Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame.  In winter she goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.  Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies’ seminary in Europe or America.  She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the fashion for the whole North in chef d’oeuvres of the quills of the porcupine.  She is a most observant “old wife.”  Watching, fascinated, the lightning play of the machine, “Much hard that, I think, harder than bead-work, eh?” Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to find out how the dickens when you strike capital “A” at one end of the keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small “o” at the other end.  There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.

[Illustration:  Starting up the Athabasca]

We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca.  It will be a tiresome enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the shore, now on land, now splashing in the water.  The party will have the mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we dropped down in little over a week.  We send letters home, and with hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and the rest.

[Illustration:  On the Clearwater]

Our way back on the Grahame to Chipewyan is not without adventure.  At three o’clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!  There is no swearing, no shouting of orders.  The deck-hands from long experience know exactly what to do.  The engines are reversed and, in their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the familiar “Wuh!  Wey!” But it is no go.  The sun sinks behind the bank, over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast.  The drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is removed.  The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own boot-straps.

We have head-winds all the way.  At four o’clock on the morning of August 14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.  We tie up at the base of some splendid timber.  Spruce here will give three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground.  With an improvised tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big poplars (rough-backed).  The first ran seven feet three inches, the second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches.  Within view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.