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ough that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill, and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the rest of the run. The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun to learn a little at our travelling night-school. [Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL] [Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES] A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12 deg. below, and the mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky shore of the north coast of Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise, which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it. The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of the mountains of Tennessee, when for half
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