"That was up in the Tanana region, wasn't it?" queried Barnes, but without looking up from his work.
"Yes," answered the boy, "and from all accounts that must be a wild part of the country. Speaking of that same enumerator, the supervisor says: 'That this agent survived the work during the stormy period and came back alive was the wonder of the older inhabitants of the country. No less than four times this man was found by other travelers in an exhausted condition, not far from complete collapse, and assisted to a stopping place. He lost three dogs, and suffered terribly himself from frost-bite. In the same district, during the same time, eight persons were frozen to death, six men and two women.' There's quite a story here, too, telling how he himself rescued a couple of trappers in the last stages of hunger, exposure, and exhaustion."
"It's fearful to think of," the other commented; "just imagine those agonizing journeys in the teeth of an Arctic wind, traveling over hundreds of miles of trackless wilderness to get less than one-tenth as many people as a city enumerator would find in one block!"
"But why do it in winter?" asked Hamilton. "It's hot up there in summer, I've heard, and driving in the warm weather is pleasant enough; there's no hardship in that!"
"You can't drive where there are no roads, and you can't ride where there are no horses. Then the time available is short."
"You haven't a railroad going to every point in Alaska," Barnes pointed out, "there's usually a trip of several hundred miles before you get to the place from which to start. And when are you going to make that journey?"
"In the spring," Hamilton said, "as soon as it gets mild."
"I reckon you don't know much about Alaska," the older man remarked. "When the snow thaws, the creeks overflow, and the rivers become raging torrents. You can't ride, and if you walk, how are you going to cross a swollen river, filled with pieces of ice the size of this room? Those Alaska rivers are huge bodies of water, many of them, and there are no bridges."
"You mean traveling on those ice-filled rivers? It couldn't be done."
"That's pretty well into June, to start with, and then you would have to pole up against the current all the way, and the currents of most of the rivers are very swift. Did you ever pole a boat up against a swift mountain river?--I thought not. Suppose, by very hard work, you could make two or three miles an hour up stream,--at that rate how long would it take you to go up to the highest settlement? And then you would have to go all the way down again and ascend the next stream; and even then more than half the settlements would be on streams and creeks you could not get to with boats because of falls, of rapids, of long portages, and things of that kind."