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56 BREAK-UP

stars of the Great Bear were hardly discernible by
reason of the full moon’s brightness. But to the
west, in the glare of that sailing moon, lay a sight
so grand and so awful that the mind shrank back
in sudden disbelief. A canyon yawned at our feet,
and the towering walls of its farther side were
streaked with moonlight and gashed with shadows.
Beyond the brink of the canyon stretched miles of
bristling dark pine-woods, and beyond those miles
more miles of snow, until against the dark velvet
of the sky a line of jagged and gigantic peaks rose
ghostly under the moon.

Our dogs stood silently upon a bare, dark patch
of heather, with the moonlight in their eyes;
phantom dogs, not sleigh-dogs upon snow. In
something like panic we pushed and shoved at the
sleigh until its runners were clear of the heather,
and then tore at break-neck speed down the farther
side of the summit, swinging and swaying past
silver places and dark places, under dark boughs
and over white curves, down, down to the lowest
terrace of the Stikine valley and the river that
wound beneath.

The rotting ice groaned ominously as the sleigh
slid on to its surface, but we ran swiftly across to-
ward the farther bank where the cabins of Telegraph
Creek huddled together in the hollow. Down the