between the bluffs on
good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat
beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail.
Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is
something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon
that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that
struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift
that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it
took hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail
through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach
a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow
that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good passage,
we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.

A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the smoke of a human
habitation. What a blessed sight often and often this waving column of
blue smoke in the distance is! Sometimes it means life itself to the
Alaskan musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food,
companionship, assistance; all that one human being can bring to
another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn" never "breaks on
the traveller faint and astray" with half the rejoicing that comes with
the first sight of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur,
with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?" we eagerly
inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars and limped forward to the
boy ahead with the axe. "Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I
see it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a house, we're
coming to people!" The trip was a severe apprenticeship to Alaskan life
for a man straight from the New York hospitals, although before the
accident to his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors would haul a sled
very well. He was delighted at coming upon the first inhabited house we
had seen since we helped Nelson to build his little cabin--and _that_
was only the second inhabited house in three hundred miles.

[Sidenote: BREAKING THROUGH]

But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our excitement, almost
immediately after we had spied the smoke of the cabin we got into one of
the worst messes of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all t