The river does not begin with ceremony; it begins with a long, ordinary morning of loading and an unassuming shove away from shore. The first scene opens at a fur trading post that smelled of wet hide and smoke, where men hefted pack-bundles into canoes and tied down barrels of salted meat and flour. Oars cut the glassy current; the conversation is functional — routes, portages, tides. The sky is low and the light has that pearled, northern quality: distance seems slightly condensed, as if the land holds its breath.
At the first portage the scene becomes tactile: packs are slung, birchbark is rolled, and the labour of men and dogs transforms the landscape into a line on a map. The creak of leather straps and the thump of feet on loam make a rhythm that sustains morale. The cold bites at fingers and cheeks; breath hangs in white-laced clouds. Men talk rarely; their bodies know the work. The water, when it returns, smells of algae and old wood, and the skin of the canoe glints with recent tarting. Navigation in these first days is a practical geometry — currents calculated against wind, canoe angle against rock.
A second, sharper scene arrives at a set of rapids. The river narrows, and the music of water changes to a high, nervous pitch. Canoes are lined up in single file, one by one wrestled through the shallow teeth. Men strain, pushing poles against the riverbed, feet sliding on rock. The sound of strained rope and the occasional clash of wood against stone rise in a chorus. The risk is immediate: a sudden turn could flip a craft, washing out provisions and consigning men to cold water that tastes of minerals and astringent peat. In the dark of the lower hulls the smell of wet wool and iron is thick; the river seems intent on exposing any flaw in discipline or craft.
Early illnesses begin to punctuate the march. In a cramped night shelter the air is close and touchable, and the low cough of those struck by fever becomes a metric of vulnerability. Men refuse the cup sometimes, emboldened by solvent fouls and old superstitions. Food that once comforted becomes monotonous; the fat of pemmican clings to the tongue, the flour turns to a pasty reassurance. Scurvy, dysentery and simple exposure sediment into the daily ledger. The captain — if that word is allowed for a man more accustomed to ledger-rooms than to command — watches the tally of men and weighs whether the expedition's timetable must bend.
A scene of social friction emerges when shortages press. Rations shrink, and with them the lines of authority fray. Men once steady in march begin to calculate their odds, thinking of hearths and of the longer chance of profit at other posts. Desertion is a shadow that walks beside the party: a man may vanish in the night and take with him a paddle and the ghost of complaint. Mutinies do not arrive like storms but like small, accumulating splinters: grumbles over food, over pay, over the weariness of endless canoeing.
All the while, however, there are moments that arrest the breath. Dawn over a slow, braided channel reveals a horizon where spruce silhouettes dissolve into mist; the whole world feels newly made. The sky, when it clears, displays a vault of stars unsoftened by urban smoke, and the Milky Way is a solid rue of white that maps the human longing to keep moving. These are moments of wonder: a bald eagle dropping like a punctuation mark into a river, the sudden wall of mountains looming at a bend, the first sighting of an animal species previously known only by traders' hearsay. Men write these scenes in their notebooks with a mixture of practical notes and private awe.
The first contacts with Indigenous peoples occur in the early stages, and these are scenes of careful diplomacy. At a summer camp by a wide bend, smoke rings rise above skins stretched over frames; children cry in a language whose cadence is unfamiliar but whose human sounds are immediate. Trade is conducted: a small exchange of kettles and beads for fish and intelligence about routes. The Indigenous perspective is not a monolith; some saw the travellers as necessary partners in trade, others eyed the newcomers as competitors. The balance is negotiating terms in word and gesture, a lived practice of boundary-making.
Risk grows not only from weather and disease but from navigation itself: a wrongly judged branch, a carelessly chosen ford and a week's progress can be lost. Yet progress is visible. Canoes slide inland, portages lengthen, and the map in Mackenzie's head is filled with new lines drawn in wet ink. The expedition pushes into waters and woods where European footsteps are few, and every bend reveals the continent's stubborn refusal to be concise.
As the party closes the second week, their pace is steadied but their nerves are frayed. They have learned that rivers can betray, that food stores are thin, that human temper both saves and endangers them. The expedition is no longer a plan on paper; it is a living mechanism composed of exhausted men, damp gear, and a handful of instruments that must perform. The canoe's wake is a narrow, ephemeral inscription on a wide continent. But at dusk, as the men draw shelter and the sky turns a distant violet, there is unanimous understanding: they are now headed into regions that ask for more than simple endurance. The river widens beyond the last mapped point, and in its widening the crew reads the question written in water: what will lie ahead? The next chapter begins with that widening and with the first real crossing into the unknown reaches of the continent.