the
others, took full care to evade the question I had raised as to
celibacy....

What Clement of Alexandria said was that women, like Egyptian temples,
were beautiful without, but when you entered and withdrew the veil,
there was nothing behind it but a cat or a crocodile.

CHAPTER XI

SOME NORTHERN PIONEERS

Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!--WHITMAN.

In the morning, soon after sunup, we continue our joyous journey on the
Athabasca, but the birds are out and about before us. An occasional
duck rises off the water sharply with a whir of wet wings, but
generally they are self-complacent and play at last across the road
with the ship, just as if they sought trouble and despised it. The
young ducklings, who have only taken to water these few days agone,
form themselves into tiny rafts and one might almost expect to see a
fairy step aboard them. The fish jump out of the water, praying to be
caught. They look like strips of silver ribbon. Mr. Patrick O'Kelly,
who is also watching their come and go, declares this to be a sign of
rain. "When birds fly low, lady, and when fish swim near the surface,
it is well to bring in the clothes off the line." He also says that
the plover's cry indicates rain, even as does its name--the _pluvoir_,
or rain-bird.

There are few birds to be seen, except an occasional hawk, who seems to
have no other object than to curvet about and display his clipper-built
wings for our admiration. Sometimes he soars into the skies in order
to exercise a keen vision that covers half the province, or, again, he
appears to hang in the air with an invisible string, so perfect is his
poise. It is foolish to call hawks ravening birds and to impute evil
motives to them. We only do this because they like chickens and other
gallinaceous fowl whose end we should prefer to be pot-pie. This is
not a reprobate taste on the hawk's part, for, of course, he has never
read the game-laws, nor the Book of Leviticus, and cannot be expected
to know that certain flesh, in certain localities, in certain seasons,
is the particular appurtenance of the _genus homo_. In truth, we are
so uninstructed in these laws ourselves that the government must,
perforce, keep game-wardens and the churches must keep preachers to
educate us more fully.

The Athabasca River, Mr. O'Kelly calculates, is about eight hundred
feet wide and about twelve feet deep