Over the Divide ey;

where the river contracts to forty or fifty yards. “The great
body of water tumbling in successive cascades rolls through
this narrow passage in a very turbid current full of whirlpools.”

The swift current enabled them to speed down at a
gratifying rate. The high banks were overshadowed by
lofty firs and wide-spreading cedars, to be succeeded by
shores of a more moderate height, and flats, the former
rising gradually in wooded slopes to the horizon, and the
latter thickly covered with the cottonwood, birch, spruce,
and willow. A day’s journey below the canyon a wooden
house thirty by twenty feet, containing three fireplaces on
the ground, was discovered, and Mackenzie remarks that it
was the first carpentered building of native construction he
had seen west of Michilimackinac.

For some time past their canoe had been a mere patch-
work that would barely hold together from day to day.
It had been broken and wrecked and strained so often in
the water and on the carrying-places, that it had become
imperative to make another, to facilitate which the men
were sent out on the twentieth to find bark, and were suc-
cessful in securing enough to cover a framework thirty feet
long, and four and a half feet in height. Running a rapid
later in the day did not improve the condition of the canoe.
It was now too heavy to portage, although, when they left
the fort on the Peace, it was so light that two men could
easily carry it several miles without resting.

Mackenzie thought it was advisable to cache a ninety-
pound bag of pemmican for their return, which was accord-
ingly done in the customary manner by digging a hole and
burying it sufficiently deep to admit of a fire over it without
doing any injury to the hidden treasure. It was thus secure
both from the natives and the wild animals of the country.

A party of Indians engaged in securing their winter