"Shall I stake a claim for you?" asked the man with a smile the day before he left the Mission.
"O, I would like it so much!" said I, really delighted. "I did not wish to ask you, because I thought you had promised so many."
"So I have," he replied, "but I guess I can stake for one more, and if I find anything good I will remember you."
"Shall I have a paper made out?" I inquired, feeling it would be safer and better from a business point of view to do so.
"You may if you like. I will take it," said he; and I thanked him very cordially, and hastened to the Commissioner to have the paper drawn up. It did not take long, and the man has taken it, and gone. Being an old mail carrier and stampeder of experience in this country, he ought to know how to travel, and, being a Norwegian, he is well used to the snow and the cold. He says he always travels alone, though I told him he might sometime get lost in a storm and freeze to death, at which he only laughed, and said he was not at all afraid. Two years afterwards he was frozen to death on the trail near Teller City, northwest of Nome. He was an expert on snowshoes or ski, both of which he learned to use when a boy in Norway.
February tenth: The two young men, B. and L., have returned from the Koyuk trip, having been able to travel only three days of the eleven since they left here on account of blizzards, but they will not give it up in this way.
Mollie and Jennie are better, the doctor having been here two days. For the little invalid there is nothing of such interest as Apuk's baby, and as the child is well wrapped and brought in often to see her, she is highly delighted. She holds the baby in her arms, and hushes it to sleep as any old woman might, lifting a warning finger if one enters the room with noise, for fear of waking it. Little Charlie cries with whooping cough a great deal and is taken to Ageetuk's house when he gets troublesome, as he worries both Mollie and Jennie. Under no consideration is Charlie to come near enough to Jennie to give her the whooping-cough, for she coughs badly already. She and I make paper dolls by the dozen, and cloth dresses for her real dolls, which, so late in the season, are getting quite dilapidated and look as though they had been in the wars.
Many natives are now bringing beautiful furs into camp for sale, and among others one man brought a cross fox which was black, tipped with yellow, another which was a lovely brown, and a black fox valued at two hundred dollars which the owner refused to sell for less, though offered one hundred for it. I have never seen more lovely furs anywhere, and I longed to possess them.
It seems almost like having a hospital here now, for we have another patient added to our sick list. Joe, the cook, is ill, and thinks he will die, though the doctor smiles quizzically as she doses him, thinking as she does so that a few days in bed and away from the saloons will be as beneficial as her prescriptions.
Today the hills surrounding the bay were lovely in the warm sunshine both morning and evening, pink tinted in the sunrise and purple as night approached.