We search for an hour or more with
grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
us--the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the
Mackenzie, goes out with the current.
The Mackenzie River, "La Grande Riviere en Bas," as the people of
Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
to two and a half to three miles.
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