ers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the
Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.

[Illustration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL
PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]

[Illustration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]

One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in
any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint
Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo
of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod
the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole
camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real
calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter
throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the
Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had
cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail
from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were
so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges
of the pages was almost unreadable.

These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the
new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region
of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to
have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter
of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in
the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek
valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and
the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every
turn of the trail.

The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek
is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters
of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza
Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod
River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has
reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge
for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in
clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage
in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded
domes of hills, stretched away in all dir