It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster region from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps and that steel knife had come.  Subienkow bullied, and cajoled, and bribed.  Every far-journeyer or strange tribesman was brought before him.  Perils unaccountable and unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts, hostile tribes, impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but always from beyond came the rumour and the tale of white-skinned men, blue of eye and fair of hair, who fought like devils and who sought always for furs.  They were to the east—­far, far to the east.  No one had seen them.  It was the word that had been passed along.

It was a hard school.  One could not learn geography very well through the medium of strange dialects, from dark minds that mingled fact and fable and that measured distances by “sleeps” that varied according to the difficulty of the going.  But at last came the whisper that gave Subienkow courage.  In the east lay a great river where were these blue-eyed men.  The river was called the Yukon.  South of Michaelovski Redoubt emptied another great river which the Russians knew as the Kwikpak.  These two rivers were one, ran the whisper.

Subienkow returned to Michaelovski.  For a year he urged an expedition up the Kwikpak.  Then arose Malakoff, the Russian half-breed, to lead the wildest and most ferocious of the hell’s broth of mongrel adventurers who had crossed from Kamtchatka.  Subienkow was his lieutenant.  They threaded the mazes of the great delta of the Kwikpak, picked up the first low hills on the northern bank, and for half a thousand miles, in skin canoes loaded to the gunwales with trade-goods and ammunition, fought their way against the five-knot current of a river that ran from two to ten miles wide in a channel many fathoms deep.  Malakoff decided to build the fort at Nulato.  Subienkow urged to go farther.  But he quickly reconciled himself to Nulato.  The long winter was coming on.  It would be better to wait.  Early the following summer, when the ice was gone, he would disappear up the Kwikpak and work his way to the Hudson Bay Company’s posts.  Malakoff had never heard the whisper that the Kwikpak was the Yukon, and Subienkow did not tell him.

Came the building of the fort.  It was enforced labour.  The tiered walls of logs arose to the sighs and groans of the Nulato Indians.  The lash was laid upon their backs, and it was the iron hand of the freebooters of the sea that laid on the lash.  There were Indians that ran away, and when they were caught they were brought back and spread-eagled before the fort, where they and their tribe learned the efficacy of the knout.  Two died under it; others were injured for life; and the rest took the lesson to heart and ran away no more.  The snow was flying ere the fort was finished, and then it was the time for furs.  A heavy tribute was laid upon the tribe.  Blows and lashings continued, and that the tribute should be paid, the women and children were held as hostages and treated with the barbarity that only the fur-thieves knew.