ees, as Mackenzie says, or all three, we found it to be a wide
and beautiful table-like prairie, begirt with aspens, on which we
flushed a pack of prairie chickens. Below it, and looking upward
beyond an island, a line of timber, fringed along the water's
edge with willows, sweeps across the view, met half-way by a wall
of Devonian rock, whose alternate glitter and shade, in the strong
sunshine streaming from the east, seemed almost spectral.

The heavily timbered island added to the effect, and, with a patch
of limestone on its cheek, formed a strikingly beautiful foreground.

The only exciting incident of the day was the vigorous chase, by some
of the party, of an old pair of moulting gray geese with their young,
all, of course, unable to fly. It was pitiful to watch the clever
and fearless actions of the old birds as decoys, falling victims,
at last, to parental love. Indeed, they were not worth eating, and
to kill them was a sin. But when were there ever scruples over
food on Peace River, that theatre of mighty feats of gormandism?

I have already hinted at those masterpieces of voracity for which
the region is renowned; yet the undoubted facts related around our
camp-fires, and otherwise, a few of which follow, almost beggar
belief. Mr. Young, of our party, an old Hudson's Bay officer, knew
of sixteen trackers who, in a few days, consumed eight bears, two
moose, two bags of pemmican, two sacks of flour, and three sacks of
potatoes. Bishop Grouard vouched for four men eating a reindeer at
a sitting. Our friend, Mr. d'Eschambault, once gave Oskinnequ--"The
Young Man"--six pounds of pemmican, who ate it all at a meal, washing
it down with a gallon of tea, and then complained that he had not had
enough. Sir George Simpson states that at Athabasca Lake, in 1820, he
was one of a party of twelve who ate twenty-two geese and three ducks
at a single meal. But, as he says, they had been three whole days
without food. The Saskatchewan folk, however, known of old as the
Gens de Blaireaux--"The People of the Badger Holes"--were not behind
their congeners. That man of weight and might, our old friend,
Chief-factor Belanger--drowned, alas, many years ago with young
Simpson at Sea Falls--once served out to thirteen men a sack of
pemmican weighing ninety pounds. It was enough for three days; but,
there and then, they sat down and consumed it all at a single meal,
not, it must be added, without some subsequent and just pangs of
i