Again and again,
when we landed on the level or rocky shore and all hands set out
to pick up the few pencil-thick stems of creeping birch, roots
of annual plants, or wisps of grass to boil the kettle, old Weeso
would wander off by himself and in five minutes return with an
armful of the most amazingly acceptable firewood conjured out of
the absolutely timberless, unpromising waste. I never yet saw the
camp where he could not find wood. So he proved good stuff; I was
glad we had brought him along.
And I was equally glad now to say good-bye to the rest of the crew.
I gave them provisions for a week, added a boiling of beans, and
finally the wonderful paper in which I stated the days they had
worked for me, and the kind of service they had rendered, commended
Freesay, and told the truth about Beaulieu.
"Dat paper tell about me," said that worthy suspiciously.
"Yes," I said, "and about the others; and it tells Harding to pay
you as agreed."
We all shook hands and parted. I have not seen them since, nor do
I wish to meet any of them again, except Freesay.
My advice to the next traveller would be: get white men for the trip
and one Indian for guide. When alone they are manageable, and some
of them, as seen already, are quite satisfactory, but the more of
them the worse. They combine, as Pike says, the meanest qualities
of a savage and an unscrupulous moneylender. The worst one in the
crowd seems most readily followed by the others.
CHAPTER XXVIII
GEOLOGICAL FORCES AT WORK
It seems to me that never before have I seen the geological forces
of nature so obviously at work. Elsewhere I have seen great valleys,
cliffs, islands, etc., held on good evidence to be the results of
such and such powers formerly very active; but here on the Athabaska
I saw daily evidence of these powers in full blast, ripping, tearing
reconstructing, while we looked on.
All the way down the river we saw the process of undermining the
bank, tearing down the trees to whirl them again on distant northern
shores, thus widening the river channel until too wide for its normal
flood, which in 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.
