And it had had no more faithful servant than young Donald Smith, who traded for furs in desolate Labrador wastes, and spent fifteen years in the fur regions, tramping on snow shoes for thousands of miles. That lad is today Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, Governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Lord Strathcona loves to tell of the good old days when prices for fine. skins at Fort Dunvegan on the Peace river were absurdly low. An Indian

derness of snow,

muskrat. The trader makes an offer; and if this be accepted. he passes over the little bales of flannel, as well as tea, powder, knives, beads, and tobacco. The furs in the pack are immediately sorted. A silver fox skin may be worth six hundred dollars. Cross fox and the blue and white varieties will fetch from ten dollars upwards.

Ermine is always appreciated at the fort, and many an Indian's daughter or squaw wears rudelymade. garments of this beautiful fur which no expert could possibly mistake for doctored rabbit. Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, and the tiny weasel coat turns from faun to yellow, from yellow to cream, and from cream to snow-white, according to latitude and season.

wanting a trade musket would be asked to pile up as many Rocky Mountain sables on either side of the weapon as would come level with the muzzle. These skins fetched seventeen dollars apiece, yet the old musket would have been dear at five dollars.

In those days the fur factor in the wilderness sat within his rude log fort surrounded with piles of blankets, copper kettles, knives, guns, looking-glasses and beads, all to be bartered with up country redskins from the vast regions to the west.

For six or eight months out of the year the trader's world is a white wil

Fox, lynx, marten, otter and Dear are now taken with steel traps of various sizes. As he goes his rounds the lonely hunter notes the queer little tracks in the snow, and reads them like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. From the length of the leaps he judges the ermine's age. Fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a full grown animal; and a snare of twine is arranged from a twig in such a way as to lift the little

creature clear off the ground and strangle it instantly. If the tracks are like If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers-that is to say close and small-the keen eyed trapper hopes to take a skin fit for a queen -the little pelts that the kings of France used to pay one hundred and fifty dollars each for.

When the trading season is over the trappers go off to their winter hunting grounds, which they will not leave from October till June. In this latter month the long straggling brigades of canoes and boats, pack horses and ox carts, come back with the harvest of winter furs for the women and girls' of civiliza

Considering the untold millions of skins taken annually, one is apt to wonder whether the supply can be maintained? Yet the fur trade of America is greater today than ever before. The great Hudson Bay Company sells more

furs than in the days of its monopoly, although now opposed by a French concern as powerful as itself, besides hundreds of lesser competitors that support free traders in the wilderness, and also buy by mail.

In fact our fur trade today is actually greater than when buffalo and beaver had the run of the whole continent. True, the buffalo as a fur yielder has gone, and the beaver is practically extinct. The sea otter too, that once yielded 100,000 pelts every year, has now dwindled to a few hundreds. And the fur seal is fast on its way to extermination owing to reckless poaching. But other furs have taken the place of these.

There is more money going to trappers today for such ordinary skins as skunk, musk-rat and fox than was ever made out of beaver, sea otter, seal and the rarer furs. The swamps of New

Jersey and Delaware alone will yield three million musk-rats in a fairly dry season, and these fetch from 25 to 40 cents a skin. In these two sections of this country alone $800,000 a year has been paid for musk-rat!

The demand for skunk skins so greatly exceeds the supply that men in the West are running skunk farms and receiving prices equal to those paid for beaver in the old days; that is to say two dollars or three dollars. Every woman knows there are fashions in furs, as in hats or frocks. And it is fashion that regulates the fur trade. A distinguished woman some great Paris house will take a fancy for chinchilla, mink, or other fur, and then up goes the price. Word is sent to the trapper, and they pursue that skin because it pays the best. Meanwhile other little fur bearing animals get a rest and multiply during the

or

respite. In this way the balance is held even between the various furs. And there are other protections for the little creatures. Poison the animals and you will spoil the fur. Or kill them out of season, and you will have fur that does not pay for your trouble. Consequently the most paying months are those of midwinter, when furs are at their best. Thus the animals have perhaps eight or nine months out of the year when they are immune from pursuit.

200 bears; 300 loups cerviers; 700 otters; 2,000 fisher cats; 50,000 foxes; 75,000 skunks, and hundreds of thousands of musk-rats. Most of the choice otter skins of this section go to Russia, where the nobles have also ordered in advance all the silver gray and black fox pelts that may be secured in the state for years to come. But so rare is the silver fox that not three specimens will turn

up in 50,000 skins. And even these freaks will probably be worth only three hundred dollars, or perhaps half the price of the Russian variety.

The hunter must carry his traps and supplies into the remotest regions, where even lumbermen are unknown. He builds a low wide sled holding three hundred pounds, and loads this up with pork, flour, underclothing and steel traps. And when streams and lakes will bear his weight he starts into the wilderness, there to lead a hermit's life for seven months.

Arrived at a point fifty miles from the nearest habitation the trapper looks for two parallel streams. Here he pitches his home. camp, setting traps along both rivers. This enables him to visit traps for twenty miles down one of the frozen streams, camping in a brush shack at night, and returning down-stream on the second line next day. An able man will attend to a hundred traps, taking chiefly fishers, mink, and otter. It hardly pays to drag a musk-rat skin fifty or sixty miles through snowy woods for the sake of twenty-five cents. But with fisher cats at five dollars, mink at six dollars, and

The actual winning of the pelts is a long and difficult task, for the trapper must cut himself off entirely from civilization. Take the vast silent woods of Maine, where every year are taken over

otter at ten dollars or twelve dollars, there is plenty of profit in the winter's work.

Yet the labor is exacting, and the frightful loneliness has driven some men insane. Otter traps are baited with fresh pickerel, and those for mink with musk-rat flesh or hare meat. The fisher cats are particularly cautious and timid. A whole day is taken once or twice a week in cooking food and stretching skins. These are scraped and stretched over wide thin slips of cedar wood, whittled into shape with a pocket knife.

The work is varied by catching fish, snaring rabbits, and taking musk-rats for bait and larder. Now and then the hunter may kill a wandering bear-an event which may lead him to a big store of wild honey in a hollow tree. In this utter solitude the fur trapper lives, not knowing the day of the week or the month of the year. He only fixes the date for breaking up camp and turning back to civilization by the condition of the fur on the little animals he takes, or

ESKIMO HUNTER AT A HUDSON BAY POST.

by the effects of sunlight on the snow. Now and then he will shoot a deer, or even a moose, for the sake of the rawhide, meat, and fat-which latter keeps his traps from rusting. A file serves him instead of a grindstone to keep axes and knives keen; and he washes his own clothes through a hole in the ice, drying them by an open fire.

The dazzling glare of February often brings snow blindness; and a month or two later the fast thinning fur on his prey shows that further work is unprofitable. He then secretes his traps in hollow logs ready for the next season; packs his load of pelts on the wide sled, and trudges off through the forest on a journey of two or three weeks. On arriving at a town the trapper sells his furs outright for six hundred dollars or so, and then takes a brief rest before seeking employment during the summer months.

Hunting wood marten on the slopes of the Rockies-dark glossy skins of the best-is also an arduous task. The trapper sets forth in summer for the winter grounds, traveling up-stream by canoe, and later taking to snow shoes. Heavy loads are carried depending from a packstrap around the hunter's forehead; and then follow long lonely nights in snowpadded silences of the great wastes. And when spring comes the terrible. journey by dog sleigh or canoe must be faced, perhaps to far Winnipeg, one of the world's greatest fur centers.

Some varieties have almost disappeared. Take the sea otter, so high in favor today in Russia. There was a time when 150,000 skins would be taken off the Aleutian islands; but the entire harvest today is a bare 400 pelts, of which one-half come to the American market, while the rest go to Russia. And even these are won at great cost in human life. They must be hunted in the very teeth of wild Alaskan gales that destroy even the hardy Aleuts that try to ride the storm in flimsy skin skiffs, seeking the big dog-like sea otters that lie hidden with heads buried in the tossing seaweed.

The North American Commercial Company has an exclusive right to the seals of the Prybiloff islands; but there is also a Russian concern that has the run of the Commander islands. Most ruthless of all, however, are the poachers that roam the high seas, raiding the migrating herds, and plundering the islands with cruel recklessness. Of these poachers the Japanese are reputed the most daring. But some idea may be formed of the general depredations when I mention that two or three decades ago