Yet in this inhospitable region numerous herds of
reindeer, musk-oxen, and other mammalia find subsistence during the
brief summer, as do partridge and numerous birds of various species.

Here the Esquimaux lives in his skin-tent during the warmer months, and
in his snow-hut in winter, existing on the seals which he catches with
his harpoon, the whales occasionally cast on shore, and the bears, deer,
and smaller animals he entraps.

The numerous rivers flowing from the mountain-ridges mostly make their
way northward. The Mackenzie, the largest and most western, rising in
the Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, falls, after a course of many
hundred miles, into the Polar Sea. The Coppermine River, rising in
Point Lake, makes its course in the same direction; while eastward, the
great Fish or Back River, flowing from the same lake as the first
mentioned stream, reaches the ocean many hundred miles away from it, at
the lower extremity of Bathurst Islet. It runs rapidly in a tortuous
course of 530 geographical miles through an iron-ribbed country, without
a single tree on the whole line of its banks, expanding here and there
into five large lakes, and broken by thirty-three falls, cascades, and
rapids ere it reaches the Polar Sea. Not far from its mouth rises the
barren rocky height of Cape Beaufort.

It was down this stream that Captain Back, the Arctic explorer, made his
way, but was compelled to return on account of the inclemency of the
weather and the difficulty of finding fuel; the only vegetation which he
could discover being fern and moss, which was so wet that it would not
burn, while he was almost without fire, or any means of obtaining
warmth, his men sinking knee-deep as they proceeded on shore in the soft
slush and snow, which benumbed their limbs and dispirited them in the
extreme. Through this country the unhappy remnant of the Franklin
expedition, many years later, perished in their attempt to reach the
Hudson Bay Company's territory. Here, in winter, the thermometer sinks
70 degrees below zero. Even within his hut, when he had succeeded in
lighting a fire, Back could not get it higher than 12 degrees below
zero. Ink and paint froze. The sextant cases, and boxes of seasoned
wood--principally fir--all split; the skin of the hands became dried,
cracked, and opened into unsightly and smarting gashes; and on one
occasion, after washing his hands and face within three feet of the
fire, his hair was actu