Deep Lake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the
man-killing race against winter kept on. Men broke their hearts
and backs and wept beside the trail in sheer exhaustion. But
winter never faltered. The fall gales blew, and amid bitter
soaking rains and ever-increasing snow flurries, Tarwater and the
party to which he was attached piled the last of their outfit on
the beach.

There was no rest. Across the lake, a mile above a roaring
torrent, they located a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit.
Here, by hand, with an inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the spruce-
trunks into lumber. They worked night and day. Thrice, on the
night-shift, underneath in the saw-pit, Old Tarwater fainted. By
day he cooked as well, and, in the betweenwhiles, helped Anson in
the building of the boat beside the torrent as the green planks
came down.

The days grew shorter. The wind shifted into the north and blew
unending gales. In the mornings the weary men crawled from their
blankets and in their socks thawed out their frozen shoes by the
fire Tarwater always had burning for them. Ever arose the
increasing tale of famine on the Inside. The last grub steamboats
up from Bering Sea were stalled by low water at the beginning of
the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north of Dawson. In fact, they
lay at the old Hudson Bay Company's post at Fort Yukon inside the
Arctic Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars a pound, but
no one would sell. Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money to burn,
were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub.
Miners' Committees were confiscating all grub and putting the
population on strict rations. A man who held out an ounce of grub