In the evening I got photos of a Polar Hare, the
third we had seen. The following day (August 20), at noon, we camped
in Sandhill Bay, the north point of Aylmer Lake and the northernmost
point of our travels by canoe. It seems that we were the fourth
party of white men to camp on this spot.
Captain George Back, 1833-34.
Stewart and Anderson, 1855.
Warburton Pike, 1890.
E. T. Seton, 1907.
All day long we had seen small bands of Caribou. A score now appeared
on a sandhill half a mile away; another and another lone specimen
trotted past our camp. One of these stopped and gave us an
extraordinary exhibition of agility in a sort of St. Vitus's jig,
jumping, kicking, and shaking its head; I suspect the nose-worms
were annoying it. While we lunched, a fawn came and gazed curiously
from a distance of 100 yards. In the after-noon Preble returned
from a walk to say that the Caribou were visible in all directions,
but not in great bands.
Next morning I was awakened by a Caribou clattering through camp
within 30 feet of my tent.
After breakfast we set off on foot northward to seek for Musk-ox,
keeping to the eastward of the Great Fish River. The country is
rolling, with occasional rocky ridges and long, level meadows in the
lowlands, practically all of it would be considered horse country;
and nearly every meadow had two or three grazing Caribou.
About noon, when six or seven miles north of Aylmer, we halted
for rest and lunch on the top of the long ridge of glacial dump
that lies to the east of Great Fish River. And now we had a most
complete and spectacular view of the immense open country that we
had come so far to see. It was spread before us like a huge, minute,
and wonderful chart, and plainly marked with the processes of its
shaping-time.
Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand
miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual
succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing,
ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken
hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them
again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region
into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble
and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them
in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this going on
for thousands of years, and we shall have the hills lowered and
polished, the valleys more or less filled with broken rocks.
Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of flood. For another
age all is below water, dammed by the northern ice, and icebergs
breaking from the parent sheet carry bedded in them countless
boulders, with which they go travelling south on the open waters.
As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow share equally
in this age-long shower of erratics. Nor does it cease till the
progress of the warmer day removes the northern ice-dam, sets free
the flood, and the region of archaean rocks stands bare and dry.
It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills
of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock
and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing
in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of
mighty power used only to destroy. A waste of shattered granite
spotted with hundreds of lakes, thousands of lakelets, millions of
ponds that are marvellously blue, clear, and lifeless.
But a new force is born on the scene; it attacks not this hill or
rock, or that loose stone, but on every point of every stone and
rock in the vast domain, it appears - the lowest form of lichen,
a mere stain of gray. This spreads and by its own corrosive power
eats foothold on the granite; it fructifies in little black velvet
spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite,
to help the effect. Soon another kind follows - a pale olive-green
lichen that fruits in bumps of rich brown velvet; then another
branching like a tiny tree - there is a ghostly kind like white
chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and
one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher
and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses
higher still.
In the less exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade,
searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral
reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours
of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt
some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible
sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever
evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange
textures and oriental tones; broad carpets there are of gray and
green; long luxurious lanes, with lilac mufflers under foot, great
beds of a moss so yellow chrome, so spangled with intense red sprigs,
that they might, in clumsy hands, look raw. There are knee-deep
breadths of polytrichum, which blends in the denser shade into a
moss of delicate crimson plush that baffles description.
Down between the broader masses are bronze-green growths that run
over each slight dip and follow down the rock crannies like streams
of molten brass. Thus the whole land is overlaid with a living,
corrosive mantle of activities as varied as its hues.
For ages these toil on, improving themselves, and improving the
country by filing down the granite and strewing the dust around
each rock.
