“There’s an independent trader with a boat-load of furs which he is going to take out over the Rat Portage and into the Yukon, the same way that we are going,” volunteered John, also after a little. “I’ve been down talking with him. He says it will take ten days from here to the summit, the best we can do, and as to when we can start no one can tell. Uncle Dick told me we would have to wait for our supplies until the general annual jamboree cooled down a little bit. Then we will get our canoe off the boat and rig her up.”
Jesse stood with his hands in his pockets, looking about the motley scene surrounding them. “I don’t care much for the fur trade,” said he, slowly, after a time. “It looks all dirty, and it’s a cruel thing. I don’t like to trap things, anyhow, very much any more since I got older. Besides, it doesn’t look nice to me. These people are so poor they can barely live from one year to the next, and the Company could have changed that in a hundred years if it had wanted to.”
“Well, there’s the mission-work among them even here,” commented Rob. “That gives them a little bit more life. They learn how to read a little bit sometimes, and they get to using the needle better than they did before. It helps them make things they can sell—moccasins and bead-work—don’t you think?”
“Huh!” said Jesse. “Much money they get out of that. When that boat’s gone their market’s gone for the full year, isn’t it? No, I don’t like it. Of course I’m glad we’ve come up here and seen all this—I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But now I know more about the great fur companies than I ever did before. Old ones or new ones, they all look alike to me, and I don’t like them.”
“Well,” said Rob, “if everything was just the way we left it back home, there wouldn’t be any fun in going traveling anywhere in the world. It’s the strangeness of this and the wildness that make it interesting, isn’t it?
“And we are in a strange, wild country,” he continued. “Where else can you go in all the world and find as many new and out-of-the-way places as this? From where we stand here you can go over east into a country that no white man knows about. We have passed beyond the place where Sir John Franklin was lost. If you go southwest you can get to Dawson, maybe—there’s the tombstones of the four Mounted Policemen who tried to get across from Dawson and didn’t. I’ve got a photograph of their tombstones; the men just hauled them up the hill with dogs to-day and put them up not more than an hour ago.
“And then,” he went on, “north of here runs the Arctic, with who knows what beyond the shore-line. South and west of the place where we will cross the Canadian and American line there’s a lot of country no man knows much about. And everywhere you looked as we came through, east and west of the big river, there was country that was mapped, but with really little known of it. The Liard has been mapped, but that’s all you can say about it. The only way to travel through this country is on the rivers, and when you are on one of these rivers you don’t have much time to see beyond the banks, believe me.”
“Well, it’s kept me mighty busy with my little old map,” said John, “changing directions as much as we have. I wanted to ask you, Rob, whether I’ve got the distances all right. Why not check up on the jumps in our whole journey from the start to here, where we are at the end of the trail?”
“All right,” said Rob, and produced his own memorandum-book from his pocket. “I’ve got the distances here, the way they were given to me by the government men:
“From Athabasca Landing to Pelican Portage was one hundred and twenty miles; to the Grand Rapids, one hundred and sixty-five miles; to McMurray, two hundred and fifty-two miles; to Chippewyan, four hundred and thirty-seven miles; to Smith’s Landing, five hundred and thirty-seven miles; to Fort Smith, below the portage, five hundred and fifty-three miles; to Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake, seven hundred and forty-five miles; to Hay River, eight hundred and fifteen miles; to Fort Providence, nine hundred and five miles; to Fort Simpson, ten hundred and eighty-five miles; to Fort Wrigley, twelve hundred and sixty-five miles; to Fort Norman, fourteen hundred and thirty-seven miles; to Fort Good Hope, sixteen hundred and nine miles; to Arctic Red River, eighteen hundred and nineteen miles; to Fort McPherson, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine miles. That’s the way we figured it out at first, and I guess it’s about as accurate as any one can tell,” he concluded.