Nine, like one drowning and swimming feebly to keep his
consciousness above the engulfing dark, he came out upon the snow-
slope to a canyon and saw below smoke rising and men who ceased
from work to gaze at him. He tottered down the hill to them, still
singing; and when he ceased from lack of breath they called him
variously: Santa Claus, Old Christmas, Whiskers, the Last of the
Mohicans, and Father Christmas. And when he stood among them he
stood very still, without speech, while great tears welled out of
his eyes. He cried silently, a long time, till, as if suddenly
bethinking himself, he sat down in the snow with much creaking and
crackling of his joints, and from this low vantage point toppled
sidewise and fainted calmly and easily away.

In less than a week Old Tarwater was up and limping about the
housework of the cabin, cooking and dish-washing for the five men
of the creek. Genuine sourdoughs (pioneers) they were, tough and
hard-bitten, who had been buried so deeply inside the Circle that
they did not know there was a Klondike Strike. The news he brought
them was their first word of it. They lived on an almost straight-
meat diet of moose, caribou, and smoked salmon, eked out with wild
berries and somewhat succulent wild roots they had stocked up with
in the summer. They had forgotten the taste of coffee, made fire
with a burning glass, carried live fire-sticks with them wherever
they travelled, and in their pipes smoked dry leaves that bit the
tongue and were pungent to the nostrils.

Three years before, they had prospected from the head-reaches of
the Koyokuk northward and clear across to the mouth of the
Mackenzie on the Arctic Ocean. Here, on the whaleships, they had
beheld their last white men and equipped themselves with the last