C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

~ La Pierre HouseThe doctor's verdict on Gwen's strained foot had lifted a load ofanxiety from our minds, for ever since that morning after leaving FortProvidence, when she could not set foot to the ground, we had both been fllledwith secret gloom. Now, at Aklavik, we only had to exercise patience for two weeksand all should be well. That first day, however, when I discussed the details of ourjourney with the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company store, Mr Parsons, adark cloud appeared on our horizon. From the safety of our armchair plans inCornwall, where neither ice, mosquitoes, rapids, nor mud approaches to humandwellings played any part in everyday life, all the stages of our journey hadseemed to dovetail so perfectly. How many times we had spread out maps andletters and gone over every detail!Two Indian guides and a canoe up the Rat River; portaging over the Divide. LaPierre House, a trading station where Jackson Brothers ran a store for the largeIndian settlement and for passing travellers; a place marked clearly in the atlas.There we should flnd, without any difficulty, a single Indian guide to take usdown to Old Crow and the rapids and through the Ramparts to Fort Yukon inAlaska. There we would sell our canoe, catch a tourist steamer and travel by waterand then by rail to Seward, thence by steamer past the Pacific coast fjords toSeattle. From Seattle we would cross to Vancouver Island, stay with Gwen's oldfriend as paying guests for as long as our money lasted and then return by theCanadian Pacific Railway across the Rocky Mountains and the prairie. It allseemed to fit in like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, except that our map of the RatRiver seemed rather blank, showing no natural features to mark our course; but