ON THE YUKON TRAIL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 108, 9 May 1934, Page 2

ON THE YUKON TRAIL

BACK TO THE WILDS WOMAN’S STRANGE LIFE FAR AND FROZEN WASTES From the Norfolk village of Dorsingliam a woman recently set out for the far and frozen Yukon, and there she was to resume a life that reads more like fiction than fact. For a long time she has lived within ten miles of the Arctic Circle, and has accompanied hoi husband, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Police, on dangerous manhunts. Mrs. Alary Tidd had been spending u holiday with her relatives at Dorsingham. Her husband, a Norfolk man aud formerly a school teacher, has been stationed in the Yukon territory nearly 20 years. The last hundred miles or so of her journey Airs. Tidd was to cover on a dog-drawn toboggan. She has lived in parts where no white woman has been before, and the natives first looked upon her in wonderment. “ Aly husband never knows when he will be called out, where he will have to go, or on what errand,” Airs. Tidd said the other day. “ I accompany him on all calls that arc any distance away, even if it means chasing a dangerous criminal or a mad trapper. The • old-timers,’ through years of loneliness in the wilds, often become unbalanced. “ I travel in a toboggan drawn by three dogs, and my husband on another drawn by four. We carry our tent, our bed, a stove, food and utensils strapped to the toboggans. I have travelled many hundreds of miles in this way, and often through blinding blizzards.’’ The meeting of Airs. Tidd and her husband was a romance. Sergeant Tidd was at Dawson City when suddenly “ out of the blue ’’ came a young and pretty woman travelling to Fort Yukon, Alaska, to take up a post as a mission nurse. The tall, smart policeman attraced her eye. She had already attracted his. She stayed one night in Dawson City and they danced together, and then she passed on to her work with the natives and Eskimos. A year later the sergeant followed the nurse and made the “ capture ” of his life. They married and he took her to his log-cabin which, for nearly three parts of the year, was snow covered. Afrs. Tidd made a difference to that shack. She draped it with pretty curtains, and actually secured a piano. In the shack in the snow waste, hundreds of miles from anywhere, with perhaps only the trader for a neighbour, she played to her husband. The couple had no wireless then, and they only received news and letters from home once a year—in July. They knew nothing of what was going on in the world beyond.

Airs. Tidd saw the trappers when they came to the trading depot once a year to sell their skine and replenish their stores and ammunition before they set off again. This was her life year in and year out —and she was

happy. Now she is returning to it, comforted by the knowledge that a radio set will have been installed by the time she gets back.