July and August are hot months in the high
latitudes. For six weeks or thereabouts the bottom-lands of the Peace
and the Athabasca can hold their own with the steaming tropics. After
that--well, this has to do in part with "after that." For it was in late
July when Wesley Thompson touched at Fort Pachugan, a Bible in his
pocket, a few hundred pounds of supplies in Mike Breyette's canoe,
certain aspirations of spiritual labor in his head, and little other
equipment to guide and succor him in that huge, scantily peopled
territory which his superiors had chosen as the field for his labors.
When Breyette and MacDonald had so bestowed the canoe that the
diligently foraging dogs of the post could not take toll of their
supplies they also hied them up to the cluster of log cabins ranging
about the Company store and factor's quarters. They were on tolerably
familiar ground. First they made for the cabin of Dougal MacPhee, an
ancient servitor of the Company and a distant relative of Breyette's,
for whom they had a gift of tobacco. Old Dougal welcomed them
laconically, without stirring from his seat in the shade. He sucked at
an old clay pipe. His half-breed woman, as wrinkled and time worn as
himself, squatted on the earth sewing moccasins.
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