<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII.</h2></div>
<div class="blockquot inhead short">
<p>Lake Athabasca.—Northern Lights.—Chipewyan.—The real
Workers of the World.</p>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">Athabasca,</span> or more correctly “Arabascow,”
“The Meeting-place of many Waters,” is a large
lake. At this fort of Chipewyan we stand near
its western end. Two hundred miles away to
the east, its lonely waters still lave against the
granite rocks.</p>
<p>Whatever may be the work to which he turns
hand or brain, an Indian seldom errs. If he
names a lake or fashions a piece of bark to sail its
waters, both will fit the work for which they were
intended.</p>
<p>“The meeting-place of many waters” tells the
story of Athabasca. In its bosom many rivers
unite their currents; and from its north-western
rim pours the Slave River, the true Mackenzie. Its
first English discoverer called it the “Lake of the
Hills;” a more appropriate title would have been
“The Lake of the Winds,” for fierce and wild the
storms sweep over its waves.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">138</span></p>
<p>Over the Lake Athabasca the Northern Lights
hold their highest revels. They flash, and dance,
and stream, and intermingle, and wave together
their many colours like the shapes and hues of a
kaleidoscope. Sometimes the long columns of
light seem to rest upon the silent, frozen shores,
stretching out their rose-tipped tops to touch the
zenith; again the lines of light traverse the sky
from east to west as a hand might sweep the
chords of some vast harp, and from its touch
would flow light instead of music. So quickly
run the colours along these shafts, that the ear
listens instinctively for sound in the deep stillness
of the frozen solitude; but sound I have never
heard. Many a time I have listened breathless to
catch the faintest whisper of these wondrous
lightnings; they were mute as the waste that
lay around me.</p>
<p>Figures convey but a poor idea of cold, yet they
are the only means we have, and by a comparison
of figures some persons, at least, will understand
the cold of an Athabascan winter. The citadel of
Quebec has the reputation of being a cold winter
residence; its mean temperature for the month of
January is 11° 7´ Fahr. The mean temperature of
the month of January, 1844, at Fort Chipewyan,
was 22° 74´, or nearly 30° colder, and during the
preceding month of December the wind blew with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">139</span>
a total pressure of one thousand one hundred and
sixty pounds to the square foot.</p>
<p>It is perhaps needless to say more about the
rigour of an Athabascan winter.</p>
<p>As it is the “meeting-place of many waters”
so also is it the meeting-place of many systems.
Silurian and Devonian approach it from the
west. Laurentian still holds five-sixths of its
waters in the same grasp as when what is now
Athabasca lay a deep fiord along the ancient ocean
shore. The old rock caught it to his rough heart
then, and when in later ages the fickle waves
which so long had kissed his lips left him stern
and lonely, he still held the clear, cold lake to his
iron bosom.</p>
<p>Athabasca may be said to mark also the limits
of some great divisions of the animal kingdom.
The reindeer and that most curious relic of an
older time, the musk ox, come down near its
north-eastern shores, for there that bleak region
known as the “Barren Grounds” is but a few miles
distant. These animals never pass to the southern
end of the lake; the Cariboo, or reindeer of the
woods, being a distinct species from that which
inhabits the treeless waste. The wood buffalo
and the moose are yet numerous on the north-west
and south-west shores: but of these things
we shall have more to say anon.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">140</span></p>
<p>All through the summer, from early May to mid-October,
the shores of the lake swarm with wild
geese, and the twilight midsummer midnight is
filled with the harsh sounds of the cries of the
snow goose, or the “wavy” flying low over their
favourite waters.</p>
<p>In early days Chipewyan was an important
centre of the fur trade, and in later times it has
been made the starting-point of many of the
exploratory parties to the northern coast. From
Old Fort Chipewyan Mackenzie set forth to
explore the great northern river, and to the same
place he returned when first of all men north of
the 40th parallel he had crossed in the summers of
1792–93 the continent to the Pacific Ocean.</p>
<p>It was from New Fort Chipewyan that Simpson
set out to trace the coast-line of the Arctic
Ocean; and earlier than either, it was from Fond
du Lac, at the eastern end of Fort Athabasca,
that Samuel Hearne wandered forth to reach the
Arctic Sea.</p>
<p>To-day it is useful to recall these stray items of
adventure from the past in which they lie buried.
It has been said by some one that a “nation cannot
be saved by a calculation;” neither can she be
made by one.</p>
<p>If to-day we are what we are, it is because a
thousand men in bygone times did not stop to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">141</span>
count the cost. The decline of a nation differs
from that of an individual in the first symptoms
of its decay. The heart of the nation goes first,
the extremities still remain vigorous. France,
with many a gallant soul striking hard for her in
the Carnatic or in Canada, sickens in the pomp and
luxury of Versailles, and has nothing to offer to
her heroes but forgetfulness, debt, or the rack. Her
colonial history was one long tissue of ingratitude.</p>
<p>Biencourt, De Chastes, Varrene de la Verendrie,
or Lally might fight and toil and die, what cared
the selfish heart of old France? The order of St.
Louis long denied, and 40,000 livres of debt
rewarded the discovery of the Rocky Mountains.
Frenchmen gave to France a continent. France
thought little of the gift, and fate took it back
again. History sometimes repeats itself. There is
a younger if not a greater Britain waiting quietly
to reap the harvest of her mother’s mistakes.</p>
<p>But to Chipewyan. It is emphatically a lonely
spot; in summer the cry of the wild bird keeps
time to the lapping of the wave on the rocky
shore, or the pine islands rustle in the western
breeze; nothing else moves over these 8000 square
miles of crystal water. Now and again at long
intervals the beautiful canoe of a Chipewyan
glides along the bay-indented shores, or crosses
some traverse in the open lake.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">142</span></p>
<p>When Samuel Hearne first looked upon the
“Arabascow,” buffalo were very numerous along
its southern shore, to-day they are scarce; all else
rests as then in untamed desolation. At times
this west end of the lake has been the scene of
strange excitements. Men came from afar and
pitched their tents awhile on these granite shores,
ere they struck deeper into the heart of the great
north. Mackenzie, Franklin, Back, Richardson,
Simpson, Rae, rested here; ere piercing further
into unknown wilds, they flew the red-cross flag
o’er seas and isles upon whose shores no human
foot had pressed a sand-print.</p>
<p>Eight hundred thousand pounds sunk in the
Arctic Sea! will exclaim my calculating friend
behind the national counter; nearly a million gone
for ever! No, head cash-keeper, you are wrong.
That million of money will bear interest higher
than all your little speculations in times not far
remote, and in times lying deep in the misty
future. In hours when life and honour lie at
different sides of the “to do” or “not to do,”
men will go back to times when other men battling
with nature or with man, cast their vote on the
side of honour, and by the white light thrown into
the future from the great dead Past, they will
read their roads where many paths commingle.</p>
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<div id="toclink_143" class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">143</span></p>
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