outh, must be
a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
blood.

Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
another unit--blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.

At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than
mine." Britain's h