Excerpt from A Winter Circuit of Our Arctic Coast: A Narrative of a Journey With Dog-Sleds Around the Entire Arctic Coast of Alaska This is my fourth, and will, I am sure, be my last, book of Alaskan travel; indeed I had thought the third would be the last. When one has described winter travel at great length, and then summer travel (which means the rivers) at great length, and has described the mountains and the ascent of the chiefest of them, there would seem little need to chronicle further wanderings. But my journey of the winter of 1917-18 carried me completely around a distinct region of great interest that had been no more than barely touched by my previous narratives - the Arctic coast - and seemed sufficiently full of new impressions and experiences to be worth writing about. That coast has of course been well known for seventy-five years; I have no discoveries or explorations to record. Yet in one respect the journey was fresh and even singular. Whether anyone ever made the circuit of that coast in the winter-time before I know not, but I am sure it was never made before in the winter-time by one having for his purpose a general enquiry into Eskimo conditions; yet the winter is the time when the normal activities of the villages, with their schools and missions, are in operation. All such visits of bishops and superintendents and inspectors and interested travellers - not to mention wandering archdeacons - have been made hitherto in the summer-time, when the annual trip of the revenue cutter offers suitable opportunity of passage, and when the natives are scattered and their normal activities intermitted. For it is more and more true as one goes further north that the winter life is the normal life, since it comprises a larger and larger part of the year. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.