It did snow that night, and Lucky Jim steered his sled across the frozen river about two o'clock. On arriving at the farther bank he slipped on his snowshoes and took the lead. The dog-team followed.
This dive into the wilderness seemed to differ little from starting across the ocean in a small boat, for the great flat resembled a sea that had been frozen when a heavy swell was on. But although Lucky Jim had never crossed the flat before—it was a route that invited hardship, even disaster—he knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was cutting off a great elbow in the river.
About four that afternoon he made camp on an "island," a half-acre covered with scrub spruce and birch. Centuries before this piece of high ground had doubtless occupied a place in the river channel of that time.
In the afternoon of the fourth day out he struck the river again. The weather had cleared. He reckoned he had covered sixty miles since leaving Totatla City—a distance he could have negotiated much sooner had he been traveling light and pressed for time; but the dogs were hauling a load in excess of seven hundred pounds, three hundred of which was their own rice and dried salmon.
And in reality Lucky Jim had made good time, for by crossing the flat instead of coming around by the river he had cut the distance from Totatla City in two. This he proved to his satisfaction by reason of a peculiarly shaped hill on the opposite bank, at the foot of which he had camped over night on his way down the fall before, and from which point it had taken him twenty-four hours by raft to reach Totatla City. He reckoned the river current—in the fall of the year—at five miles an hour.
He started up the river on the shore ice next morning. An hour later he arrived at the foot of the rapids, and shortly thereafter passed up through the canyon.
Fifteen days out from Totatla City he made his camp on Easy Money bar—or, as he had named it the summer before, Gold Tender. That night he made himself a calendar for the month of April out of the leaf of a notebook and crossed out the first day.
"On the face of it," he chuckled that night after rolling into his wolf robe, "it sounds queer that I should have landed on Dad's bar last summer, but not after you come to think it over. The bar is one of the highest on the whole river, I guess, and the heavy wash gravel that carries the pay stares everybody that passes in the face. Only a chechako would miss it, or one of the hot-air prospectors that hang around the Red Fox and the Nugget hotels. Which I take it Dad and me are the only two old-timers who have passed this way."
Lucky Jim had come over the divide from the Kantishna region the summer before.
