A study of frozen noses would be interesting; one could work out from it an essay on the admirable fitness of things, and even history read by the light of frozen noses might teach us new theories. The Roman nose could not have stood an arctic winter, hence the limits of the Roman empire. The Esquimaux nose is admirably fitted for the climate in which it breathes, hence the limited nature it assumes.
CHAPTER XII.
The Clearwater.—A bygone Ocean.—A Land of Lakes.—The Athabasca River.—Who is he?—Chipewyan Indians.—Echo.—Major succumbs at last.—Mal de Raquette.
The Clearwater, a river small in a land where rivers are often a mile in width, meanders between its lofty wooded hills; or rather one should say, meanders in the deep valley which it has worn for itself through countless ages.
Ever since the beginning of the fur trade it has been the sole route followed into the North. More practicable routes undoubtedly exist, but hitherto the Long Portage (a ridge dividing the waters of the chain of lakes and rivers we have lately passed from those streams which seek the Arctic Ocean) and the Clearwater River have formed as it were the gateway of the North.
This Long Portage, under its various names of La Loche and Methy, is not a bad position from whence to take a bird’s-eye view of the Great North.
Once upon a time, how long ago one is afraid to say, a great sea rolled over what is now the central continent. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the base of the Rocky Mountains, this ocean has left its trace. It had its shores, and to-day these shores still show the trace of where the restless waves threw their surge upon the earlier earth. To the eye of the geologist the sea-shell, high cast upon some mountain ridge, tells its story of the sea as plainly as the tropic sea-shell, held to the dreamer’s ear, whispers its low melody of sounding billow.
To the east of this ocean the old earth reared its iron head in those grim masses which we name Laurentian, and which, as though conscious of their hoary age, seem to laugh at the labour of the new comer, man.
The waters went down, or the earth went up, it little matters which; and the river systems of the continent worked their ways into Mother Ocean: the Mississippi south, the St. Lawrence east, the Mackenzie north. But the old Laurentian still remained, and to-day, grim, filled with wild lakes, pine-clad, rugged, almost impassable it lies, spread in savage sleep from Labrador to the Arctic Ocean.