, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the
tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my
part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary Indian's dog--so he
died.

There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles through the Yukon Flats
to Fort Yukon--always the most dangerous stretch of the river, and at
this season, when the winter's trail was beginning to break up,
particularly so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a land trail
that should not touch the river at all, or not at more than one point,
between Circle and Fort Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all
the danger would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places it was
necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe, constantly sounding and
testing the ice. Here and there we made a circuit around open water into
which the ice that bore the trail had collapsed bodily--one of them a
particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet deep running at
six or seven miles an hour. I never pass this stretch of river without a
feeling of gratitude that I am safely over it once more.

[Sidenote: CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN]

As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian from Fort Yukon going
up the river with dogs and toboggan, and I chuckled, as I returned his
very polite salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of the
way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he had been a
particularly churlish fellow with an insolent manner. Six or seven
years before he had been taken by Captain Amundsen, of the _Gjoa_, as
guide along this stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when
that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell Island from
the east, he left his ship in winter quarters and made a rapid journey
with Esquimaux across country to Fort Yukon expecting to find a
telegraph station there from which he could send word of his success.
But to his disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred and
thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his
message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as
guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's
surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.

Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been flung out of a
store decided that he must be dealt with, and I sent for him, for the
chief, the native minister, and the interpreter. With these assessors