and Fort Smith the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total drop of two hundred and forty feet.  Until within a few years every ounce of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges.  The “free trader” still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the H.B.  Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.

We land on the heels of a tragedy.  Some days before, in this surging swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe.  The older man had been in the North for years and was “going out,” the other had come from Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the beauties of the rapids.  In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the “Rapid of the Drowned,” and canoe and men went down.  An old Indian woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, “One arm lifted out of the river, the paddle pointing to the sky—­a cry came over the water, and that was all.”  Our thought jumps to that peasant’s home in far France where the mother waits and wearies for news from America.  We see the unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that remote land where devotion and duty had called her son.  We wonder who wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves dotards dozing in the sun.

At Smith’s Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones, among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a winter’s study.  Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates, R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass tacks.  With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as coadjutor.  Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck, an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn’t rushed since.  Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants.  He can afford to take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the Mosquito Portage and we do not.

We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca.  The Athabasca mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith’s Portage.  Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the mosquito.  He tells us that they are “of the order Diptera,” “sub-order Nemocera,” and chiefly “of the family Culicidae,” and he also goes so far as to tell us that they “annoy man.”  As we bump along in the muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert that “the