YEARS

It was boasted of Seal Bay that its inhabitants produced more wealth per
head than any other community in the Northern world, not even excluding
the gold cities of Alaska and the Yukon. It was a considerable boast,
but with more than usual justice. A cynic once declared that it was the
only distinction of merit the place could fairly claim.

The boast of Seal Bay was sufficiently alluring to those who had not yet
set foot on its pestilential shores. For once, by some extraordinary
chance, truth had been spoken in Seal Bay. No one need starve upon its
deplorable streets, if sufficiently clever and unscrupulous.

A photographic plate would have yielded a choice scene of desolation, if
sun enough could have been found to achieve the necessary record. The
long, low foreshore of Seal Bay was dotted with a large number of mud
huts, thatched with reeds from adjacent marshes, and a fair sprinkling
of frame houses of varying shapes and sizes. There were no streets in
the modern sense, only stretches of mire which were more or less
bottomless for about seven months in the year, and lost in the grip of
an Arctic winter for the rest of the time. Foot traffic was only made
possible in the softer portion of the year by means of disjointed
sections of wooden sidewalks laid down by those who preferred the
expense and labour to the necessary discomfort of frequent bathing.

There was no doubt that Seal Bay as a trading port owed its existence to
two spits of mud and sand on either side of a completely inhospitable
foreshore. They stretched out, forming the two horns of a horseshoe,
like puny arms seeking to embrace the wide waters of Hudson's Bay.

Within their embrace was a more or less safe anchorage for light draft
craft. There was a pier. At least it was called a pier by the more
reckless. It was propped and bolstered in every conceivable way to keep
it from sinking out of sight in its muddy bed, and became a source of
political discord on the subject of its outrageous cost of maintenance.

As for the setting which Seal Bay claimed it was no more happy than the
rest. There was no background until the far-off distance was reached,
and then it was only a serrated line of low and apparently barren hills.
Everything else was a wide expanse of deplorable morass and reed-grown
tundra, through which ran a few safe tracks, which, except in winter,
were a deadly nightmare to all travellers.

The handiwork of man is not usually