“I’d rather go to the Midnight Sun now,” said Rob. “There’s some trouble about it now, and there’s some wilderness now between here and there. It’s no fun to do a thing when it’s too easy. I wouldn’t give a cent to go to Fort McPherson, the last post north, by any railroad.”
John was still poring over the map, which lay upon the rude boards of the platform, and he shook his head now somewhat dubiously. “Look where we’ll have to go,” he said, “and all in three months. We have to get back for school next fall.”
“Never doubt we can do it,” said Rob, stoutly. “If we couldn’t, Uncle Dick would never try it. He’s got it all figured out, you may be sure of that, and he’s made all his arrangements with the Hudson’s Bay Company. You forget they’ve been going up into this country for a hundred years, and they know how long it takes and how hard it is. They know all about how to outfit for it, too.”
“The hardest place we’ll have,” said John, following his map with his finger now almost to the upper edge, “is right here where we leave the Mackenzie and start over toward the Yukon, just south of the Arctic Ocean. That’s a whizzer, all right! No railroad up in there, and I guess there never will be. That’s where so many of the Klondikers were lost, my father told me—twenty years ago that was.”
“They took a year for it,” commented Rob, “and sometimes eighteen months, to get across the mountains there. They built houses and passed the winter, and so a great many of them got sick and died. But twenty years ago is a long time nowadays. We can do easily what they could hardly do at all. Uncle Dick has allowed us about three weeks to cover that five hundred miles over the Rat Portage!”
“Well, surely if Sir Alexander Mackenzie could make that trip in birch-bark canoes, over three thousand miles, with just a few men who didn’t know where they were going, we ought to be able to get through now. That was a hundred and twenty-eight years ago, I figure it, and a lot of things have happened since then.” John spoke now with considerable confidence.
“Well, Uncle Dick will take care of us,” said Jesse, the youngest of these adventurers.
“Yes, and we’ll take care of ourselves all we can,” added Rob. “Uncle Dick tells me that the trouble with the Klondikers was that they didn’t know how to take care of themselves out of doors. A lot of them were city people fresh to all kinds of wilderness work, and they simply died because they didn’t know how to do things. They were tenderfeet when they started. A good many of them died before they got through. Some of those who did get through are the prominent men of Alaska to-day. But we’re not tenderfeet. Are we, boys?”
“No, indeed,” said Jesse, stoutly. “As I said, I’m ready to start.” And he again puffed out his chest with much show of bravery, although, to be sure, the wild country in which he now found himself rather worked on his imagination.