with that dreamy look which only
those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
places,--they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
dropped here and there over the white map of the North.

CHAPTER IV

DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS

"Set me in the urge and tide-drift
Of the streaming hosts a-wing!
Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,
Raucous challenge, wooings mellow--
Every migrant is my fellow,
Making northward with the Spring."

--_Bliss Carman_.

If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.

The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
flotilla: seven specially-built scows or "sturgeon-heads." Each runs
forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
stern.

Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
The third craft we observe with due respect as "the cook boat." The
remaining four scows carry cargo only,--the trade term being "pieces,"
each piece from eighty to a hund