Page:Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America.djvu/270

240 from York Factory on Hudson's Bay to Red River, and, again, from Red River to Athabasca,—a distance little short of two thousand miles,—wearing only an ordinary cloth capot, and have accomplished fifty miles in a day. Here, however, myself and my companions soon found that the wanderer within the unsheltered precincts of the Polar Circle must be far otherwise provided. Accordingly, on our distant excursions, we usually assumed capots of dressed moose-skin, impervious to the wind, or of reindeer hide with the hairy side outwards, and were provided with robes of the latter light and warm material for a covering at night, when, to increase the supply of animal heat, our dogs couched close around us. Yet in a stormy, barren, mountainous country, where, in many parts, a whole day's journey intervenes between one miserable clump of pines and the next, we were often exposed to suffering, and even danger, from the cold; and several of our dogs were at various times frozen to death.

In the early part of May Fort Confidence was visited by a party of twenty-seven Hare Indians from Smith Bay, with a small but acceptable supply of provisions, for which they were liberally recompensed. Our long-expected winter packet from the southern parts of the country