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A TYPICAL BAKE OVEN USED BY THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY AT THE NORTHERN POSTS.

that ripped a clean hole the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The cold water hardened it; and that repair carried them along to the first birch tree affording a new strip of bark.

Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp, we could hear the laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among the trembling black poplars and whispering birches; and where we landed at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with. the Indian families to prevent lapses to barbarism. On one of these moose hunts for pemmican supply in the rock region north of this muskeg, the Revil

lons' manager succeeded in snap-shotting a sister rifle in hand. The good lady was panicky at thought of this representation of a peaceful missionary going out to the world. "Oh, by Gar, Sister," consoled one of the hunters, "you convert us all lot faster-me, I t'ink-wit' y'r rifle than y'r beads."

Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks above the reach of animal marauderstestimony to the honesty of the passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized Eastern city cannot boast of its denizens.

"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times," declared the Revillon man, "and left $500 worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our way out, and when we came that

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THE HOME OF THE FUR-BEARERS. North of the shaded line they are most abundant.

same way six months afterwards we never found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were starving owing to the rabbit famine."

In winter, this region is traversed by dog train along the ice-a matter of 500 miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or 600 to Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely faced Cambridge graduate fur trader to me. "When my little boy took sick last winter, I had to go only 55 miles. There happened to be a doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."

But even winter travel is not all easy in a 50 below zero climate where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night fire. I know the story of one fur trader, who was running along behind his dog sleigh in this section. He had become over-heated running, and had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in the iced At a bend in the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had thought, he had sicked the dogs on at them. With a yell they were off out of sight amid the goose grass and reeds. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make matters worse, a heavy snow storm

came on. The wind was against the direction the dogs had taken and the man hollooed himself hoarse without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before the wind sank and the trader found his dogs; and by that time between sweat and cold, his shirt had frozen to a board.

Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary-the water slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the slow keel.

One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had vanished. far to rear; and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest intoxications. There would be the wedge shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky-a far honkthen stillness. Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders

then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly, there lifted against the lonely red sunset sky-a lob stick-a dark evergreen stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands. marked land enough to support black poplars; and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the sevenbanded birch canoe of a little old hunter -Sam Ba'tiste Buck-80 years old he was-squatting in the bottom of the

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birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperorthe first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs. We camped together that night on the sand bars -trading Sam Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been storm stead camped in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he was to be pitied? Don't! Three days hunting will lay up enough meat for Sam for the winter. In the winter, he will snare some small game, mink, and otter and muskrat; and these will earn him flour and clothes from the fur trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning $700 a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther northmore than illiterate, unskilled men earn net in Eastern lands. spring, Sam will emerge from his cabin -wood is free-and build another birch canoe, and paddle away in freedom and peace to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled off in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free tobacco. In town, Sam would be poverty stricken, hungry, a beggar. Here, he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and care-free than you are-peace to his aged bones!

THE TRAVELING DRESS OF A MISSIONARY'S WIFE. Mrs. Bompas, wife of Archbishop Bompas.

Then in

Another night coming through the muskegs, we lost ourselves. We had left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest 200 miles to the next fur post by the sun; but there was no sun, only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake seven miles across;

not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun' of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe. Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.

Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder and hurricane wind looking for camping place. It had been a back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; and we had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and at seven in the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on 700 pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds; but the reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their wings. Simultaneously, all three dropped paddles-all three were speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of reeds.

"Sexsmith," I asked, "have those little sticks drifted down 1500 miles to this lagoon of dead water?"

"Sticks," he repeated, "it isn't sticks -it isn't drifts-it's birds-it's duck and geese-I have never seen anything like it-I have lived West more than twenty years and I never heard tell of anything of anything like it."

Anything like it? I had lived all my

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CAMP OF A CHAMPION BIG GAME HUNTER OF THE NORTHWEST.

life in the West and I had never heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as I have never seen classified or

named in any book on birds. We sat very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult nests where the duck had con

gregated before their long flight south. That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oil cloth on top; and all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the thwarts of the canoe. How the guide held his taut, I don't know. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe the big white banded gray canoe of The Company, not the little seven banded birch craft-with birds to the gun' in two hours' shooting on that lake.

That muskeg is only one of hundreds of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of all the little furs-mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit and ermine, the furs that clothe-not princes and millionaire, who buy silver fox and sea otter-but you and me and the rest of us, whose object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that one muskeg, hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since 1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, first led the fur trader' inland from the Bay. Yet the game-save in the year of the unexplained rabbit pest-shows no sign of diminishing.

Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game pre

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trader and wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur trader who did not make that answer.

To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost exterminated; but the extermination in one case has been the poacher, in the other the farm. Even today if the governments of the world, especially Canada and the United States would pass a law prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea otter for fifty years -these species would replenish themselves.

"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.

I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though I have written an 800 page history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the romance of the fur trade right in the year 1911 than has ever been penned of the Company since it was established away back in the year 1670.

NUNS. AIDED BY INDIANS. SHOT THESE MOOSE.

Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man, who thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog train for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her a shy a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to

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