[Illustration: An Eskimo Boy at Arctic Red river.] One hundred and thirty miles below Loon river a stream one hundred yards wide enters from the northeast. This is a river which the old man at Fort Good Hope described to Mr. Ogilvie as one up which a Hudson’s Bay Company’s officer went many years ago to its source, which he found to be not far from the head waters of Anderson river, which flows into Arctic ocean. It would appear from the old man’s statement that several trips up it have been made since, but this information was vague, and Mr. Ogilvie afterwards met no one who could give him a reliable account of this river. Sixty miles lower down, Red river enters the Mackenzie on its west side just at the foot of the Narrows. It is about two hundred yards wide at its mouth and appears to be shallow. As far as Mr. Ogilvie could learn from persons acquainted with the river, it comes from a flat, swampy country. WHERE THE RIVER BRANCHES. Where the upper end of the branch of the Mackenzie channel on which Fort McPherson is situated connects with Mackenzie proper, according to Mr. Ogilvie:—“The channel is three-fourths of a mile wide, but it is only one of four, there being four large islands there. The whole width of the river cannot be less than three or four miles. “Looking northward down the westerly channel the view is bounded by the sky and widens in the distance so that one can fancy he is looking out to sea. This can hardly be so; but, from the altitude of the bank where I stood, added to my own height, the horizon must have been six miles away, and a bank in the channel of equal height to that on which I stood would have been visible twice that distance. Now, if the supposed bank was timbered, as was that on which I stood, it would be visible ten or twelve miles farther, but none was in sight. “From the entrance of the small channel of Peel river to the head of the upper island in the Mackenzie is nine miles. From the west shore to the southerly point of this island is a mile and a quarter; from the island to the east shore the distance is nearly as great, showing the river to be more than two miles wide at this point. However, it gradually narrows, and five miles above this is a little over a mile wide, which it averages up to the narrows, about sixty miles from Fort McPherson, or twenty-eight from where we entered it. “A north wind raises quite a swell here and the salty odour of the sea air is quite perceptible above the delta.” AGRICULTURAL POSSIBILITIES.