ry northward seeking the sea.
Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "_Le convert du bon
Dieu_," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
unwitting of shelter.

According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
hunter, man.

In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power--the
Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
children.

Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.

Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent peopl