ince
the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a
year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be
found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes
place is local.

The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and
fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles
through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within
the second half of the journey, for Easter.

Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and
particularly within the narrow, canon-like stretch of seventy-five miles
from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream
winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river
winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow
is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this
wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black
surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a
down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against
such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and
the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as
Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it
took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with
nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that
it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had
worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the
dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.

On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy
Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven
miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river
within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to
the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the
mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that
cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces
all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face
the blast of the last three miles.

[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]

We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay
in the