ts, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in
the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had
thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out
of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his
garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom
corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make
matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the
direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse
without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before
the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between
sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.

Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of
the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling
of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may
laugh but they all do it--make offerings of tobacco to the Granny
Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and
orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside
at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the
waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter
and life to the slow keel.

One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had
vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood
of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color
intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese
against a flaming sky--a far honk--then stillness. Then the flackering
quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our
shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and
ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted
against the lonely red sunset sky--a lob stick--a dark evergreen
stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or
sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a
clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we
rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch
canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck--eighty years old he
was--squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to
nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than
an emperor--the first living being we had seen for a week