It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution just twenty-four hours before.  Finishing his turn at stoking, he had gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen, carrying the hatch with him.  At first we think nothing of the incident, as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him.  As soon as the startled people realise what has happened the steamer’s engines are reversed and a boat is lowered.  We call out to De-deed to swim to the buoy, but he doesn’t see it or doesn’t understand.  The black head gets smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again.  Down it goes for the second time.  A strange, constricted feeling comes into our throats as we cry out, “Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming!  They are almost up to you!” The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but a dozen yards away.  Will he hold up?  As we look, the head sinks, and it does not come up.  Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time.  We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again.  A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—­the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well.  It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the “Little Lake” of the Mackenzie, goes out with the current.

The Mackenzie River, “La Grande Riviere en Bas,” as the people of Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth’s great rivers the one least traversed by man.  Counting back from the headwaters of either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles.  At Little Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion of fifty miles.  The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep to two and a half to three miles.

From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as “The Head of the Line.”  Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie, when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars.  The plains bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with muskeg and lakes.  The statistician on board works out that the volume of water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.  No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for commercial and economic purposes.  There is surely enough “white coal” rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent.  The Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.  The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main river through passes in that range.