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

to Pierre House 73ourselves. I was almost ready to dictate to Archdeacon Whittaker, when I went toget his opinion, what he should say about our tackling that reach of the riveralone. Yet I could not completely dismiss from my mind the thought and the fearof rapids. The archdeacon was neither for nor against our lone journey.However, he assured me that there were no really dangerous rapids between LaPierre House and Old Crow and he sent me off to find a trader and also a trapperwho had each, at different times, navigated the Rat River in summer.Mter long interviews with all three of them I went back to Gwen with the resultof my enquiries. They were agreed that if we had common sense and moderatecourage we could certainly paddle down that stretch alone. There would bepatches of swift water and we must keep a lookout for snags of fallen tree branchesboth above the surface of the water and below, but there were no actual rapidsand as for Old Crow it was a settlement of some size and we would have nodifficulty in picking up a guide there.I rather think that they overestimated our powers. They probably believed thatsince we had come so far from home and had deliberately chosen the Rat Riverroute for crossing the Divide into the Yukon, we were equipped in mind andbody to face any danger or emergency . From their point of view a patch of swiftwater-a little less turbulent than a rapid-was hardly to be counted as a danger;for a canoe man it was all in the day's work. They could not have guessed howinexperienced we were.Looking back on all these things from the vantage point of today, I see that theadvice of those three men was an enormous help to us, although at the time wethought them rather casual. Their confidence in us, their conviction that wewere seasoned travellers, encouraged us to think that we really were seasonedtravellers. They helped to restore our self-confidence when it was at a low ebb.So our resolution was taken. We made up our minds on the strength of whatthose three had told us about their own experience, to paddle on alone down thePorcupine River after dismissing Lazarus and the boy Jimmy, at La Pierre House.Old Crow and the unknown guide that we should find there had now become thekey-pin of our canoe journey, for even those three old-timers did not think itpossible for us to paddle down alone from that settlement, through the rapidsand the Ramparts, to Fort Yukon.That evening our friend Sergeant Anderton of the North -West MountedPolice came to see us and we had a long talk with him about Eskimos and other