It was very necessary to make Fort Chipewyan
while there was a calm, so we pushed on. After four hours' groping
among blind channels and mud banks, we reached the lake at
midnight - though of course there was no night, but a sort of gloaming
even at the darkest - and it took us four hours' hard rowing to
cover the ten miles that separated us from Chipewyan.
It sounds very easy and commonplace when one says "hard rowing,"
but it takes on more significance when one is reminded that those
oars were 18 feet long, 5 inches through, and weighed about 20 pounds
each; the boat was 30 feet long, a demasted schooner indeed, and
rowing her through shallow muddy water, where the ground suction
was excessive, made labour so heavy that 15 minute spells were all
any one could do. We formed four relays, and all worked in turn
all night through, arriving at Chipewyan. 4 A.M., blistered, sore,
and completely tired out.
Fort Chipewyan (pronounced Chip-we-yan') was Billy Loutit's home,
and here we met his father, mother, and numerous as well as interesting
sisters. Meanwhile I called at the Roman Catholic Mission, under
Bishop Gruard, and the rival establishment, under Reverend Roberts,
good men all, and devoted to the cause, but loving not each other.
The Hudson's Bay Company, however, was here, as everywhere in the
north, the really important thing.
There was a long stretch of dead water before we could resume our
downward drift, and, worse than that, there was such a flood on the
Peace River that it was backing the Athabaska, that is, the tide
of the latter was reversed on the Rocher River, which extends
twenty-five miles between here and Peace mouth. To meet this, I
hired Colin Fraser's steamer. We left Chipewyan at 6.15; at 11.15
camped below the Peace on Great Slave River, and bade farewell to
the steamer.
The reader may well be puzzled by these numerous names; the fact
is the Mackenzie, the Slave, the Peace, the Rocher, and the Unchaga
are all one and the same river, but, unfortunately, the early
explorers thought proper to give it a new name each time it did
something, such as expand into a lake. By rights it should be the
Unchaga or Unjiza, from the Rockies to the Arctic, with the Athabaska
as its principal southern tributary.
The next day another Lynx was collected. In its stomach were
remains of a Redsquirrel, a Chipmunk, and a Bog-lemming. The last
was important as it made a new record.
The Athabaska is a great river, the Peace is a greater, and the
Slave, formed by their union, is worthy of its parents. Its placid
flood is here nearly a mile wide, and its banks are covered with
a great continuous forest of spruce trees of the largest size.
