dor.

Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and
admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood
for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing
on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting
some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good
now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it
was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it
out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front
of the camp at night? The Indian calls that
"a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."

Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great
bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a
river--it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not
twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and
goose grass--ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game.
Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the
ground of the little fellows--waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the
muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or
pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions
upon millions of little pelts--hundreds of thousands of muskrat are
taken out of this muskeg alone--exceed by a hundredfold the profits on
the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross
fox and marten.

Look at the map again! North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post
is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by
dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake--more muskeg cut by
limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles
east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on
the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a
straight stretch of one thousand miles--nothing but rocks and cataracts
and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them--and
sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking
muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by
the amber water ways.

IV

If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the
muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south
end of this field.

We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you
could di