[Illustration:  Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian]

The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of ’08.  We ask him where he heard the tune.  “O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the Mission.”  Canned culture even here!  It is light enough to read on the deck at quarter past eleven.  We chunk along through a lake of amethyst and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep.  On the scow astern, sprawled on the season’s output of fur, the men smoke and argue.  In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast about their dogs, and discuss food.  Two kindred souls may hark back to boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.  That is all “long ago and far away.”  To-night it is “You know there are fellows in here who can run like hell.  The world’s record is beaten every winter.”  “The world’s record in lying, do you mean?” “No, running—­a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country.”  “Well, what makes a day?” “Twelve hours,—­that is what I learned at school.”  “No:  there’s twenty-four hours in a day.”  “Well, a day, I take it, is as far as you can go without stoppin’—­it never gets dark, so how is a man to know what’s a day?”

We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada’s national holiday.  For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley, radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter.  Wild gooseberries are big enough to make delectable “gooseberry fool.”  Who hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?

Early in the morning we start north in the Primrose, cross Athabasca Lake, and enter the Rocher River.  Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living.  Poplars and willows alternate with white spruce (Picea canadensis) fully one hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter.  It is an ideal run,—­this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith’s Landing, and we make it in twelve hours.

[Illustration:  Smith’s Landing]

“How did Smith’s Landing get its name?” I ask the Primrose Captain.  “Some ould fish o’ the Hudson’s Bay,” from the tightly-bitten black pipe leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant.  At Smith’s Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort McMurray and the Arctic Ocean.  Between Smith’s Landing