[Illustration:  CAN WE MAKE CAMP?  A last rush for shelter as the blizzard strikes, wiping out all landmarks.]

Hamilton glanced at the paper with redoubled interest.

“I suppose it was no use trying to get the pouch back,” he said.

“I didn’t think it would be,” the Alaskan replied “but I tried to reach the place where the sled had been overturned, an’ each time the weather drove me back.  On the third day I got a chance to go with some Eskimos with reindeer to a little settlement about twenty miles off, an’ so I went along and got the names there, comin’ back on a reindeer sled.  That’s the only time I ever felt like Santa Claus.  I’m sure I don’t look it.”

[Illustration:  TO ESKIMO SETTLEMENTS BY REINDEER.  Census enumerator using half-wild animals when dog-team was too exhausted to go farther. (Courtesy of the Bureau of the Census.)]

Hamilton looked at his spare figure and laughed.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think an artist would be likely to pick you for the part.  How did you like the reindeer, though?  I’ve always wondered that they didn’t use them more in Alaska.  The government keeps a herd, doesn’t it?”

“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?’