This was the name given to the divided roots of the spruce fir, which the natives wove into a degree of compactness that rendered it capable of containing a fluid.  Watape fibre was also used to sew together different parts of the bark canoes.  They also made fibre or thread from willow bark.  Their cooking vessels made of this watape not only contained water, but water which was made to boil by putting a succession of hot stones into it.  It would, of course, be impossible to place these vessels of fibre on a fire, and apparently none of the Amerindians of temperate North America knew anything about pottery.  Those that were in some degree in touch with the Eskimo used kettles or cauldrons of stone.  Elsewhere the vessels for boiling water and cooking were made of bark or fibre, and the water therein was made to boil by the dropping in of red-hot stones.  The arrows of these Slave Indians were two and a half feet long, and the barb was made of bone, horn, flint, or copper.  Iron had been quite lately introduced, indirectly obtained from the Russians in Alaska.  Their spears were pointed with barbed bone, and their daggers were made of horn or bone.  Their great club, the pogamagan, was made of a reindeer’s antler.  Axes were manufactured out of a piece of brown or grey stone, six to eight inches long and two inches thick.  They kindled fire by striking together a piece of iron pyrites and touchwood, and never travelled without a small bag containing such materials.

The Amerindians along the lower Mackenzie had heard vague and terrible legends about the Russians, far, far away on the coast of Alaska; they were represented as beings of gigantic stature, and adorned with wings; which, however, they never employed in flying (possibly the sails of their ships).  They fed on large birds, and killed them with the greatest ease.  They also possessed the extraordinary power of killing with their eyes (no doubt putting up a gun to aim), and they travelled in canoes of very large dimensions.

[Illustration:  BIG-HORNED SHEEP OF ROCKY MOUNTAINS]

“I engaged one of these Indians,” writes Mackenzie, “by a bribe of some beads, to describe the surrounding country upon the sand.  This singular map he immediately undertook to delineate, and accordingly traced out a very long point of land between the rivers ... which he represented as running into the great lake, at the extremity of which he had been told by Indians of other nations there was a white man’s fort.”  The same people described plainly the Yukon River westward of the mountains, and told Mackenzie it was a far greater stream than the one he was exploring.  This was the first “hint” of the existence of the great Alaskan river which was ever recorded.  They also spoke to Mackenzie of “small white buffaloes” (?the mountain goat), which they found in the mountains west of the Mackenzie.

Whenever and wherever Mackenzie’s party met these northernmost tribes of Athapascan Indians they were always ready to dance in between short spells of talking.  This dancing and jumping was their only amusement, and in it old and young, male and female, went to such exertions that their strength was exhausted.  As they jumped up and down they imitated the various noises produced by the reindeer, the bear, and the wolf.