I 

 AT THE FRONTIER 



FAR to the northwest, beginning ten days' journey be- 

 yond Great Slave Lake and running down to the Arctic 

 Ocean, with Hudson's Bay as its eastern and Great Bear 

 Lake and the Coppermine River as its western boundaries, 

 dies the most complete and extended desolation on earth. 

 That is the Barren Grounds, the land whose approximate 

 350,000 square miles (for its exact area is unknown) is the 

 dwelling-place of no man, and whose storms and sterility 

 in its most northerly part are withstood the year round by 

 no living creature save the musk-ox. There is the timber- 

 less waste where ice-laden blasts blow with hurricane and 

 ceaseless fury that bid your blood stand still and your 

 breath come and go in painful stinging gasps ; where rock 

 and lichen and moss replace soil and trees and herbage ; 

 and where death by starvation or freezing dogs the foot- 

 steps of the explorer. 



There are two seasons and only two methods of pene- 

 trating this great lone land of the North by canoe, when 

 the watercourses are free of ice, and on snow-shoes during 

 the frozen period, which occupies nearly nine of the year's 

 twelve months. The deadly cold of winter, and greater 



