In its stomach was part of a sparrow (white-throat?) and a piece of rawhide an inch wide and 4 feet long, evidently a portion of a dog-harness picked up somewhere along the river. I wonder what he did with the bells.
That night we decided to drift, leaving one man on guard. Next day, as we neared Lake Athabaska, the shores got lower, and the spruce disappeared, giving way to dense thickets of low willow. Here the long expected steamer, Graham, passed, going upstream. We now began to get occasional glimpses of Lake Athabaska across uncertain marshes and sand bars. 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. How far back this extends I do not know, but the natives say the best timber is along the river.
More than once a Lynx was seen trotting by or staring at us from the bank, but no other large animal.
On the night of June 7 we reached Smith Landing.