" He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
whisper, but its burden is ever the same.
"Something lost behind the Ranges,
Lost and waiting for you: Go!"
No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond
the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
stand.
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