FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
"On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,
We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,
The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago."
--_Service_.
Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
their own word, "as a bird on the wing," has just succeeded in
extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Misère Bonnet Rouge. Misère
looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
"Merci very," bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.
[Illustration: Fond du Lac]
Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
succulent peanut are alike alien. This _pee-mee_ or oil of bacon is
delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, "I have two
boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
myself." Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.
Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
we leave Fond du Lac.
[Illustration: Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian]
The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
heard the tune. "O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
Mission." Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
That is all "long ago and far away." To-night it is "You know there are
fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
every winter." "The world's record in lying, do you mean?" "No,
running--a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country." "Well,
what makes a day?" "Twelve hours,--that is what I learned at school."
"No: there's twenty-four hours in a day." "Well, a day, _I_ take it, is
as far as you can go without stoppin'--it never gets dark, so how is a
man to know what's a day?"
We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
gooseberries are big enough to make delectable "gooseberry fool." Who
hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?
Early in the morning we start north in the _Primrose_, cross Athabasca
Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
and willows alternate with white spruce (_Picea canadensis_) fully one
hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
run,--this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
we make it in twelve hours.
[Illustration: Smith's Landing]
"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the _Primrose_ Captain.
"Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe
leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free
trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.
We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from
Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
"Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the
river, the paddle pointing to the sky--a cry came over the water, and
that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
dotards dozing in the sun.
At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
Mosquito Portage and we do not.
We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order _Diptera_," "sub-order
_Nemocera_," and chiefly "of the family _Culicidae_," and he also goes
so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the
muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the
female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the
natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant."
We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on "Mosquito" out of some convent
dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
introduced by his friend of the cloth. "Brother Jones will now give an
address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
to you _full of his subject."_
The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
Slave River priest had said to us, "These have not delicate
sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
appreciation of _material things_."
Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
match-head on our face and hands the "bull-dog" contests with the
mosquito. An interesting study is the "bull-dog." He looks like a cross
between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
"long" on the "bull-dog." He told us that his Sunday name was
"_Tabanus_," and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
learn for ourselves by direct contact.
Personally I have very little rancour against the "bull-dog." He looks
worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the "bull-dogs," often jump
over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when _they_
were possessed of devils.
Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, "The
deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs," ruminates audibly,
"Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
resourceful beggars, these Colonials." A literary scientist sending out
copy from the North wrote, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
bull-dogs," which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, "My two
greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs."
Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60° North, the northern boundary
of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
seed, shinleaf (_Pyrola elliptica_), our old friend yarrow, and
golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
kinnikinic-tobacco (_Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)_ with its astringent
leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.
[Illustration: A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing]
[Illustration: Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company]
Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.
At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,--a modern steamship in the
waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, _The Mackenzie River_.
Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
receive them.
The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.
Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy _in esse_, the other
_in posse_. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
is the timber wolf.
[Illustration: The World's Last Buffalo]
Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.
In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
"observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind."
In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.
One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
conclusively prove.
Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it
had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly
afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
the wolf. Archbishop Taché tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle â la Crosse. Thirty days
afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
weary miles.
With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.
More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
age.
In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United
States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.
What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.
What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.
The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
Northern travellers drink boiled tea _au natural_. Cows are the eternal
feminine and will not be explained by logic.
But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
"How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
Isle â la Crosse in latitude 55° 30', about twenty years ago, an
experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary--Burbanks
got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!
We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
ever paid on the London market,--$1700, that it was one of the most
beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
"Of the American silver-fox (_Canis vulpes argentatus_) black skins have
a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
by the nobles."
[Illustration: Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage]
And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very
white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a
phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
difference--!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.
I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
moving an eye-brow.
At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
_(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)_ which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for
Byron to state
"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream
To still her famished nestling's scream."
And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, "We are nurtured
like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.