"That would be fearful," said Barnes, "unless he could pitch camp right there, put up a tent, build a fire, and change into dry clothing."
"There seems to have been mighty little wood for that up there," Hamilton remarked, "because, speaking of this same enumerator, the supervisor says, further on, 'In crossing the Arctic Range and in returning he traveled above timber line eighteen hours in both directions, which, in a country where fire is a necessity, can be understood is a very considerable sacrifice. He traveled in many places where a white man had never been before, and as there are no beaten trails or government roads in the district anywhere, he was obliged, everywhere, to snow-shoe ahead of his team to beat down a trail.'"
"Did you ever snow-shoe?" asked Barnes abruptly.
"Once," answered Hamilton, "when I went to Canada to visit some cousins; they had a snow-shoe tramp and insisted on my coming along. But I was stiff for a week."
"Well," said the editor, "when you try to break trail and have to keep ahead of a dog-team coming along at a fair clip, it's just about the hardest kind of work there is."
"They all seem to have had their own troubles," said Hamilton, who had been glancing down the pages of the report: "here's the next chap, who got caught in a blizzard while accompanying the mail carrier, and if it hadn't been for the fact that the people of the nearest settlement knew that the mail carrier was expected on that day and sent out a rescue party to search for him, neither of the two men would ever have been found, and the census would have lost a man."
"That was up in the Tanana region, wasn't it?" queried Barnes, but without looking up from his work.
"Yes," answered the boy, "and from all accounts that must be a wild part of the country. Speaking of that same enumerator, the supervisor says: 'That this agent survived the work during the stormy period and came back alive was the wonder of the older inhabitants of the country. No less than four times this man was found by other travelers in an exhausted condition, not far from complete collapse, and assisted to a stopping place. He lost three dogs, and suffered terribly himself from frost-bite. In the same district, during the same time, eight persons were frozen to death, six men and two women.' There's quite a story here, too, telling how he himself rescued a couple of trappers in the last stages of hunger, exposure, and exhaustion."
"It's fearful to think of," the other commented; "just imagine those agonizing journeys in the teeth of an Arctic wind, traveling over hundreds of miles of trackless wilderness to get less than one-tenth as many people as a city enumerator would find in one block!"
"But why do it in winter?" asked Hamilton. "It's hot up there in summer, I've heard, and driving in the warm weather is pleasant enough; there's no hardship in that!"