m the moment we saw the dogs there was never any
question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a
half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the
road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.
And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their
movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen
miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.

[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]

So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of
meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval
of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in
the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes,
and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the
overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the
pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its
little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no
store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious
work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the
writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in
prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a
year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no
word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so
he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come
pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and
rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it
was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply
and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at
all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the
heart and from the life's experience.

Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people,
situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river
above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it
had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the
natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted
icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was
served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim
is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel