have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
"blind she-ny." The land we have come from is known as "Outside" or "_Le
Grand Pays_." Anywhere other than where we sit is "that side," evidently
originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you "get debt." A Factor's
unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
"The Company will give me no debt this winter." From here northward the
terms "dollars" and "cents" are unheard. An article is valued at "three
skins" or "eight skins" or "five skins," harking back to the time when a
beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is "making fur."
"I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt," is a
painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
he is "starving," and you may be "starving" many moons without dying or
thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and
"sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
the spinal column of the same animals.

[Illustration: Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police]

There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,--there
are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
lakeside in the North just when most wanted.

Varied indeed is this man's duty,--"nursemaid to the Doukhobor" was a
thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
interrogates each