hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped, landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect the sound of command.
The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we hear the familiar "Nistow! Nistow!" of the awakened camp. This word literally means "brother-in-law," but it is the vocative used by the Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far behind, with the fardels.
It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats, "Mooswa!" and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose. There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown, bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion "bannockburn"), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke, strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle—this is luxury's lap.
The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small runway makes in, "Gon-sta-wa-bit" (man who was drowned), he volunteers. Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man, his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this spring—three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the Mother, and the Child.
It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant blood—the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to his long, sky-clinging V.
Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North holds so many scientific men and finished scholars—colonial Esaus serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new places and untrod ways—who would exchange all this for the easy ways of fatted civilization!
At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a burden, and it is 102° in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in height.
It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore. The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red beard—the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds' eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.
We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas. Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the Wetigo, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh, Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride, carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a gruesome story.
Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook says, "nothing to write home about."
We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals, banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which we lie is one brown cloud
