By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to leave.  We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still the stuff makes a rather formidable array.  What have we?  Tent, tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding (a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or “Hudson’s Bay suit-case” (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap—­and last, but yet first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.  The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory, but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.

[Illustration:  The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan]

At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains—­no gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer!  The accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once.  Expansive Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel.  His Majesty’s Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other victims.  We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean.  Every passenger but ourselves looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent places.  We alone are going for fun.  Our one care is to keep those precious cameras dry.  This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.

And the fellow-passengers?  Law is represented, and medicine, and the all-powerful H.B.  Co.  With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie River District, and with him two cadets of The Company.  On the seat behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and a third passenger complaining of a camera “which cost fifty pounds sterling” that somehow has fallen by the way.  Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.

Kennedy, the driver, is a character.  Driving in and out and covering on this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked with stories of the North and Northmen.  The other stage is driven by Kennedy’s son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man.  Dwarfed in mind and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.

The roads are a quagmire.  The querulous voice of the man who lost his camera claims our attention.  “I thought I would be able to get out and run behind and pick flowers.”  Turning and introducing ourselves, we find the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic Circle.