ok to the tundra. All the snow had gone
except just the hard snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across
the brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to rain again, and
soon we were wet through and had much trouble in keeping that
penetrating, persistent drizzle from wetting our load through the canvas
cover. Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
on the winter trail--rarer in the interior probably than on the coast.
Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to
me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part
Esquimau and part Indian. These were the last Esquimaux we should see,
and I was sorry, for I had grown to like very heartily and to respect
very sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured race.
Surely they are a people any nation may be proud to have fringing its
otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and should be eager to aid and conserve.
There comes a feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise how
many white men there are who speak of them continually with the utmost
contempt and see them dwindle with entire complacency. The same thing is
true in even more marked degree about the Indians of the interior: nine
tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant, of that I am
convinced, and the only question is, shall it be an inhabited wilderness
or an uninhabited wilderness? Here, lodging with the natives, and, I
make no doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking white man
whom I had met in several different sections of interior Alaska, known
as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would
esteem a poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke out an
existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he will not under any
circumstances, but subsists on the hospitality of the whites until he
has entirely worn it out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes. He was on his way to
Saint Michael, he told me with perfect gravity, "to get work."

[Sidenote: THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS]

Before dark we had reached our destination for the night at the Old
Woman Mountain, the divide between the waters of the Yukon and the
waters of Norton Sound, and were kindly received and well treated at the
telegraph station, the only resort on this portage for weary travellers.