A very brief attempt to make our way against the running ice showed the danger of doing so, for the thin cakes had knife-edges and cut the planking of the boat so that she began to leak. Then there came to me with some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself to be persuaded out of it by her builders. So again my forethought had been of no avail--though, of course, lightness of draught _was_ the first consideration. We put back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and cut up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail it along the water-line of the boat, but the prospector persuaded us to wait a day or two. He had never seen a river close with the first little run of ice. He looked for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to risk the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after night the thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower, until presently a sheet of ice stretched across the whole river in the bend where we lay. We were frozen in. The remote possibility we had feared and sought to guard against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the Koyukuk at the earliest date anybody remembered, the 23d of September. Three days more had surely taken us to the mission where they had long expected us; now we should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on the dangerous "first ice," as it is called, taking all sorts of chances, pulling a Yukon sled, with tent and stove, grub and bedding, "by the back of the face." But first there was the launch to pull out and make snug for the winter and safe against the spring break-up. A convenient little creek mouth with easy grade offered, which was one of the reasons I had not pushed on the few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible winter quarters; farther on we might have trouble in putting the boat in safety; here also was a kindly and capable man willing to assist us. It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek, which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he informed us.