And you, Sergeant
McVeigh, who have spent years in that country of the Great Slave, know
what a race with death from Christie Bay to Old Fort Eeliance would be.
To follow the broken and twisted waters of the Great Slave would mean two
hundred miles, while to cut straight across the land by smaller streams
and lakelets meant less than seventy. But on your maps that space of
seventy miles is a blank. You have in it no streams and no larger waters.
You know little of it. But I can tell you, for I have been though it. It
is a Lost Hell. It is a vast country in which berry bushes grow
abundantly, but on which there are no berries, where there are forests
and swamps, but not a living creature to inhabit them; a country of water
in which there are no fish, of air in which there are no birds, of plants
without flowers--a reeking, stinking country of brimstone, a hell. In
your Blue Books you have called it the Sulphur Country. And this country,
as you draw a line from Christie Bay to Old Fort Reliance, is straight
between. Mon pere was dying, and my time was short. I decided to venture
it--cut across that Sulphur Country, and I sought for a man to accompany
me. I could find none. To the Indian it was the land of Wetikoo--the
Devil Country; to the Breeds it was filled with horror. Forty miles
distant there was a man I knew would go, a white man. But to reach him
would lose me three days, and I was about to set out alone when the
stranger came.
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