Time, drops into a deeper restricted channel, in
the wide summer waste of gravel and sand.
Ten thousand landslides take place every spring, contributing
their tons of mud to the millions that the river is deporting to
the broad catch basins called the Athabaska and Great Slave Lakes.
Many a tree has happened to stand on the very crack that is the
upmost limit of the slide and has in consequence been ripped in
two.
Many an island is wiped out and many a one made in these annual
floods. Again and again we saw the evidence of some island, continued
long enough to raise a spruce forest, suddenly receive a 6-foot
contribution from its erratic mother; so the trees were buried to
the arm-pits. Many times I saw where some frightful jam of ice had
planed off all the trees; then a deep overwhelming layer of mud
had buried the stumps and grown in time a new spruce forest. Now
the mighty erratic river was tearing all this work away again,
exposing all its history.
In the delta of the Slave, near Fort Resolution, we saw the plan of
delta work. Millions of tons of mud poured into the deep translucent
lake have filled it for miles, so that it is scarcely deep enough
to float a canoe; thousands of huge trees, stolen from the upper
forest, are here stranded as wing-dams that check the current and
hold more mud.
