the whole party almost past bearance.  The leaders of the expedition and their Indian hunter had to be busily engaged (the Indian women also) in hunting and fishing in order to get food for the support of the party, who seemed to have had little reserve provisions with them.  Pemmican was made of fish dried in the sun and rubbed to powder.  Swans, geese, cranes, and ducks fell to the guns; an occasional beaver was also added to the pot.  When they reached the Great Slave Lake they found its islands—­notwithstanding their barren appearance—­covered with bushes producing a great variety of palatable fruits—­cranberries, juniper berries, raspberries, partridge berries, gooseberries, and the “pathogomenan”, a fruit like a raspberry.

Slave Lake, however, was still, in mid-June, under the spell of winter, its surface obstructed with drifting ice.  In attempting to cross the lake the frail birch-bark canoes ran a great risk of being crushed between the ice floes.  However, at length, after halting at several islands and leaving Le Roux to go to the trading station he had founded on the shores of Slave Lake, Mackenzie and his two canoes found their way to the river outlet of Slave Lake, that river which was henceforth to be called by his name.  Great mountains approached near to the west of their course.  They appeared to be sprinkled with white stones, called by the natives “spirit stones”—­indeed over a great part of North America the Rocky Mountains were called “the Mountains of Bright Stones”—­yet these brilliant patches were nothing more wonderful than unmelted snow.

A few days later the party encountered Amerindians of the Slave and Dog-rib tribes, who were so aloof from even “Indian” civilization that they did not know the use of tobacco, and were still in the Stone Age as regards their weapons and implements.  These people, though they furnished a guide, foretold disaster and famine to the expedition, and greatly exaggerated the obstacles which would be met with—­rapids near the entrance of the tributary from Great Bear Lake—­before the salt water was reached.

The canoes of these Slave and Dog-rib tribes of the Athapaskan (Tinne) group were covered, not with birch bark, but with the bark of the spruce fir.

The lodges of the Slave Indians were of very simple structure:  a few poles supported by a fork and forming a semicircle at the bottom, with some branches or a piece of bark as a covering.  They built two of these huts facing each other, and made a fire between them.  The furniture consisted of a few dishes of wood, bark, or horn.  The vessels in which they cooked their victuals were in the shape of a gourd, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and made of watape.