the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival, preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she would drop everything and come.
For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours. As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had to torture him continually.
Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this region—Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others—whose teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian account.
THE SHORTEST DAY
At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge of the great flat of the interior.
The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101° and 102°. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised in command and I knew that relief was at hand.
The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would. Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before, and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he thanked me with his eyes.
The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day long.
A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur, formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime, bichloride of mercury—the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little plain instruction.
The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.
THE MISSIONARY NURSE
We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman, sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."
"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat fatuously.
"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"
I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute that we go, and we went.
Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot—both patients recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village just in time.
CHAPTER II
CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK
At five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice; the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a glass which is easily broken, and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40° below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and when its moisture