H2 ON SNOW-SHOES TO THE BARREN GROUNDS 



at the Barren Grounds. It is a country where the water- 

 courses are the highways for canoes in summer and 

 snow-shoes in winter. The land is without roads, and 

 stray where you will you may stand on unexplored soil. 

 The river-banks are well timbered, but back of them 

 stretches away, far beyond the Indians' ken, the trackless, 

 uninhabitable muskeg. 



My joy at being out of the cariole was brief, for the 

 pain of my ankle was intensified by the hard' track on 

 which we were running, and the ice was full of cracks and 

 holes, which in darkness are always dangerous to the voy- 

 ageur, and were especially so to me in my crippled condi- 

 tion. We had the coldest weather I experienced before 

 reaching the Barrens, the mercury touching 50 below the 

 second night, and beginning at 42 and going to 48 on 

 the third day. The only relief I had to the monotony of 

 travel was afforded me by Roderick and Maurice in setting 

 fox-traps, and my own experiment with a pair of Norwe- 

 gian snow-shoes (skis), which I had made at Chipewyan, 

 and that I found inferior to the web shoe for travel in this 

 kind of country. 



Although we were, indeed, going along at a pretty lively 

 gait, and quite fast enough for my physical condition, my 

 mental half chafed at the pace, and was impatient to reach 

 Fort Smith. My eyes had been on this post ever since 1 

 left the railroad. It seemed the Mecca of my trip, for 

 there lived James McKinley, the only man who could 

 give me any information of the Barren Grounds, as he not 

 only had been stationed at Great Slave Lake, but made a 

 summer trip to that land of desolation with Warburton 

 Pike. But the way was hard and the long stretches of 

 river disheartening. It is an interesting fact that I always 

 found I travelled easier where the river was tortuous, for, 

 though knowing the distance to be none the less, the 



