the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles straight for the other
side. It was like crossing from Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage
made, the Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward Peninsula
left behind us, and our way lay across desolate, low-lying tundra
strewn with driftwood and hollowed out here and there into little
lagoons. Evidently the waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather
when the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it reared a sort
of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or forty feet high, lashed and
nailed together, with a precarious little platform on top and cleats
nailed to one of the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting tower from which
water-fowl might be spied in the spring. Sixteen miles of this
melancholy waste brought us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau
village and a tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached in front of it.
If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as we entered was sinister.
By the light of a single candle--though it was not yet dark
outside--amidst unwashed dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed
Portuguese or Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three
skin-clad Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that they had not
heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With a brief, reluctant interval for
the preparation of a poor supper, the card playing went on all the
evening far into the night. My companion discovered that the chips were
worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable of a game." At
last I arose from my bunk and said that we were tired and had come there
to sleep, and with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers as well
as the South Sea Islands.

[Sidenote: UNALAKLIK]

The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend my day of rest at
Unalaklik and most indisposed to spend it here, so we got away with a
very early start long before daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and
lagoon travel and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away. The going was
splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice upon which snow had melted and
frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled,
yet not so smooth as to deny good footing.