"It looked like a solid wall of snow, an' before I realized it was comin', the storm struck, hurled me to the ground, an' rolled me over an' over in the snow. I wasn't hurt, of course, but it took me so long to get my breath that I thought it was never goin' to come, an' that I should suffocate. But after that first burst, the blizzard settled down to the regular variety, an' we all felt more at home. But even at that, it was the worst one I ever saw in the North, an' I've been there nine winters."
"What did you do? Go back?"
"No use tryin' to go back," the traveler said, "because those whirlwinds had cut gullies across the snow in every direction so that our old trail was no use to us. We went ahead a bit, as far as we could, but soon realized that there was nothin' to do but camp right where we were an' wait for the blizzard to blow over. Usually two days is enough for the average storm to let up a little, but it was not until the third day that there was any chance of startin', an' even then it was almost as bad as could be for travel. But I had to make a start then."
"Why?" asked Hamilton, who always wanted to know the details of everything.
"Because we were runnin' short of dog-feed, an' you can't let your dogs die of hunger, for then you can't get anywhere. But the blizzard had drifted everything an' was still driftin', so that the snow was hard in some places and soft in others; the travelin' was almost impossible, an' you couldn't see twenty yards ahead. Then while the blizzard had filled the gullies made by the whirlwinds, the snow in them was not packed down as hard as the rest of the surface, an' dogs an' sled an' Indian an' myself would all go flounderin' into the drift, an' it would be a tough pull to get the sled out again.—That was a hard trip.
"The worst of it came when, without a bit of warnin', without our even knowin' where we were, the hard crust of the snow gave way beneath us, an' the sled, the dogs, and myself fell headlong down a slope an' into a stream of runnin' water, the sled upside down, of course."
"How about the Indian?" asked the boy.
"He saved himself from goin' into the water, an' it was a good thing that he did, for he was able to help in pullin' us out. But, from one point of view, the accident was a help, for it told the Indian just where we were. There was only one stream of that size in that neighborhood, an' until we found it, we were hopelessly lost. But from that time we knew that the settlement we were headin' for was straight up the stream, an' all we had to do was to follow it. But it was a race for life, in order to get to camp before frozen clothin' and various frostbites crippled me entirely."
"But how about the dogs?" queried Hamilton. "I should think it would be worse for them than for you."
The Alaskan shook his head.