The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all, but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue, but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing was evidently the boundary between two peoples. [Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]