estroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly
afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
the wolf. Archbishop Tache tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle a la Crosse. Thirty days
afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
weary miles.

With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.

More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
clothing h