Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs, that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and, without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.
CHAPTER V
NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
De win' she blow, blow, blow,
An' de crew of de wood scow '
Julie Plante
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