es already forming seed.

Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian
limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal
which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they
hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
_Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.

[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]

It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.

The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
surprised to learn that the lake remains open