I just tasted it, and found the oil perfectly sweet, without which the other ingredient would have been very insipid.

The chief partook of it with great avidity after it had received an additional quantity of oil.

This dish is considered by these people as a great delicacy; and on examination, I discovered it to consist of the inner rind of the hemlock pine tree, taken off early in summer, and put into a frame, which shapes it into cakes of fifteen inches long, ten broad, and half an inch thick; and in this form I should suppose it may be preserved for a great length of time.

This discovery satisfied me respecting the many hemlock trees which I had observed stripped of their bark." Mackenzie found some of the older men here with long beards, and to one of them he presented a pair of scissors for clipping his beard.
After describing some remarkable oblong "tables" (as they might be called) of cedar wood--twenty feet long by eight feet broad--made of thick cedar boards joined together with the utmost neatness, and painted with hieroglyphics and the figures of animals; and his visit to a kind of temple in the village, into the architecture of which strangely carved and painted figures were interwoven; Mackenzie goes on to relate an episode giving one a very vivid idea of the helplessness of "native" medicine in many diseases.
He was taken to see a son of the chief, who was suffering from a terrible ulcer in the small of his back, round which the flesh was gangrened, one of his knees being afflicted in the same way.

The poor fellow was reduced to a skeleton, and apparently drawing very near to death.
"I found the native physicians busy in practising their skill and art on the patient.