Our transport at Grand Rapids Island
At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport. It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.
Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island
In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.
The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,—soft, yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this strange page of history in stone.
Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we see is largely second growth,—Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender, delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery branches seem to float in air.
Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:—
"This guest of summer,