In A Few Minutes Preble Hastened Back To Say
That We Were To Go To Breakfast At Once.
That breakfast, presided over by a charming woman and a genial,
generous man, was one that will not be forgotten while I live.
Think of it, after the hard scrabble on the Nyarling!
We had real
porridge and cream, coffee with veritable sugar and milk, and
authentic butter, light rolls made of actual flour, unquestionable
bacon and potatoes, with jam and toast - the really, truly things - and
we had as much as we could eat! We behaved rather badly - intemperately,
I fear - we stopped only when forced to do it, and yet both of us
came away with appetites.
It was clear that I must get some larger craft than my canoe to
cross the lake from Fort Resolution and take the 1,300 pounds of
provisions that had come on the steamer. Harding kindly offered the
loan of a York boat, and with the help chiefly of Charlie McLeod
the white man, who is interpreter at the fort, I secured a crew to
man it. But oh, what worry and annoyance it was! These Great Slave
Lake Indians are like a lot of spoiled and petulant children,
with the added weakness of adult criminals; they are inconsistent,
shiftless, and tricky. Pike, Whitney, Buffalo Jones, and others
united many years ago in denouncing them as the most worthless and
contemptible of the human race, and since then they have considerably
deteriorated. There are exceptions, however, as will be seen by
the record.
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