voice with its pronounced, unusual inflections that aroused their merriment. The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency for disseminating a knowledge of English amongst the natives throughout Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy ragtime music. As an index of the taste of those who purchase records, the selection brought to this country points low.
The third day the thermometer stood at −49° and we were free to leave without actually breaking the rule we had made after the escapade on the Yukon. Two other teams were going down the river, so we started with them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty miles or so below Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several miles in a narrow channel between steep rock bluffs, with here and there great detached masses standing in the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance to an aged bishop in his vestments and is known as the Bishop Rock; another a more remote likeness to an Indian woman, and this is known as the Squaw Rock. This part of the river, which is called the cañon of the Koyukuk, though it is not a true cañon, is very picturesque, and because of frequent overflow, offers glare ice and swift passage to the traveller when it does not embarrass him with running water. We were fortunate enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet wet, and made the half-way road-house in a brilliant moon that rendered travelling at night pleasanter than during the day.
TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"
The next day we started again at near 50° below, but because there was a good trail and a road-house for noon, the travelling was rather pleasant than otherwise. If there be a warm house to break the day's march and eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps and mittens may be dried out, with a warm outhouse where the dogs may rest in comfort, travelling in such weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The continual condensation of the moisture from the breath upon everything about the head and face is a decided inconvenience, and when it condenses upon the eye-lashes, and the upper and the lower lashes freeze together, the ice must be removed or it is impossible to open the eyes. This requires the momentary application of the bare hand, and every time it goes back into the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that after a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover, there is always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.
There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist, although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple, although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason. Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50° below zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be diffused amidst the air near the ground.
It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses. Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge; they are often even life-saving stations.
METEOROLOGICAL
While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from the earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain. There is no heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass of moist air, which is warm air, introducing itself from some milder region. So the cloud brings the heat; and the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby discharge the moisture. For an hour or two around noon the thermometer stood at −35° and there was a light fall of snow; then the skies cleared because they were discharged of all their moisture, and the thermometer went down to −50° again. It is a beautifully simple process and sometimes takes place two or three times a day. Every time the sky clouds, the thermometer rises; every time the sky clears, the thermometer falls. And because the barometer gives notice of changes in the density of the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer means a steady fall in the thermometer; a fall in the barometer in a time of great cold infallibly prophesies warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one given above are anticipated. So well is this established, that during "50°-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country.
After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas at. We were unable to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during the whole of that time the thermometer never rose above 50° below zero.
The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively tedious had it not been for the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the Commercial Company's agent and his wife, and this is but one of many times that I have been under obligation to them for cordial welcome and entertainment, for needs anticipated, and every sort of assistance gladly rendered. We had been expected many days; the Christmas festivities with a gathering of natives of both races had come and gone; still they looked for us, for in this country one does not give a man up merely because he is a few weeks behind time, nor hold him to account for unpunctuality. The natives remained for the most part, and there was abundant opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings of instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements for our advance were made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is a great country for teaching patience and resignation.
PARASELENÆ
Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there was a wind at 58° below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing, this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion ("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called, saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.
The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains, there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind, they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog upon whom also they