covering, grow numb and stay so. We
crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never
have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and
when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached
with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this
trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.

Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor
camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail
that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim
valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if,
as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this
season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and
heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36 deg. and 40 deg.. The labour
of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,
through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the
handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchumina, but the
hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us
views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a
keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of
which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.

At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was
started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and
we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts
around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of
our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through
again.

[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHUMINA]

At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a
long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchumina, one
of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its
broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite
invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we
had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was
no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting
snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up
a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse
without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged a