day. Since three hours were consumed by making camp at night and
cooking beans, by getting breakfast in the morning and breaking
camp, and by thawing beans at the midday halt, nine hours were
left for sleep and recuperation, and neither men nor dogs wasted
many minutes of those nine hours.

At Selkirk, the trading post near Pelly River, Daylight suggested
that Kama lay over, rejoining him on the back trip from Dyea. A
strayed Indian from Lake Le Barge was willing to take his place;
but Kama was obdurate. He grunted with a slight intonation of
resentment, and that was all. The dogs, however, Daylight
changed, leaving his own exhausted team to rest up against his
return, while he went on with six fresh dogs.

They travelled till ten o'clock the night they reached Selkirk,
and at six next morning they plunged ahead into the next stretch
of wilderness of nearly five hundred miles that lay between
Selkirk and Dyea. A second cold snap came on, but cold or warm
it was all the same, an unbroken trail. When the thermometer
went down to fifty below, it was even harder to travel, for at
that low temperature the hard frost-crystals were more like
sand-grains in the resistance they offered to the sled runners.
The dogs had to pull harder than over the same snow at twenty or
thirty below zero. Daylight increased the day's travel to
thirteen hours. He jealously guarded the margin he had gained,
for he knew there were difficult stretches to come.

It was not yet quite midwinter, and the turbulent Fifty Mile
River vindicated his judgment. In many places it ran wide open,
with precarious rim-ice fringing it on either side. In numerous