52 



EXPLORATIONS IN THE FAR NORTH 



other denied having buck fever but acknowledged being a 

 little "nervous." At all events, when the smoke cleared away, 

 the moose were still uninjured. We were swept some distance 

 down stream before we could make fast to the broken and 

 dangerous ice. Running back along shore, we cautiously 

 approached the spot where the moose were last seen, but they 

 had disappeared. We were about to turn back, thinking they 

 had entered the woods, when the ears of one of the animals 

 were seen above a hummock in the midst of the tumbled mass 

 of ice blocks, slush and mud. The ice had given way beneath 

 them and both moose were floundering in pits too deep to 

 admit of escape. We were without fresh meat and quite will- 

 ing to kill one, but it was only after every effort to rescue the 

 other had failed that it, too, was slaughtered. Unfortunately, 

 the skins were worthless as specimens at that season. After an 

 hour's hard work, the bodies were dragged out and rolled into 

 the river to be picked up by the boat below. 



We encamped a short distance from the rapids upon a steep 

 hillside and passed an uncomfortable night on sloping ground, 

 with everything soaked by the water trickling from the banks 

 of melting snow above us. The boys feasted until a late hour 

 upon choice morsels of moose meat. " Lixie," one of the Crees, 

 declared it to be "bacon breakfast;" these were the only Eng- 

 lish words that I ever heard him use. They probably seemed 

 to him to express the highest praise. 



We ate our breakfast in the morning before embarking — no 

 floating there — and pulled across to the eastern bank to inspect 

 the channel, which it was feared would be obstructed with ice. 

 The portage is made across an island, four or five hundred 

 yards in length, lying in the middle of the stream. The steam- 

 boat landing is a mile above on the right bank, whence the 

 goods are taken in boats through a crooked channel blasted 

 through the huge nodular sandstone boulders to the head of 

 the island. A dilapidated wooden tramway extends across the 

 island, at the foot of which the rapids are still so strong that 

 the sturgeon-head boats of the "Athabasca Transport" have to 

 be dragged through with a line. The free traders carry their 

 goods along the east bank and lower their boats with a line 

 through the rapids, a descent of sixty feet. 



Pushing off again, we were soon in the grasp of the swiftly 



