Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of roaring water dangerous enough looking.  We have learned ere this, however, to sit tight and watch for events.  The careless Indians have straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut, every sense alert.  Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the others stand at the oars.  Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to the island and we step out with relief.  The other boats follow and anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst rapids of the Athabascan chain.  The current on the west side of the dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.

[Illustration:  Portage at Grand Rapids Island]

The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which we enjoyed.  Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,—­vetches, woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of false Solomon’s seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and, treasure-trove, our first anemone,—­that beautiful buttercup springing from its silvered sheath—­

“And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows.”

I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising amid last year’s prostrate growth.

[Illustration:  Our transport at Grand Rapids Island]

At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.  It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds from Lac la Biche.  Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy for.  A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.

[Illustration:  Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island]

In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets.  The hum of the foiled mosquito is unction to our souls.  It is a relief, too, to remove the day’s clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.

The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,—­soft, yellowish, homogeneous.  In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of ninety feet.  The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones.  The river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe.  The sandstone banks opposite the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel.  Sections of fossil trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one’s great wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this strange page of history in stone.