130 THKOUGH THE MACKENZIE BASEST 



horrible banquet, and there took his own life. Having 

 rowed across the river for better tracking, as we crawled 

 painfully along, the melancholy Point with its lonely graves, 

 deserted cabins and cannibal legend receded into eerie dis- 

 tance and wrapped itself once more in congenial solitude. 



The men continued tracking until ten a.m., much of the 

 time wading along banks heavily overhung with alders, or 

 along high, sheer walls of rock, up to the armpits in the 

 swift current. The country passed through was one. giant 

 mass of forest, pine and poplar, resting generally upon 

 loamy clay — a good agricultural country in the main,, 

 similar to many parts of Ontario when a wilderness. 



We camped at the Joli Fou Rapids, having only made 

 about fifteen miles. It was a beautiful spot, a pebbly shore, 

 with fine open forest behind, evidently a favourite camp- 

 ing-place in winter. ~Sext morning the trackers, having 

 recrossed for better footing, got into a swale of the worst 

 kind, which hampered them greatly, as the swift river was 

 now at its height and covered with gnarled driftwood. 



The foliage here and there showed signs of change, some 

 poplars yellowing already along the immediate banks, and 

 the familiar scent of autumn was in the air. In a word, 

 the change so familiar in Manitoba in August had taken 

 place here, to be followed by a balmy September and the 

 fine fall weather of the North, said to surpass that of the 

 East in mildness by day, though perhaps sharper by night. 

 We were now but a few miles from the last obstruction, the 

 Pelican Rapids, and pushed on in the morning along banks 

 of a coal-like blackness, loose and friable, with thin cracks 

 and fissures running in all directions, the forest behind 

 being the usual mixture of spruce and poplar. By mid- 

 day we were at the rapids, by no means formidable, but 

 with a ticklish place or two, and got to Pelican Portage in 

 the evening, where were several shanties and a Hudson's 

 Bay freighting station. Here, too, is a well which was sunk 

 for petroleum, but which struck gas instead, blowing up 



