ver artificers were started making
cribbage-boards long ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every
summer they come in from their winter hunting with fresh supplies carved
during the leisure of the long nights. The beautiful walrus tusk becomes
almost an ugly thing when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of
holes. The best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made by
the dozen, but the domestic implements made for their own use, and some
of this work is very clever and tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold
etchings of the chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.

CHAPTER V

NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE
YUKON TO TANANA

WE left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before being taken up by a
banquet which the Commercial Club was kind enough to give me; indeed,
the whole stay was marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous and open-handed
places I had ever visited.

The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel. Our course lay all
around Norton Sound to Unalaklik, and then over the portage to Kaltag on
the Yukon; up the Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing of our steps
to Solomon's, and that was done without difficulty save for a new
trouble with the dogs. It appeared that we no longer had any leader. All
the winter through my team had been behind another team, and that
constant second place had turned our leaders into followers. We thought
we had two leaders, but neither one was willing to proceed without some
one or something ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team simply to please
these leader-perverts, and the whip had to be wielded heavily on Jimmy's
back ere he could be induced to fill his proper office--and then he did
it ill, with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back. At
Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years with Peary in his arctic
explorations, and I sat up far into the night drawing interesting
narratives out of him. So far as Topkok we were still retracing our
steps, but once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time owing
to the mist which accompanies this soft weather, we were on new ground,
our course lying wholly along the beach.

At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining I have ever