"First I've carried since I was a kid," he confessed. "And she made me promise to _read_ it! A woman that can be a bright little Christian in a place like that, and a dead game sport, too, can make me do most anything. Joe [Nina's husband] is a lucky guy."
Naturally such reports as these made me all the more anxious to see this queen of the wilderness again. The necessity of taking a seven-hundred-mile trip to the Coast in March gave me the opportunity.
Oh, boys, you'll never know the real joy of living till you take a winter trip with dog-sled in Alaska. The keen, fine air, lung-filling, invigorating; your dogs yelping with eagerness, their feet twinkling, the sled screaming its delight; frost-diamonds sparkling from every branch, frost-symphonies played by the ice-harps under your feet; your own struggle, achievement, triumph, against and over the cold, the difficulties of the trail, the long miles.
"The morning breaks, the stars grow pale, Your huskies leap, shrill shrieks the sled; You follow free with flying tread; A joy to live! What joy! to thread The fluted ribbon of the trail."
It was near the sunset of a beautiful, bright day that I swung into Joe's clearing. For three days I had been headed almost directly towards Dinali--The Great One, and Dinah's Wife (Mt. McKinley and Mt. Foraker). Higher and higher these majestic mountains heaved their mighty shoulders. The country became more broken and rugged. Lesser mountains raised their white heads all around me. Only a few inches of snow covered the ground instead of the six to ten feet that prevailed farther west. The character of the trees had changed--more birch, cottonwood and other deciduous timber; less tamarack, hemlock and swamp spruce.
Signs of abundant life were everywhere. Fox, wolf, lynx and wolverine tracks criss-crossed the snow in all directions; great moose tracks going in a straight line, and the imprint of thousands of caribou hoofs crossing and obliterating each other, but keeping in the same general direction showed the presence of abundance of big game; while grouse, ptarmigan and rabbit tracks were so numerous that my dogs were kept excited and on the "keen jump" every minute.
On the bank of a small river, in a clearing of a couple of acres cut out of a forest of great fir and cedar trees, stood Joe's log-cabin roadhouse. Enough of the big trees had been left standing to shade the house. In front of it were a dozen cozy log dog-kennels, and behind it was a garden enclosed in a picket and wire fence.