On the 7th of June they were two hundred and forty miles above Nulato, at the junction of the Tanana, the furthest point reached by the Russians, and soon were in a part abounding with moose owing to their seeking refuge in the stream from the millions of mosquitoes. Here the Indian hunters were busy, not wasting powder and shot, but manœuvring round the swimming deer in their birch-bark canoes until they tired the victim out; and then stealthily approaching, securing it with a stab from their knives. After twenty-six laborious days against the stream they reached Fort Yukon, the then furthest outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company, six hundred miles from Nulato, and, of course, managed and victualled from the east. Here the amount of peltry was astonishing, the fur-room of the fort containing thousands of marten skins, hanging from the beams, and huge piles of common furs lying around, together with a considerable number of foxes, black and silver-grey, and many skins of the wolverine, thought so much more of by the Indians than by any one else that they are used as a medium of exchange. All these furs were brought in from the surrounding districts, far and near, and traded for goods, as widely distributed, among the native tribes whose representatives gathered at the fort in such a miscellaneous crowd that perhaps half a dozen dialects were heard in a morning. [Illustration: MOOSE-HUNTING ON THE YUKON] In the crowd the busiest and most prominent were the primitive Tananas, gay with feathers and painted faces, looking like survivals among the local Kutchins and the Kutchins of the upper river, the Birch River men, and the Rat River men by whom the skins were brought from the natives of the northern coast, as were the messages from the Franklin search parties. Indians were all of these, distinguishable by their wearing the hyaqua or tooth-shell (_Dentalium entalis_) through the septum of the nose, while the Mahlemut wears a bone on each side of the mouth, a practice common with all the Innuit, or Eskimo tribes, from the Alaska Peninsula to Point Barrow, unless some other form of labret happens to be the local fashion. CHAPTER VIII THE AMERICAN MAINLAND