G" TRAIL]

The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly swift one. We
covered the one hundred and thirty miles in three days, far and away the
best travelling of the winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The
hard snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the peninsula is
rugged and mountainous; two prominent elevations, the Ass's Ears,
standing up as landmarks during the first day of the journey. The route
crossed ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of the
heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and again it was overturned,
and it was all that I could do, and more than I ought to have done, to
set it up again. The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall always remember.
The trail sloped with the hill and the wind was blowing directly down
it. I could keep no footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily
again and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs and all
from sweeping down into a dark ravine that loomed below, when I
bethought me of the "creepers" in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in
passing over glare ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able
to stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once and again
that I got my load safely across. When I was wallowing in a hot bath at
Council two days later I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue
where I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save the dogs
and the sled, I had not noticed that I had bruised myself. So, judging
great things by little, one understands how a soldier may be sorely
wounded without knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.

Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees in the
children's picture-books, where the man sits in the sled and cracks his
whip and is whisked along as gaily as you please--such travel as I had
never had before; but there was no pleasure in it--the wind saw to
that.

On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men
were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles
across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our
course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right
side of one's body and the right arm were continually numb from the
incessant beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn c