t of trippers' and traders' canoes, and passed during
the day immense banks of shale, the tracking being very bad and
the water still high. We noted much good timber standing on heavy
soil, and on the 14th passed a curious hump-like hill, cut-faced,
with a reddish and yellow cinder-like look, as if it had been
calcined by underlying fires. Near it was an exposure of deep
coloured ochre, and, farther on, enormous black cut-banks, also
suggestive of coal.

The Calling River--"Kitoosepe"--was one of our points of
distribution, and upon reaching it we found the river benches
covered with tepees, and a crowd of half-breeds from Calling
Lake awaiting us. After the declarations and scrip payments were
concluded, we took stock of the surroundings, which consisted, so
far as numbers went, mainly of dogs. Nearly all of them looked very
miserable, and one starveling bitch, with a litter of pups, seemed
to live upon air. It was pitiful to see the forlorn brutes so
cruelly abused; but it has been the fate of this poor mongrel friend
of humanity from the first. The canine gentry fare better than many
a man, but the outcasts of the slums and camps feel the stroke of
bitter fortune, yet, with prodigious heart, never cease to love the
oppressor.

There was an adjunct of the half-breed camp, however, more
interesting than the dogs, namely, Marie Rose Gladu, a half-sister
of the Catherine Bisson we met at Lesser Slave Lake, but who
declared herself to be older than she by five years. From evidence
received she proved to be very old, certainly over a hundred,
and perhaps the oldest woman in Northern Canada. She was born at
Lesser Slave Lake, and remembered the wars of her people with the
Blackfeet, and the "dancing" of captured scalps. She remembered
the buffalo as plentiful at Calling Lake; that it was then a mixed
country, and that their supplies in those old days were brought
in by way of Isle a la Cross, Beaver River, and Lac la Biche, as
well as by Methy Portage, a statement which I have heard disputed,
but which is quite credible for all that. She remembered the old
fort at the south-east end of Lesser Slave Lake, and Waupistagwon,
"The White Head," as she called him, namely, Mr. Shaw of the famous
finger-nail. Her father, whose name was Nekehwapiskun--"My wigwam
is white"--was a fur company's Chief, and, in his youth, a noted
hunter of Rabisca (Chipewyan), whence he came to Lesser Slave Lake.
Her own Cree name, unmusical for a w