OF THE POLAR SEA. 



339 



of pounded meat, which they had intended for us, they had left it 

 upon the Bear-Lake Portage. They promised, however, to get it 

 conveyed to the banks of this river before we could return, and we 

 rewarded them with a present of knives and files. 



After re-embarking we continued to descend the river, which was 

 now contracted between lofty banks to about one hundred and 

 twenty yards wide ; the current was very strong. At eleven we 

 came to a rapid, which had been the theme of discourse with the 

 Indians for many days, and which they had described to us as im- 

 passable in canoes. The river here descends, for three quarters of a 

 mile, in a deep, but narrow and crooked, channel, which it has cut 

 through the foot of a hill of five hundred or six hundred feet high. 

 It is confined between perpendicular cliffs resembling stone walls, 

 varying in height from eighty to one hundred and fifty feet, on 

 which lies a mass of fine sand. The body of the river, pent within 

 this narrow chasm, dashed furiously round the projecting rocky 

 columns, and discharged itself at the northern extremity in a sheet 

 of foam. The canoes, after discharging part of their cargoes, ran 

 through this defile without sustaining any injury. Accurate sketches 

 of this interesting scene were taken by Messrs. Back and Hood. 

 Soon after passing this rapid, we perceived the hunters running up the 

 east side of the river, to prevent us from disturbing a herd of musk 

 oxen, which they had observed grazing on the opposite bank ; we 

 put them across, and they succeeded in killing six, upon which we 

 encamped for the purpose of drying the meat. The country below 

 the rocky defile rapid consists of sandy plains, broken by small 

 conical eminences also of sand; and bounded to the westward by 

 a continuation of the mountain chain, which we had crossed at 

 the Bear-Lake Portage ; and to the eastward and northward, at 

 the distance of twelve miles, by the Copper Mountains which 

 Mr. Hearne visited. The plains are crowned by several clumps of 

 moderately large spruces, about thirty feet high. 



