ur_ calling himself and his brown-faced, smoke-dried,
weather-worn companions, by the title of white people; but Lawrence
referred to the natural colour of the race to which he belonged.

"They do seem rather koorious," observed Reuben, as one of the Indians
timidly touched his arm and looked wonderingly up into his blue eyes.

It was found, however, that these natives had heard of white people,
though they had not seen them; moreover, they displayed a number of
knives and iron implements which they said had been procured from people
inhabiting the banks of a river which might be reached over a
carrying-place of "eleven days in length," and which river flowed in an
_opposite direction_ from the Peace River. These people, they said,
travelled during a moon to get to the country of another tribe who dwelt
in houses, and these again extended their journeys to the sea, or, as
they called it, the "Stinking Lake," where they exchanged their furs
with white people, like our pioneers, who came to the coast of that lake
in canoes as big as islands!

Here, then, at last, was definite information, and the enterprising
discoverer was not long in availing himself of it. After gratifying his
new friends with sundry little gifts, a feed of pemmican, which they
relished amazingly, and a taste of sugar to tickle their palates, he
gained their confidence so much as to induce one of them to be his
guide, and immediately pushed forward.

In the course of the following week they gained the much-longed-for
height of land, and found two lakelets within a quarter of a mile of
each other, from one of which the waters find their way through Peace
River, on the east side of the mountains, into the Arctic Sea, while
from the other the waters flow south and west through the great River
Columbia to the Pacific Ocean.

But the succession of disasters that befell them here, and the
difficulties of the route--for it could not be called navigation--threw
all their previous experiences into the shade. One day, having made a
portage, they relaunched the canoe and began the well-nigh forgotten
process of _descending_ stream. They had not gone far when they struck
a rock and were driven down sideways with great violence, Mackenzie,
followed by his men, jumped into the shallow to turn the canoe straight,
but in a moment the water deepened and they had to scramble inboard
again hurriedly. Swiftarrow by some mischance was left behind to
struggle on s