es across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
wept. White women are a _rara avis_. Father Beihler wants to know how
old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that
age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a _woman
chercher_." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
have in common,--the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.

[Illustration: A Bit of Fond du Lac]

These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.

To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
extinct product of a past race that never existed.

The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the ani