It was great sport, now that their loads were light, for the young drivers to flourish their whips and crack them in the dry air, while the dogs, fed-up, fresh and eager, raced along, with tinkling bells where the going was good, as though they were making a dash for the pole. The boys and their outfit would have made a capital movie, but there wasn’t a cinematograph camera nearer than Skagway on the south or St. Michaels on the west.
At this time of the year, the period of daylight on the Arctic Circle is very short and as darkness came on they pulled up on the banks of a stream to make camp.
“This must be the Rat River,” said Bill.
“It is, but it certainly isn’t much at this point. We’re close to its head waters though and that accounts for it. It empties into the Porcupine River about sixty or seventy miles west of here. It might be worth our while to make a survey up and down the river for a few miles, so to-morrow let’s go down stream.”
They had not gone more than five miles the next morning when their attention was attracted by a huge fire a couple of hundred feet back of the north bank and they drove up to see what was going on.
“Bet it’s the Yeehats barbecuin’ a caribou,” suggested Bill who was dying by inches for the want of a caribou steak.
“Look again,” said Jack, and then Bill saw the winter diggings of some miners, three all told, one white man and two Indians, busy with picks and shovels.
“Lookin’ for our gold,” was Bill’s idea of it.
“More likely they are mining for some on their own account. A great deal of placer mining is done up here in the winter—has to be done in winter as a matter of fact—because the ground is so low and wet that they can’t do any digging in the summer time, for the hole fills up with water as fast as the dirt is thrown out.
“The way they work it according to what Rip Stoneback told me, is like this. The miner cuts all the fire-wood he can in the summer, which isn’t a great deal as it is so scarce in these parts, and builds his sluice-box; then when winter sets in and it begins to freeze, he clears the moss off of a small patch. On this clearing he builds a fire and keeps it going until the ground is thawed down a foot or so when he digs it out; then he builds another fire, digs out the thawed ground and repeats the operation until he has sunk a shaft through the muck and gravel to bed-rock.