d by seven in
the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land
visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might
break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven
hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a
shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the
reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A
whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their
wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles--all three were
speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself
think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of
reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred
miles to this lagoon of dead water?"

"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks--it isn't drift--it's
birds--it's duck and geese--I have never seen anything like it--I have
lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of
anything--of anything like it."

Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never
heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven
miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without
disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as
I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat
very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We
couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding
places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult
nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south.
That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a
foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and
all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the
thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief
trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe--the big, white
banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch
craft--with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.

That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north
of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg
and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of
all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit
and ermine, the furs that clothe-