We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley, radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild gooseberries are big enough to make delectable "gooseberry fool." Who hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?
Early in the morning we start north in the _Primrose_, cross Athabasca Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars and willows alternate with white spruce (_Picea canadensis_) fully one hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal run,--this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and we make it in twelve hours.
"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the _Primrose_ Captain. "Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.
We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the "Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the river, the paddle pointing to the sky--a cry came over the water, and that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves dotards dozing in the sun.