“Yes, and you can get it for nothing in hell,” was the reply.
Here in Dawson the days are now so long that I can read out-of-doors at any time during the twenty-four hours. I can take pictures at midnight by giving a slight time exposure, and in the latter part of June one can make snapshots at one in the morning. It is not difficult to get excellent photographs between nine and eleven P. M. and at any time after two o’clock in the morning. The sun now sets at about eleven P. M. and comes up again about two hours later. The twilight is bright and at midnight the sky is red. Last night I saw a football match that did not end until after ten o’clock, and moving pictures were taken near the close of the game.
I find that the light has a strange effect upon me. The sleepiness that comes about bedtime at home is absent, and I often work or talk until midnight or later without realizing the hour. The air is invigorating, the long hours of light seem life-giving, and I do not seem to need as much sleep as at home.
The weather just now is about as warm as it is in the States. The grass is green, the trees are in full leaf, there are flowers everywhere, and the people are going about in light clothing. The women go out in the evening with bare arms and necks, and the men play football, baseball, and tennis in their shirt sleeves. There are many bare-footed children, and all nature is thriving under the hot twenty-two-hour sun of the Arctic.
Many people here declare that they like the winters better than the summers, and that they all—men, women, and children—thrive on the cold. The pilot of the boat on which I came in from White Horse tells me he would rather spend a winter on the Upper Yukon than at his old home in Missouri. He says that one needs heavy woollen clothing and felt shoes or moccasins. When the thermometer falls to fifty or sixty degrees below zero he has to be careful of his face, and especially his nose. If it is not covered it will freeze in a few minutes. At twenty degrees below zero the climate is delightful. The air is still and dry, and the people take short walks without overcoats. At this temperature one needs a fur coat only when riding. Cows and horses are kept in warmed stables and get along very well. Horses are seldom used when the thermometer is fifty degrees below zero. At that temperature the cold seems to burn out their lungs. Still, it is said that there are horses that are wintered in the open near Dawson. They have been turned out in the fall to shift for themselves and have come back in the spring “hog fat.”
The old timers here tell me that the dreariness of the long nights of the winter has been greatly exaggerated. During that season most of the earth is snow-clad, and the light of the sky, the stars, and the moon reflected from the snow makes it so that one can work outside almost all the time. True, it is necessary to have lights in the schools, and in the newspaper offices the electricity is turned off only between 11:15 in the morning and 2:15 in the afternoon. The morning newspaper men who sleep in the day do not see the sun except upon Sunday.
In the coldest part of the winter the snow makes travelling difficult. It is then so dry that the dogs pulling the sleds have to work as hard as though they were going through sand. In March and April the snow is not so powdery and sleighing is easier. The ideal winter weather is when the thermometer registers fifteen or twenty-five degrees below zero, with a few hours of sunlight. The most depressing time is from the middle of December until the end of the first week in January. Then comes the most severe cold, and the sun may not be seen at all.
It is this midwinter period that is described in many of the gruesome poems of the Yukon, especially in Service’s “Cremation of Sam McGee.” You remember how Sam McGee left his home in sunny Tennessee to roam around the North Pole, where:
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d sooner live in hell.