42 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



A stranger in the Arctic is met by so many new things 

 on every hand that his impressions are at first confused. 

 Some changes come so gradually that they are not no- 

 ticed; others, while they come suddenly, come so many 

 together that the impression is not clear. 



One of the changes that comes too slowly to be noticed 

 is the gradual disappearance of the night. .When we left 

 the railway at Edmonton, there were fourteen or fifteen 

 hours of daylight. On Slave Lake there were seventeen 

 or eighteen, and not far north of that we reached a point 

 where at midnight there is still a glimmer of light in the 

 northern sky. If we had been traveling with railway rap- 

 idity straight north, the next night down the river would 

 have been bright enough for reading at midnight. But 

 our steamer's speed was only eight or ten miles an hour, 

 which the river current accelerated to twelve or fourteen. 

 Then the Mackenzie runs northwest instead of north, 

 which slows up the advance of the midnight light, and 

 we stopped a day or two at a post every two hundred 

 miles to do the business of the fur trade. I did not no- 

 tice the increasing light enough to make any entries in 

 my diary about it until we came to the head of the Mac- 

 kenzie delta. We had thought we might see the midnight 

 sun there, and all of us were on deck watching for it. 

 ,-The daylight at midnight was as broad as it is in ordinary 

 latitudes five minutes after sundown, but the sun itself 

 was below the northern horizon. Then we stopped at 

 Fort Macpherson long enough so that even on the later 

 journey to Herschel Island the sun did not rise above the 

 horizon, and we never saw it at midnight that year. Still, 

 we had several weeks of such bright light that for all 

 purposes of travel we got along as well as if the sun 

 had been shining all night. 



