It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the water with only such wilderness tackle as we could devise. We made ways of soft timbers, squaring and smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her, and she lay there until spring and took no harm at all. Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch, intending to pull it himself while the doctor and I pulled a Yukon sled borrowed from our friend the prospector. By the 6th of October all our dispositions were made for departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant trusting ourselves to it; but we waited another two days, the thermometer still reaching a minimum each night somewhere around zero. When we said good-bye to our friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere else in the world can be found men as kind and helpful to strangers) and started on our journey, it soon appeared that Arthur's sled was more hindrance than help. There was no material to iron the runners save strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth that they did not drag and cut on the ice. So the load was transferred to our sled and the little sled abandoned, and we took turns at the harness. This was the order of the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one man pushed at the handle-bars which had been affixed to the sled. It was fortunate that amidst the equipment on the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers. Without them any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would have been impossible. We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen was no sort of index of the general condition of the river. Much of it was still wide open, and every elbow between bends was piled high with rough ice from pressure jams. There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends, along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams gave considerable trouble, yet we did very well the first day and camped at dark with eighteen or nineteen miles to our credit, in the presence of a great, red, smoky sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow mountain. The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We were to learn more about the varieties and vagaries of ice on that journey than many winters' travel on older ice would teach. [Illustration: THE START OVER THE "FIRST ICE."] [Illustration: "ROUGH GOING."] [Sidenote: THE START]