It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights.  At seven o’clock we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being shouted from boat to boat.  Then, in one voice from three boats, “Mooswa!” and far beyond white man’s vision the boatmen sight a moose.  There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay the moose wandered into pleasant pastures.  The boatmen were very much disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that his world offers the Indian.  From here to the Arctic are no domestic animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown, bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion “bannockburn"), and coffee is a beverage discredited.  Tobacco to smoke, strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,—­this is luxury’s lap.

The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small runway makes in, “Gon-sta-wa-bit” (man who was drowned), he volunteers.  Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man, his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this spring,—­three in one grave, Lamartine’s trinity, the Father, the Mother, and the Child.

It is Sunday, and we have music from a li’l fiddle made by a squaw at Lac Ste. Anne.  Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden’s place, and then Red Mud.  Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all night.  Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I draw up a canvas sheet.  But it is too wonderful a night to sleep.  Lying flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up and pluck them.  Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the shadow of the cut-banks.  At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these human cocoons.  The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant blood—­the “unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go.”  It is the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it.  In imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to his long, sky-clinging V.

Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North holds so many scientific men and finished scholars—­colonial Esaus serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers.  The not knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new places and untrod ways,—­who would exchange all this for the easy ways of fatted civilization!