218 On the trail of vanishing birds 



camp site on the Little Buffalo, except for the canoe, outboard 

 motor, and gas cans which we left for morning. We sat around 

 under a tarpaulin through a sudden hailstorm that covered the 

 ground with hailstones the size of marbles, and then set up our 

 tent and began supper. When we made the first portage into camp 

 we saw a large black bear across the river. He disappeared among 

 the trees, but when we came back with the next load, there he 

 was, standing on the bank as if about to plunge in and join us 

 on our side. Not wanting a camp robber on our hands so early in 

 the game, we yelled at him in unfriendly tones and ran him off. 



Beaver were plentiful, and that night we roused many times to 

 hear them playfully slapping the surface of the river with their 

 broad tails. It was a cold night with a film of ice forming on water 

 left standing in cups and cooking pots. But it was not cold enough 

 to discourage the chorus of singing and calling birds hermit and 

 olive-backed thrushes, robins, warblers (especially the abundant 

 Tennessee), and from a greater distance, the voices of geese, 

 swans, and brown cranes. 



The next day, May 25, we made the mouth of the Sass River 

 (Sass is the Chipewyan word for bear), and, with considerable 

 excitement, began the ascent. Around the first oxbow we ran into 

 a small log jam, cutting our way through in twenty minutes. Two 

 minutes later we were up against a second, and larger, jam. Going 

 ashore we scouted the riverbank upstream. Immediately beyond 

 the second jam there was a third, still larger. Somewhat dismayed 

 we went back downstream to the Little Buffalo and made camp. 

 In the morning, Ray and I, in an empty canoe, and armed with 

 axes and a big saw, returned to jam number two. When, by dint 

 of a little ax work, we had cut it loose, the entire mass of logs 

 and trees moved off in the very considerable current and started a 

 new jam below us! This was a natural but totally unexpected de- 

 velopment. The Sass is deep and narrow, with an unbroken series 

 of bends and oxbows from source to mouth. At that early date the 

 water was still high, and consequently quite swift. From what we 

 had seen of it there are almost no straight courses and few bends 

 that are free of logs. There might be several hundred oxbows 

 and almost as many log jams, from obstructions that consist of a 



