Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation, full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house, eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs. And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up. [Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]