And in the same year, other parties
(now forgotten, for who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the
gold hunters?) crossed the Pass, built boats out of the standing
timber, and drifted down the Yukon and farther north.
And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with the
terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the
primitive, garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and
covering their feet with the walrus mucluc and the moosehide
moccasin. They forgot the world and its ways, as the world had
forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty
and starved in famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure.
They crisscrossed the land in every direction, threaded countless
unmapped rivers in precarious birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes
and dogs broke trail through thousands of miles of silent white,
where man had never been.
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