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Among the Selawiks she was accounted a beauty. Her cheeks were rosy though high-boned, her skin dark but clear, and her lips, not too full for symmetry, repeated the tint of her cheeks artistically. She was fond of weaving bright bits of color into the two long braids of black hair, and decorating in many different ways her fur parkies and mukluks.
But till then she must walk. Macdonald gave way with a gesture of his hand and turned on his heel. At the camp-fire Sheba dried her mukluks, stockings, caribou mitts, and short skirts. Too tired to eat, she forced herself to swallow a few bites and drank eagerly some tea. Gordon had brought blankets from the sled and he persuaded her to lie down for a few minutes.
At a near-by cabin I tried to buy a pair of mukluks a native woman had on, as I saw they were about the size I needed. She refused to sell, though I offered her three times their value. There was no time to argue, nor persuade, so finally in desperation her Eskimo husband and I took them off her feet, though she kicked vigorously. It saved the day for me, but it seemed a bit ungallant."
The well-equipped traveller has moccasins for dry trails and mukluks for wet trails and even then may sometimes get his feet wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his dogs' feet are, collectively, as important as his own. When the dog comes out of water into snow again the snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if not removed will soon cause a sore and lameness.
While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in mukluks.
Here the bitter wind of Death Valley became a veritable hurricane. Time and again the dogs tried to climb the icy slopes and time and again they were hurled back by the fearful buffeting of the elements. "Scotty" finally halted them, and with the greatest difficulty succeeded in fastening spiked "creepers" to his mukluks. Then he tied Baldy to the back of his belt by a strong leash.
Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore, tied tight round my knees, that I did not lose my life, or at least my feet. The thermometer at Circle City stood at 60° below zero at dark that day, and down on the ice it is always about 5° colder than on the bank, because cold air is heavy air and sinks to the lowest level, and 65° below zero means 97° below freezing.
The mukluks, with walrus-hide soles, were composed of the silver-padded feet of many lynxes.
One of the characters then at Nome, known and unmistakable from the Klondike down, was "Mother" Woods, in her sunbonnet, abbreviated skirts, and "mukluks" or native sealskin boots. A woman of middle age, she had participated in almost every gold stampede, enduring as much as a man; and she swore like a trooper.
Here is a man working in wood or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here are women working in skin or fur, and some of them are admirable needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another woman chewing mukluks and many a white man who has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an intimate union between sole and upper.
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