ey; eons
passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.

Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
development and acceptance--banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
the _inconnu_ and the Indian.

It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before
had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American
Indian."

We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl--gulls in great
variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
banks--the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.

Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hur