ed in song and story. The
plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for
Byron to state

"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream
To still her famished nestling's scream."

And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, "We are nurtured
like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.

CHAPTER IX

SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE

"Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
And the weird magic of old Indian tales."

--_Archibald Lampman_.

A double cabin is assigned us on _The Mackenzie River_ and the nightmare
that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having