FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

"With souls grown clear
In this sweet atmosphere,
With influences serene,
Our blood and brain washed clean,
We've idled down the breast
Of broadening tides."

--_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.

About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.

[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]

At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
blatantly dub "progress."

It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric pr