its flat river front were built the great scows which carried this
freight to the end of the earth. It was from the Landing that the
greatest of all river brigades set forth upon their long
adventures, and it was back to the Landing, perhaps a year or more
later, that still smaller scows and huge canoes brought as the
price of exchange their cargoes of furs.

Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their
great sweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone DOWN the
river toward the Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their
still wilder crews, had come UP the river toward civilization. The
River, as the Landing speaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its
headwaters away off in the British Columbian mountains, where
Baptiste and McLeod, explorers of old, gave up their lives to find
where the cradle of it lay. And it sweeps past the Landing, a slow
and mighty giant, unswervingly on its way to the northern sea.
With it the river brigades set forth. For Pierre and Henri and
Jacques it is going from one end to the other of the earth. The
Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and the Slave empties
into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of that Lake the
Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.

In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears many
things. It is life. It is adventure. It is mystery and romance and
hazard. Its tales are so many that books could not hold them. In
the faces of men and women they are written. They lie buried in
graves so old that the forest trees grow over them. Epics of
tragedy, of love, of the fight to live! And as one goes farther
north, and still farther, just so do the stories of things that
have happened change.