and deep violet blue.  The fringed gentian is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63 deg..  Purple asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd’s-purse or mother’s-heart.  Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and purple columbines already forming seed.

Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche Trempe-l’eau or “The Rock by the Riverside,” an outcrop of Devonian limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above the river.  We come into view of the “boucans” or beds of lignite coal which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in 1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires.  At this point of his journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back, for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would come upon him before the period of his return.  He would also encounter monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings.  They added that there were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their eyes.  These Indians told Mackenzie of “small white buffalo” which they hunted to the westward.  Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the Sass-sei-yeuneh or “Foolish Bear” of the Slavis.

[Illustration:  Indians at Fort Norman]

It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes into the Mackenzie.  It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been in more comfortable places at midnight.  However, after running with the current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock.  This is a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.

The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole of its hundred-mile course.  Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water, probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave Lake.  Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and fifty miles.  The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.