So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting yet, and we were all thoroughly tired out when we pitched the tent. I have note of a great supper of bear meat and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend the prospector's gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in proportion to the bodily labour that is done. With food abundant and at choice, I do not like bear meat and will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special note of the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put any philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog team on show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards evening it is odds that his mind is not occupied with deep speculations about the infinite and the absolute, but rather with the question of what he will have for supper. Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is astonishing how one's mind runs on eating and what elaborate imaginary repasts one partakes of. Yet of all food that a man ever eats there is none that is so relished and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough fare of the camp--provided it be well cooked. Greatly as we were in need of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's knee pained him all night and poor Arthur developed a raging toothache that did not yield until carbolic acid had been thrice applied. Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed and swept round a series of mountain bluffs and we began to have the gloomiest expectations of trouble. It seemed certain that ice would fail us for passage, and we would have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays over the mountain. But to our delight we passed between the bluffs on good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail. Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it took hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good passage, we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.