On my return I brought with me a young physician, Doctor Grafton Burke, as a medical missionary, and a half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had been at school in California, as attendant and interpreter. A thirty-two-foot gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its tributaries was also brought and was launched at the head of Yukon navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages of the _Pelican_ on almost all the navigable waters of interior Alaska do not belong to a narrative concerned solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended in an unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over the ice which is perhaps worth describing. After the voyage down the Yukon, and up and down the Tanana, it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to the new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear had been left, and put her in winter quarters there. The delays that associate themselves not unnaturally with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine, had brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little too late for safety, though still well within the ordinary season of open water. The possibility of an early winter closing the navigation of that stream before the _Pelican_ reached her destination had been entertained and provided against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs, needed anyway to replace superannuated members of the team, had been bargained for at Tanana and accommodations for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we went to pay the arranged price and receive the dogs, the vender's wife and children set up such a remonstrance and plaintive to-do that he went back on his bargain and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt others, to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought to guard against, so we pulled out dogless, reached the mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of September and, having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached there, turned our bow up the river the next morning. For five days we pushed up the waters of that great, lonely river, and by that time we were some twenty-five miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred and twenty-five miles from the mission, at the camp of a prospector who had recently poled up from the Yukon. We woke on board the launch the next morning to find ice formed all around us and ice running in the river. The thermometer had gone to zero in the night. [Sidenote: THE RUNNING ICE]