r-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
English,--Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
who would fain shepherd their souls.

These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
_moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers_ (July) they will press back
east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
_the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns_, will find them camping on
the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
_hour-frost-moon,_ or the _ice-moon,_ they will be laying lines of
traps.

We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
had been loud and eloquent.

[Illustration: Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian]

We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in
the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make
nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
Labrador tea _(Ledum latifolium_), we reach the H.B. garden where the
potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
Beihler, who com