When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is at least practicable, whereas an independent course may soon lead to steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even two or three passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for. [Sidenote: CAMP MAKING] So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far from the spot where I had "siwashed" with an Indian companion the previous winter, the wind blowing half a gale at 20° below zero. Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable proceeding. It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or, if it be too deep, beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent, its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall get a fire before we freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire. The fire once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning, but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set aside to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the necessary preliminary to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water, may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the