At Christmas time the Gordons made the trip to Coldfoot, as did most of the inhabitants of the creeks, for the midwinter trading. Beside the white people there was a goodly sprinkling of Indians and Kobuk Eskimos whose chief aim in life seemed to be to squat upon the floor of the trading room and listen with unconcealed delight to the scratchy music that wheezed from the horn of a cheap phonograph. The fact that they understood no word of the ragtime songs and talking records seemed to detract in no slightest particular from their delight, as over and over again the dozen or more badly worn records were proudly fed into the machine by one of their number who had been instructed in its manipulation. Being the only white women with the exception of the dancing girls, Mrs. Gordon and Lou were the invited guests of the trader’s wife. The men foregathered in the saloon which, with its dance hall, divided honors equally as to popular diversion, with the evening meeting conducted in the trading room by an itinerant missionary. Two or three days would ordinarily have sufficed for the midwinter trading and its attendant social activities, but upon Christmas day the strong cold fastened upon the Koyukuk. The thermometer, which up to that time had hung between forty below, and ten above zero, on Christmas day dropped suddenly to sixty below. On the day following it was still sixty, and thereafter for ten days the warmest record was fifty-four below. The men of the creeks waited for a let-up. There is a saying in the North that trailing at fifty below is all right as long as it’s all right. Which means that if everything goes smoothly and without accident, no particular harm will result. But who can confidently expect to trail without accident? At fifty below the one absolute essential to life is constant motion. No clothing, however warm, that a man can possibly pile onto himself and pretend to leave any freedom of movement for walking, will protect him from the grip of the frost unless he keep moving. Any circumstance that necessitates a halt without shelter spells disaster. A broken dog harness, a damaged sled, or worst of all, encountering water on the ice, means a halt, and as nothing can be accomplished with the hand encased in heavy mittens, it also means baring the fingers to remedy the evil, and baring the fingers at fifty below for more than a minute or two at a time means that the fingers will freeze to the bone.