Northward from the Landing, for two thousand miles, reached the domain of the rivermen.  And the Landing, with its two hundred and twenty-seven souls before the railroad came, was the wilderness clearing-house which sat at the beginning of things.  To it came from the south all the freight which must go into the north; on its flat river front were built the great scows which carried this freight to the end of the earth.  It was from the Landing that the greatest of all river brigades set forth upon their long adventures, and it was back to the Landing, perhaps a year or more later, that still smaller scows and huge canoes brought as the price of exchange their cargoes of furs.

Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their great sweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone down the river toward the Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their still wilder crews, had come up the river toward civilization.  The River, as the Landing speaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its headwaters away off in the British Columbian mountains, where Baptiste and McLeod, explorers of old, gave up their lives to find where the cradle of it lay.  And it sweeps past the Landing, a slow and mighty giant, unswervingly on its way to the northern sea.  With it the river brigades set forth.  For Pierre and Henri and Jacques it is going from one end to the other of the earth.  The Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and the Slave empties into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of that Lake the Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.

In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears many things.  It is life.  It is adventure.  It is mystery and romance and hazard.  Its tales are so many that books could not hold them.  In the faces of men and women they are written.  They lie buried in graves so old that the forest trees grow over them.  Epics of tragedy, of love, of the fight to live!  And as one goes farther north, and still farther, just so do the stories of things that have happened change.

For the world is changing, the sun is changing, and the breeds of men are changing.  At the Landing in July there are seventeen hours of sunlight; at Fort Chippewyan there are eighteen; at Fort Resolution, Fort Simpson, and Fort Providence there are nineteen; at the Great Bear twenty-one, and at Fort McPherson, close to the polar sea, from twenty-two to twenty-three.  And in December there are also these hours of darkness.  With light and darkness men change, women change, and life changes.  And Pierre and Henri and Jacques meet them all, but always they are the same, chanting the old songs, enshrining the old loves, dreaming the same dreams, and worshiping always the same gods.  They meet a thousand perils with eyes that glisten with the love of adventure.