The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and wider and the mountains right and left to recede. The Jade Mountains were now dim and distant behind us, and new ranges were coming into view. The people on this lower river are very few. It was just about one hundred miles from Long Beach when we reached the next native village, a miserable collection of pole dwellings, half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants. Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we descended this river. The country seems to afford nothing but fish; we were amongst the ichthyophagi pure and simple. Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and never so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no likee this country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan, no rabbits, no timber, no nothin'." The weather had grown raw and cold again, with a constant disagreeable wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed a place where a white man was pessimistically picking away at a vein of coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been here all winter," he said, "working on the blamed ledge. I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out, and now it's begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more grub, but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out right now. I knowed it afore we started work, but the blamed fool wouldn't listen to me. 'It'll pinch out,' I told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll pinch out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope he'll be satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines from time to time located on the Yukon, in all or nearly all of which the vein has "pinched out." The deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the magazine writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable wealth" that is attributed to them, but the coal on the interior rivers seems in scant measure and of inferior quality. The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the Squirrel River, another northern tributary--the Kobuk receives most of its waters from the north--and we spent the night and the next day, which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed "Napoleon" by some white man. They had not seen one another for years, yet all the greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be right to conclude the affection lacking. I have seen an old Esquimau woman taking part in a dance the night after her husband was buried, yet it would have been unjust to have concluded that she was callous and indifferent. It is very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand them thoroughly. [Sidenote: THE CANINE INTRUDER]