lve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade,
the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at
Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of
muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful
and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the
fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them,
according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand
muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which
they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."

"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader.
If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off
place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America--down
MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain
hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca
Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.

"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought
in to each of the traders there."

I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred
thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its
palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never
sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total
for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.

III

The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the
hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.

Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it--not
just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again
advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles
of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it
isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River
(barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow
wheat all right--splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world.
That is, twenty hours of sunlight--not daylight but sunlight--force
growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but
the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of
the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does
exist? Cataracts countless--Churchill River is one succession of
cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chai