and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad
on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter."
They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.

Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a
see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them
chaps pinked them dolls every time."

As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or "De-deed." The
lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
at the open door.

Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
the landing.

[Illustration: On the Slave]

This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
North--although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
and boys of every tribe in the Nor