for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the
wall and took down the skin of a silver fox. He held it on his palm for
a moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought
it over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped
itself, as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.

"Good! good!" he said involuntarily.

"Bon! bon!" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.

The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking
the fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should
be spent on a little pelt by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old
son. One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes
fascinated by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere
vanity, or hunger, or avarice in her face--only the love of the
beautiful thing. But this was an animal's skin. Did they feel the animal
underneath it yet, giving it beauty, life, glory?

The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye
over the sights of his father's rifle, as he rested the barrel on the
window-sill, and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole
made by the bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph.
Minutes passed as they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter
proud of his son, the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts
suffering to get the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as
the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips
his fingers at times with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a
lion fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of
the desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and as
it lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of
its handsomeness. Death is no insult. It is the law of the primitive
world--war, and love in war.

They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own
way: the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic
feelings; the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious
atmosphere which belongs to the north, and to the north alone. At last
the boy lay back on the pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole
of