We Did Not Expect To Reach The Real Musk-Ox
Country On The Lower Back River, So The Musk-Ox Sought Us Out On
Aylmer Lake.
And yet one more piece of luck is to be recorded.
That
night something came in our tent and stole meat. The next night
Billy set a trap and secured the thief - an Arctic Fox in summer
coat. We could not expect to go to him in his summer home, so he
came to us.
While the boys were finishing the dressing of the bull's hide, I,
remembering the current from the last bay, set out on foot over the
land to learn the reason. A couple of miles brought me to a ridge
from which I made the most important geographical discovery of the
journey. Stretching away before me to the far dim north-west was
a great, splendid river - broad, two hundred yards wide in places,
but averaging seventy or eighty yards across - broken by white
rapids and waterfalls, but blue deep in the smoother stretches and
emptying into the bay we had noticed. So far as the record showed,
I surely was the first white man to behold it. I went to the margin;
it was stocked with large trout. I followed it up a couple of miles
and was filled with the delight of discovery. "Earl Grey River"',
I have been privileged to name it after the distinguished statesman,
now Governor-general of Canada.
Then and there I built a cairn, with a record of my visit, and
sitting on a hill with the new river below me, I felt that there
was no longer any question of the expedition's success.
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