hing to sleep as best they could. The way was well
beaten and camp was frequently made for the night with strange Indians,
from whom fresh guides were hired; but when he did not camp with the
natives, Mackenzie watched his guide by sleeping with him. Though the
fellow was malodorous from fish oil and infested with vermin, Mackenzie
would spread his cloak in such a way that escape was impossible without
awakening himself. No sentry was kept at night. All hands were too
deadly tired from the day's climb. Once, in the impenetrable gloom of
the midnight forest, Mackenzie was awakened by a plaintive chant in a
kind of unearthly music. A tribe was engaged in religious devotions to
some woodland deity. Totem poles of cedar, carved with the heads of
animals emblematic of family clans, told Mackenzie that he was nearing
the coast tribes. Barefooted, with ankles swollen and clothes torn to
shreds, they had crossed the last range of mountains within two weeks
of leaving the inland river. They now embarked with some natives for
the sea.

One can guess how Mackenzie's heart thrilled as they swept down the
swift river--six miles an hour--past fishing weirs and Indian camps,
till at last, far out between the mountains, he descried the narrow arm
of the blue, limitless sea. The canoe leaked like a sieve; but what
did that matter? At eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 20,
the river carried them to a wide lagoon, lapped by a tide, with the
seaweed waving for miles along the shore. Morning fog still lay on the
far-billowing ocean. Sea otters tumbled over the slimy rocks with
discordant cries. Gulls darted overhead; and past the canoe dived the
great floundering grampus. There was no mistaking. This was the
sea--the Western Sea, that for three hundred years had baffled all
search overland, and led the world's greatest explorers on a chase of a
will-o'-the-wisp. What Cartier and La Salle and La Verendrye failed to
do, Mackenzie had accomplished.

But Mackenzie's position was not to be envied. Ten starving men on a
barbarous coast had exactly twenty pounds of pemmican, fifteen of rice,
six of flour. Of ammunition there was scarcely any. Between home and
their leaky canoe lay half a continent of wilderness and mountains.
The next day was spent coasting the cove for a place to take
observations. Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent
fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men o