68 ARRIVAL AT THE COAST 



and simply consisted in the pounding up with an axe of a couple 

 of pounds of buffalo pemmican, which, after receiving an addition 

 of water and a sprinkling of flour, was placed in a frying pan and 

 heated. This mixture, together with tea and bread, was our daily 

 food during the whole journey to McLeod's Lake and, though 

 very uninviting to a tyro, is the strongest food and the best for 

 the traveller. One great advantage of pemmican is its portability. 

 It can be compressed into very small bulk, a bag, containing one 

 hundred pounds net weight, measures but three feet in length by 

 about ten inches in width, and will serve four men over a month. 

 My mode of eating it was to receive my portion while it was hot 

 and eat it up at once. I never took a second helping! 



For the next few days, we had very bad weather. It was 

 raining most of the time, but on the sixth of September the morn- 

 ing broke bright and clear and we packed up and were off in a 

 short time and reached the Athabasca in the afternoon of the next 

 day. When we arrived there we found that the two clerks from 

 Edmonton were then starting for Little Slave Lake and going 

 down the Athabasca. We crossed the river to the Fort and Mr. 

 Calder, who had charge, said that his son William could guide us 

 across the barren ground to Little Slave Lake, as he had crossed 

 that way with a cow six years before. Here, Thomas, the lazy 

 half-breed, was dismissed and William remained with us until 

 we went to McLeod's Lake. 



For the next ten days, we were passing through a country that 

 was almost impassable, swamps and marshes and difficulties of 

 all kinds, and the following quotation from Horetzky's book will 

 show what we went through. "For nearly the entire distance the 

 trail was hardly discernable. Our animals mired at every swamp 

 we came to and these were by no means a rare occurrence, 

 the Botanist, having counted twenty-seven separate and distinct 

 ones during the course of but one day's travel. We seemed dur- 

 ing these nine days to have experienced all the misfortunes inci- 

 dental to pack-train travelling. One of our horses was impaled 

 on a sharp stump and almost bled to death. Our provisions got 

 materially damaged and, to crown all, the weather, which had 

 been so propitious during our journey over the plains, seemed now 



