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

98 THE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATand went like an army attacking and retreating in mass formation. We met no gasboats on the sluggish river and throughout the day we had the world to ourselves,A feeling persisted that we were in a magic world where, round each bend of thecurrent, we should find something new and more exciting than anything we hadever seen before. The sight of a hippogriff or a dinosaur would not have astonishedus; in that mood miracles might seem to be a part of our birthright.To follow a river, either up or down, will always bring to the traveller a sense ofmagic adventure, but I do not remember ever enjoying that sense so vividly as onthat long day when we followed, without any personal effort, those seeminglyendless coils of the Peel and the Husky rivers. The flowers that grew most abundantlyon the banks were that beautiful lupin, a white valerian, a mauve vetch anda blue one, a yellow Senecio and lYrola.At last, after 12 hours spent circling round the base of the mountains, we cameout of the Husky, in evening sunshine, to the mouth of the Rat. It looked like alittle sluggish backwater, it was bordered by willows and seemed to be half asleep.For so many months we had read and talked about this river. For so many weeks,during our journey across Canada and down the Mackenzie, the old-timers'warnings had been echoing, like funeral dirges, in our ears. "You'll never makeit. You'll never make it. You'll be eaten alive by mosquitoes. Yes, eaten alive. Nosane person would choose to travel up the Rat for pleasure. It has a bad name anddeserves it." And so on, and so on.We landed there to boil our kettle and make tea and to refuel the boat withgasoline. There were clouds of mosquitoes about us but other things claimed ourattention. We found, among the mare's-tails, a sandpiper's nest with four eggsand then Lazarus showed us tracks of geese and beaver in the mud. He could readthese signs like a book and as the days went by we were filled with admiration forhis knowledge of wild life which amounted to an almost mystical union with hisown country.As we steamed on again the spruce trees, reflected in the water, were gold inthe evening light. We saw northern ravens, many ducks and sandpipers andvarious waders. The guides produced their rifles and after a fusillade, alas, theykilled a white-fronted goose and then the young ones went waddling away up thebank, a forlorn little party. Like the Husky and the Peel, the Rat, in this part of itscourse was a succession of loops and bends and we remained tense with expectation'mistaking every snag of a broken tree for a caribou or a moose, every fallen