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Again, as we entered the outskirts of Nome the incident was repeated, and only the hasty driving of the reindeer into a barn prevented the dogs from seizing the deer that time. Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership and a little dog named Kewalik the one I obtained at Kikitaruk was at the head of the team.
Hans would accompany me as far as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two days of forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from Kikitaruk to Candle, but they told us it could be done.
We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the mission, the only shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula and Kewalik on the mainland, and we had been warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the snow-drifts of the shore.
We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward to its mouth, double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen a horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him, leaping at his haunches as we passed by. But when they saw the reindeer the whole team set off at a run, dragging the heavy sled as if it were nothing.
But here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it. The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed by letter of our projected journey during the previous summer and had long expected us.
I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty. The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of February.
So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched, some mailed here at Kikitaruk, some to be carried back to Bettles and mailed there these latter getting outside long before the former we started at seven in the morning instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey down the shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay turned out to be a calamity for us.
We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at the mission both afternoon and night, and I found them very much the same as at Kikitaruk, with the exception that the singing was much more advanced and was very good indeed.
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