new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
Arctic edge!

At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
of bicycles was a professional racer.

Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.

CHAPTER V

NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS

"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
De win' she blow, blow, blow,
An' de crew of de wood scow '_Julie Plante_'
Got scar't an' run below--
For de win' she blow lak hurricane
Bimeby she blow some more,
An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
Wan arpent from de shore."

--_Dr. Drummond_.

This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive l