in the Cree syllabic--Baseball even
here--Rain and reminiscences--The World's Oldest Trust

CHAPTER IV

DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS

"Farewell, Nistow!"--The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a
tarpaulin--Drifting by starlight--The wild geese overhead--Forty-foot
gas-spout at the Pelican--The mosquito makes us blood-brothers--Four
days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
Athabasca--Nomenclature of the North--Sentinels of the Silence

CHAPTER V

NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS

The _Go-Quick-Her_ takes the bit in her mouth--Mallards on the
half-shell--We set the Athabascan Thames afire--Sturgeon-head breaks her
back on the Big Cascade--Fort McMurray--A stranded argosy, wreckage on
the beach--Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader--A land flowing with
coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime

CHAPTER VI

FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT

Old Fort Chipewyan--In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
Franklin--Sir John turns parson--Grey Nuns and brown babies--Where grew
the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial--Militant missionaries
fight each other for souls--The strong man Loutit--Wyllie at the
forge--An electric watch-maker--Where the Gambel sparrow builds--"Out of
old books"

CHAPTER VII

LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC

Farewell to the Mounted Police--Our blankets on the deck--Fern odours by
untravelled ways--Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
daylight--Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man--A 23-inch
trout--First white women at Fond du Lac--Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
Fond du Lac library--The hermit padre and the hermit thrush--Worn north
trails of the trapper--Caribou by the hundred thousands--The phalarope
and the suffragette

CHAPTER VIII

FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH

World's records beaten on the Athabasca--Down the Slave to Smith's
Landing--Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned--The Mosquito
Portage--Fort Smith, the new headquarters--Lady-slippers and
night-hawks--Steamer built in the wilderness--Last stand of the wood
bison--The grey wolf persists--Fur-trade and the silver-fox--Breeding
pelicans.

CHAPTER IX

SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE

"Red lemol-lade" kiddies--Tons of crystal salt--Great Slave Lake and its
fertile shores--Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
Edward--Hay River and its annual mail--Ploughing with dogs--Bill
balked--The Alexandra Falls--Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputatio