ii 4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



amount of experience can find his way about better than 

 an Indian. 



However, it is difficult to shake off the ideas we have 

 held for a lifetime, and when on the third day of travel 

 through the Mackenzie delta, Roxy and Sitsak stopped 

 frequently to climb upon little hummocks and look around 

 and talk with each other, I did not guess what it was all 

 about. Finally I asked Roxy and he told me that "may- 

 be they were lost." Little by little the doubt on this 

 point was removed. They were lost sure enough. For 

 two days we wandered aimlessly up one river channel 

 and down another, never finding out exactly where we 

 were until the morning of the third day when we came 

 upon a sled trail and soon after that a camp site. This 

 was our old trail and our own camp of two days before. 

 We had been traveling in various curves among the is- 

 lands and had finally happened upon our own trail. Roxy 

 and Sitsak now agreed that at the time when we made this 

 camp we had not yet been lost and that we must have 

 lost the way a little beyond that. We watched carefully, 

 accordingly, and sure enough after following our old trail 

 four or five miles we came to a point where it turned to 

 one side and where it should have turned to the other. 



A river delta is the easiest of all places in which to 

 lose your way. A little farther south the Mackenzie delta 

 is thickly forested with spruce but, where we were, the 

 islands were all covered with willow. The spruce islands 

 can be traversed by sled, although with difficulty, but the 

 willow islands are impassable, for the vegetation is so 

 tangled that even in summer it is almost impossible to 

 force your way through. The shrubbery commonly varies 

 in height from four to eight feet. In winter this brush 

 retains and holds up such masses of soft snow that there 



