ass, kindled
fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get
footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when
canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up
the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac
La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a
hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man
was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The
cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first
birch tree affording a new strip of bark.

Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the
laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among
the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed
at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In
fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian
families to prevent lapses to barbarism.

Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks
above the reach of animal marauders--testimony to the honesty of the
passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city
can not boast of its denizens.

"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times,"
declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five
hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our
way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never
found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians
who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were
starving owing to the rabbit famine."

In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice--a matter
of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to
Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced
Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick
last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a
doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."

But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate
where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night
fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind
his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and
had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel
shirt, fur gauntle