I have already hinted at those masterpieces of voracity for which the region is renowned; yet the undoubted facts related around our camp-fires, and otherwise, a few of which follow, almost beggar belief.  Mr. Young, of our party, an old Hudson’s Bay officer, knew of sixteen trackers who, in a few days, consumed eight bears, two moose, two bags of pemmican, two sacks of flour, and three sacks of potatoes.  Bishop Grouard vouched for four men eating a reindeer at a sitting.  Our friend, Mr. d’Eschambault, once gave Oskinnequ—­“The Young Man”—­six pounds of pemmican, who ate it all at a meal, washing it down with a gallon of tea, and then complained that he had not had enough.  Sir George Simpson states that at Athabasca Lake, in 1820, he was one of a party of twelve who ate twenty-two geese and three ducks at a single meal.  But, as he says, they had been three whole days without food.  The Saskatchewan folk, however, known of old as the Gens de Blaireaux—­“The People of the Badger Holes”—­were not behind their congeners.  That man of weight and might, our old friend, Chief-factor Belanger—­drowned, alas, many years ago with young Simpson at Sea Falls—­once served out to thirteen men a sack of pemmican weighing ninety pounds.  It was enough for three days; but, there and then, they sat down and consumed it all at a single meal, not, it must be added, without some subsequent and just pangs of indigestion.  Mr. B. having occasion to pass the place of eating, and finding the sack of pemmican, as he supposed, in his path, gave it a kick; but, to his amazement, it bounded aloft several yards, and then lit.  It was empty!  When it is remembered that, in the old buffalo days, the daily ration per head at the Company’s prairie posts was eight pounds of fresh meat, which was all eaten, its equivalent being two pounds of pemmican, the enormity of this Gargantuan feast may be imagined.  But we ourselves were not bad hands at the trencher.  In fact, we were always hungry.  So I do not reproduce the foregoing facts as a reproach, but rather as a meagre tribute to the prowess of the great of old—­the men of unbounded stomach!

On the afternoon of the 4th we rounded Point Providence, the soil exposures sandy, the timber dense but slender, and early next morning reached the Quatre Fourches, which was at that time flowing into Lake Athabasca.  It is simply a waterway of some thirty miles in length, which connects Peace River with the lake, and resembles, in size and colour, Red River in Manitoba.  It is one of “the rivers that turn”—­so called from their reversing their current at different stages of water.  A small stream of this kind connects the South Saskatchewan with the Qu’Appelle, and another, a navigable river, the Lower Saskatchewan with Cumberland Lake.  The Quatre Fourches is thus both an inlet and an outlet, but not of the lake in a right sense.  The real outlet is the Rocher River, which joins the Peace River at the intersection of latitude 59 with the 111.30th degree of longitude, beyond which the united streams are called the Great Slave River.