reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.

It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,--the Ramparts. The
great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows,
maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
cliffs above.

As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
envelopes the earth as with a garment,--the light that never was on sea
or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
pass the portal into the Arctic World.

[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]

A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
steamer they cry out th