FISHING FOR GRAYLING—WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.
MOONLIGHT ON LAKE LE BARGE.
LAKE BENNETT FROM OUR CAR.
We came down through Fifty Mile River, which is the name given to the waters connecting Lake Taggish and Lake Lebarge. The moon hung full and low in the south, giving a light as white as upon the table-lands of Mexico, so clear is the atmosphere and free from atmospheric dust. We sat upon the upper deck until late in the night, watching the varying panorama. From the window of my stateroom, lying in my berth, I looked an hour or more while we sailed through Lake Lebarge—five or six miles wide, thirty miles long—hemmed in by lofty, rounded, fir-clad limestone mountains, 4,000 or 5,000 feet in altitude—the full moon illuminating the quiet waters. Only the frequent mocking laugh of the loon echoed on the still night air—there seemed to be hosts of them. Once I heard the melancholy howling of a timber wolf among the shadows of a deep bay. From Lake Lebarge we entered the swift and dangerous currents of Thirty Mile River. Here the boats usually tie up till daylight, but with the full moon and our immense electric searchlight, the captain ventured to go down. Again I sat up watching the foaming waters behind us and how deftly we backed and swung round the many sharp bends:—high mountains quite shutting us in, the foaming waters white and black in the moonlight and shadow. At last, when the mountains seemed higher, blacker, more formidable than ever, we suddenly rounded a precipitous mass of limestone and granite and floated out into an immense pool, while away to the east seemingly joined us another river as large as our own, the Hootalinqua, fetching down the yet greater tides of Lake Teslin, and forming with the Thirty Mile, the true Yukon—though the stream is mapped as the Lewes, until joined by the Pelly, many miles below.
We have now been descending this great river all day long; as wide as the Ohio, but swifter and deeper and always dark blue water. The valley is wide like the Ohio; the bottom lands lying higher above the water and the country rising in successive benches till the horizon is bounded by rounded mountains eight or ten miles away. Mountains green with fir, golden yellow with the aspen and the birch, and red and scarlet with the lutestring herb and lichens of the higher slopes. A magnificent panorama, an immense and unknown land, not yet taken possession of by man! The soil of many of these bottoms is rich, and will yield wonderful crops when tilled. Some distant day, towns and villages will be here. We have seen many loons upon the river, and probably twenty or thirty golden eagles soaring high in mighty circles—more than I have seen in a single day before. We caught sight of a black fox in the twilight last evening, and surprised a red fox hunting mussel shells upon a river bar to-day.