CHAPTER XIII.
Lake Athabasca.—Northern Lights.—Chipewyan.—The real Workers of the World.
Athabasca, or more correctly “Arabascow,” “The Meeting-place of many Waters,” is a large lake. At this fort of Chipewyan we stand near its western end. Two hundred miles away to the east, its lonely waters still lave against the granite rocks.
Whatever may be the work to which he turns hand or brain, an Indian seldom errs. If he names a lake or fashions a piece of bark to sail its waters, both will fit the work for which they were intended.
“The meeting-place of many waters” tells the story of Athabasca. In its bosom many rivers unite their currents; and from its north-western rim pours the Slave River, the true Mackenzie. Its first English discoverer called it the “Lake of the Hills;” a more appropriate title would have been “The Lake of the Winds,” for fierce and wild the storms sweep over its waves.
Over the Lake Athabasca the Northern Lights hold their highest revels. They flash, and dance, and stream, and intermingle, and wave together their many colours like the shapes and hues of a kaleidoscope. Sometimes the long columns of light seem to rest upon the silent, frozen shores, stretching out their rose-tipped tops to touch the zenith; again the lines of light traverse the sky from east to west as a hand might sweep the chords of some vast harp, and from its touch would flow light instead of music. So quickly run the colours along these shafts, that the ear listens instinctively for sound in the deep stillness of the frozen solitude; but sound I have never heard. Many a time I have listened breathless to catch the faintest whisper of these wondrous lightnings; they were mute as the waste that lay around me.
Figures convey but a poor idea of cold, yet they are the only means we have, and by a comparison of figures some persons, at least, will understand the cold of an Athabascan winter. The citadel of Quebec has the reputation of being a cold winter residence; its mean temperature for the month of January is 11° 7´ Fahr. The mean temperature of the month of January, 1844, at Fort Chipewyan, was 22° 74´, or nearly 30° colder, and during the preceding month of December the wind blew with a total pressure of one thousand one hundred and sixty pounds to the square foot.
It is perhaps needless to say more about the rigour of an Athabascan winter.
As it is the “meeting-place of many waters” so also is it the meeting-place of many systems. Silurian and Devonian approach it from the west. Laurentian still holds five-sixths of its waters in the same grasp as when what is now Athabasca lay a deep fiord along the ancient ocean shore. The old rock caught it to his rough heart then, and when in later ages the fickle waves which so long had kissed his lips left him stern and lonely, he still held the clear, cold lake to his iron bosom.
Athabasca may be said to mark also the limits of some great divisions of the animal kingdom. The reindeer and that most curious relic of an older time, the musk ox, come down near its north-eastern shores, for there that bleak region known as the “Barren Grounds” is but a few miles distant. These animals never pass to the southern end of the lake; the Cariboo, or reindeer of the woods, being a distinct species from that which inhabits the treeless waste. The wood buffalo and the moose are yet numerous on the north-west and south-west shores: but of these things we shall have more to say anon.