Then, he sold out for a few hundred dollars to a _chechako_ and procuring a poling boat drifted northward down the great river. For another year he sniped on the Birch Creek bars, and then hearing whispers of a strike on the Koyukuk, he once more loaded his wife and child into a poling boat and, dropping down the Yukon to the mouth of the Koyukuk, spent an entire summer in ascending six hundred miles of its course that lay between the Yukon and the newfound placers. It was gruelling and laborious work, track lining and poling the heavily loaded boat against the swift and treacherous current of the Koyukuk. And it was work that all three shared equally. For Lou, a lithe bodied, rather ungainly young miss of fifteen, who seemed somehow to be mostly legs and arms, and the legs and arms all muscle, did a man’s work every day. Nor was her mother far behind her in the matter of handling a pole or paddle, or pulling on the track line. They were in the land of the midnight sun, now, and the continuous daylight was a source of never-ending wonder to the girl. Nor was the actual visualizing of the phenomenon any the less wonderful because she could demonstrate the text book explanation for it. For, despite the fact that her life had been spent entirely in the remoter outlands, yet she had suffered not one whit in any detail of her education. For her mother had been an apt pupil of a famous old mission school on the Mackenzie, and she took a great pride in passing the education she had gained on to her little daughter.