had been keen to see how it would strike me, fresh
from the outside, after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed
that it pleased me again.

[Sidenote: A STARVING WHITE MAN]

I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome that waited at Saint
John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still wondering at the homelike
cosiness which the mission house had assumed under the deft hands of
the two ladies who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of a
white man he had found starving in the wilderness fifteen miles away.
Another native with a dog team and a supply of immediate food was
hastily despatched to bring the man in, and that night the poor
emaciated fellow, looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and tottered into
the house. He had started out from Tanana two months before with two
pack-horses to make his way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his
way and wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had been
drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had made a raft to come
down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek) to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was
a trading-post near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few spoonfuls of
meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or twice a ptarmigan, and when
Ned found him was at the last extremity and had given up, intending to
die where he was.

That man's hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter, having knowledge and
experience of such cases, was apprehensive that if any large quantity of
food were taken at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for a
day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little later, as he grew
stronger, to such extremes did his hunger pinch him that he would watch
till there was no one looking and would go into the kitchen and steal
food that was preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the
stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a full meal. In ten
days he was sufficiently recovered to resume his journey to the
diggings, and when I saw him at Coldfoot two months later I did not
recognise him, so greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
that crept into the mission. We all think we have been hungry time and
again; if ever we have gone a few days on short rations we are quite
sure of it; this man had sounded the height and depth and stretched the
length and b