It was near twelve. Along the northern horizon a rosy glow, fading to
the west and deepening to the east, marked the unseen dip of the midnight
sun. The gloaming and the dawn were so commingled that there was no
night,--simply a wedding of day with day, a scarcely perceptible blending
of two circles of the sun. A kildee timidly chirped good-night; the
full, rich throat of a robin proclaimed good-morrow. From an island on
the breast of the Yukon a colony of wild fowl voiced its interminable
wrongs, while a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of
river.

In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark canoes
were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-barbed arrows,
buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven traps bespoke the fact
that in the muddy current of the river the salmon-run was on. In the
background, from the tangle of skin tents and drying frames, rose the
voices of the fisher folk. Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with
the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of
having fulfilled the end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as
they braided rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet
their naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the
tawny wolf-dogs.

To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it, stood a
second camp of two tents. But it was a white man's camp. If nothing
else, the choice of position at least bore convincing evidence of this.
In case of offence, it commanded the Indian quarters a hundred yards
away; of defence, a rise to the ground and the cleared intervening space;
and last, of defeat, the swift slope of a score of yards to the canoes
below. From one of the tents came the petulant cry of a sick child and