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having a tremendous funeral party through much of the night. Their howling sounded most mournful, but I am sure there wasn’t much honest sorrow on their part at the demise of the big black fellow, which suggests that even creatures of the wild may tend towards hypocrisy.
    Monday morning I started early for Barkerville with an empty pack on my back. I wasn’t yet in the proper mood to begin mucking in earnest. I did not wish to be hasty in my choice of a claim as long as competition was slim, so I decided to purchase a full complement of supplies and study the possibilities at leisure before I specified my piece of ground.
    At the bottleneck, I crossed the creek and followed a game trail for a while, so as to bypass Greencoat’s property, then angled down to meet with Antler just below the junction, crossing the Chinamen’s claim as I went. There were indeed three of them, each with his own shelter, and they nodded me politely past in a most neighbourly fashion.
    The route to town was much easier on a pleasant day with an empty pack, although the level of the creek had risen noticeably in the few days since I had been through, and in more than one spot the creek bed was flooded and I was forced to detour through the trees. I covered the distance in good time, though, arriving in the early afternoon with time to buy my supplies before the stores began to close. From a blacksmith I bought two pounds of nails and a piece of iron grating I would use for cooking purposes. At a general store I purchased foodstuffs, paper, ink, candles, fishhooks, a swede saw, an adze, and miscellany. Lastly, after checking my finances, I moved on to a dry goods store where I allowed myself the luxury of another blanket. I was close enough to a future flow of income, I thought, to run my savings low.
    Since the day I left home I have always kept a brief daily journal, including a record of my earnings and expenses, and the entries made in those Barkerville days are quite remarkable, prices being unconscionably high for any product whatever. Flour was thirty-five cents a pound, coffee a dollar, and my two pounds of nails cost me four dollars American. Quite astonishingly, the storekeepers and miners alike carried on at great length about how low the prices were, now that so much of the road had been completed. I had heard the same sort of talk from fellow travellers on my journey north, regarding the road itself. “How wonderful,” it was said, “that the highway north is now so easy! What a marvel of workmanship!” For my part, I thought the roadway was treacherous and crude, and the cost of living, while perhaps understandable, was no less disgusting.
    I now possessed only a few dollars of my savings, which had once seemed so expansive, and I realized that soon my payments must be made in gold dust. That was not such a frightening idea to me, though, and I dispensed another nickel to have a hotel keeper watch over my goods while I walked to Richfield, where I visited the gold commissioner’s office. I passed a pleasant half hour examining the official map of the area around my property. Then I returned to Barkerville.
    At dusk, when the lanterns were being lit and the workers began to straggle in from the goldfields, tired and exhilarated, hungry and thirsty, Barkerville was truly a sight to behold. It was a beehive of organized confusion and as strange an admixture of humanity as you could wish to see. On the one hand, every nationality in the world seemed to be represented—Englishman and Scot next to Oriental; Frenchman, Italian, and German babbling in musical polyglot. Conversely, there were almost no women in that crowd, and an equal scarcity of both the very young and the elderly. It was a cracker barrel jammed full of young men, bearded and dirty for the most part, and every one in a hurry.
    I took my dinner of cured ham and store-bought bread that night on a bench on the boardwalk. There I met and made