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Updated: May 29, 2025
They were much nearer Kaltag than they had realised, arriving after only two hours' struggle with the dogs at the big Indian village on the left bank of the river. But their first appearance here was clouded by Nig's proposal to slay all the dogs in sight. He was no sooner unharnessed than he undertook the congenial job.
Our course lay all around Norton Sound to Unalaklík, and then over the portage to Kaltag on the Yukon; up the Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing of our steps to Solomon's, and that was done without difficulty save for a new trouble with the dogs. It appeared that we no longer had any leader.
Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together here from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing and in the other directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had sprung up.
We had left the Yukon on the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we reached it again on the 23d of March at Kaltag, more than six hundred miles lower down. We had two hundred and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us, and then close to another two hundred and fifty up the Tanana River to Fairbanks. But alas! for the fine Yukon trail we had promised ourselves!
The last of their dogs had been frozen to death a few miles back on the trail, and they had no idea, apparently, how near they were to that "first Indian settlement this side of Kaltag" reached by the Colonel and the Boy after two days of rest and one day of travel.
But taking the ninety-mile portage from Unalaklík to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off. This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was reached.
The Kaltag trail is the trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato.
From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail.
She may not speak to a man nor see his face, much less touch his clothes or anything that belongs to him; for if she did so, though no harm would come to her, he would grow unmanly. She has her own dishes for eating out of and may use no other; at Kaltag she must suck the water through a swan's bone without applying her lips to the cup.
Kurilla gravely verified these facts. "And me, Dall's chief guide. Me with Dall when he make portage from Unalaklik to Kaltag. He see the Yukon first time. He run down to be first on the ice. Dall and the coast natives stare, like so" Kurilla made a wild-eyed, ludicrous face "and they say: 'It is not a river it is another sea!" "No wonder.
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