e was sorely tried. Perchance they knew
that he was dangerous to trifle with! We cannot tell, but certainly he
seems to have been a splendid manager of men.

At last they reached an Indian village where they were hospitably
entertained, and presented with as much roasted salmon as they required.
These people lived almost exclusively on fish and berries; were more
cleanly than other tribes, and apparently less addicted to war or
hunting. Here two new guides were obtained, and the people conciliated
with gifts of beads, knives, and other trinkets.

Leaving them they spent a wretched night on the shores of a lake,
deluged with rain and tormented with sandflies and mosquitoes--the
former being perhaps the greatest pests of the country. Soon the guides
grew tired of their mode of travelling, and the allowance of provisions
had to be still further reduced. Fearing that they might run short
altogether, Mackenzie ordered Reuben and his son to fall behind, bury
some pemmican in reserve for their return, and make a fire over the spot
to conceal the fact that it had been dug into. They were now on
two-thirds of their regular allowance. Soon afterwards they came to a
river too deep to ford, but one of their guides swam across and brought
over a raft that lay on the other side. This ferried most of them over,
but Swiftarrow and some of the others preferred to swim across.

At length, after many days of suffering and toil they crossed the last
range of mountains and began to descend. Here magnificent cedars and
other trees were seen, some of the former being fully eighteen feet in
circumference. The natives whom they met with were sometimes stern,
sometimes kind, but always suspicious at first. The soothing effects of
gifts, however, were pretty much the same in all. Still the party had
several narrow escapes.

On one occasion Mackenzie, when alone, was surrounded and seized, but he
soon freed himself, and just at that moment when his life seemed to hang
on a hair, Reuben Guff happened to come up, and the natives took to
flight. Some of these natives were very expert canoe-men, caught salmon
by means of weirs, dwelt in wooden houses elevated on poles, boiled
their food in water-tight baskets by putting red-hot stones into them,
made cakes of the inner rind of the hemlock sprinkled with oil, and
seemed to have a rooted antipathy to flesh of every kind. Some of the
salmon they caught were fully forty pounds' weight. T