114 Mackenzie’s Voyages

manner with a discharge of fire-arms, after which they
were regaled with plenty of spirits and cakes.

Mackenzie’s surgical skill was again called into requisition.
A youth with his thumb hanging by a strip of flesh as the
result of the bursting of a gun, was in a fair way to die
of blood-poisoning, since the wound was putrefying, and in
an advanced stage of mortification. ‘The Indian doctors had
exhausted all their arts of conjuring without avail. Mackenzie
used a poultice of bark from the spruce-fir, and the juice of
the same bark for cleansing purposes, It proved a painful
dressing, but in a few days the wound was clean, and the
proud flesh around it destroyed, but whether this desirable
result was due to the efficacy of the spruce poultice and the
decoction, or to the vitriol which he also used, he fails to
state. ‘‘In short I was so successful that by Christmas my
patient engaged in a hunting party and brought me the
tongue of an elk.”

A Chinook wind on the fifth again reduced the snow
Mackenzie had observed at Athabasca that a south-west
wind always brought clear, mild weather. “’To this cause
it may be attributed that there is now so little snow in this
part of the world. These warm winds come off the Pacific
Ocean, which cannot in a direct line be very far from us,
the distance being so short that though they pass over the
mountains covered with snow there is not time for them
to cool.”

Mackenzie here speaks of the comparatively short dis-
tance to the Pacific. The maps of the period, especially
Pond’s, make the distance from Lake Athabasca to the
western ocean short. But Mackenzie must have had his
ideas on the subject modified by the observations of ‘Turner,
the astronomer, who had wintered at Fort Chipewyan,
1791-2, while Mackenzie himself was in England perfect-