"Yes," was the reply, "but that is more for fresh meat than for travel. A good reindeer is a cracker-jack of an animal when he wants to be, but when he takes a streak to quit, it doesn't matter where it is or what you do to him, he won't go another step. A balky mule is an angel of meekness beside a reindeer. You can always make a mule see what you want him to do—although the odds are that he won't do it even then—but when a reindeer gets stubborn,—why, he just can't be made to understand anythin'!"
"Yet I've read that they use them a good deal in Lapland!" said the boy in surprise.
"They have domesticated them more thoroughly, I guess," the Northerner replied. "In time they may be worked up here in the same way, and when you consider how short a time the government has had to do what is already accomplished, it seems to me the result is wonderful. Of course, so far as traffic is concerned there are dogs enough, and they do the work in mighty good shape."
"How did you work back from the settlement which you had got to with such difficulty?" the boy asked.
"I came back another way, in order to take in a little group of houses on a small pay-creek," was the reply. "But it was comin' back from that trip, on the Koatak River, that I had quite a time, although I was not the sufferer. We had been havin' a hard spell of weather, but there come a week when conditions on the trail were much better an' we were reelin' off the miles in great shape. I hadn't a place on my map for about sixty miles, when in the distance I saw a little hut, just in the fringe of some stunted cottonwoods and some scraggy willows, for we were not far from the timber limit.
"'Billy,' I called to the Indian, 'ever see that hut before?'
"The Indian shook his head, but knowin' that I wanted to see an' count everybody in the district, he turned off the trail—he said it was a trail but I couldn't see it—an' led the way to the hut. I went in an' found a man lying on a couple of planks, just about dead. He was one of the survivors of the wrecked steamer Filarleon, and had frozen all the fingers of both hands. Two or three were turnin' gangrenous; an' one of these had got so bad that with his other crippled hand, he had sawed off the decomposin' member with his pocket-knife. One foot also was frozen an' had turned black, but that afterwards recovered."
"What did you do for him?" asked the boy.
"Put him on the sled, of course," the Alaskan answered, "an' took him to the nearest settlement. I afterwards heard that a doctor happened in to camp soon after I left, an' got at his hurts right away, an' that he was put back into fair condition all but the one finger.—That's no tenderfoot's country up there."
"I wonder you stuck it out," said Hamilton. "But then," he added a moment later, "I can see how a fellow would hate to quit."