of trade at Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, and London across the sea. It
was not a work of philanthropy. These men cared not whether Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie were well-fed or hungry, whether they
lived or died, so far as humanity was concerned. But Paris, Vienna,
London, and the great capitals of the earth must have their furs--and
unless that freight went north, there would be no velvety offerings for
the white shoulders of the world. Christmas windows two years hence
would be bare. A feminine wail of grief would rise to the skies. For
woman must have her furs, and in return for those furs Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie must have their freight. So the
pendulum swung, as it had swung for a century or two, touching, on the
one side, luxury, warmth, wealth, and beauty; on the other, cold and
hardship, deep snows and open skies--with that precious freight the
thing between.

And now, in this year before rail and steamboat, the glory of early
summer was at hand, and the wilderness people were coming up to meet
the freight. The Three Rivers--the Athabasca, the Slave, and the
Mackenzie, all joining in one great two-thousand-mile waterway to the
northern sea--were athrill with the wild impulse and beat of life as
the forest people lived it. The Great Father had sent in his treaty
money, and Cree song and Chipewyan chant joined the age-old melodies of
French and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and
mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up
and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of
timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their
long drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile
waterway a world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and
each post and gathering place along its length was turned into a
metropolis, half savage, archaic, splendid with the strength of red
blood, clear eyes, and souls that read the word of God in wind and tree.

And up and down this mighty waterway of wilderness trade ran the
whispering spirit of song, like the voice of a mighty god heard under
the stars and in the winds.

But it was an hour ago that David Carrigan had vividly pictured these
things to himself close to the big river, and many things may happen in
the sixty minutes that follow any given minute in a man's life. That
hour ago his one great purpose had been to bring in Black Roger
Audemard, alive o