rrives with the treaty money once a
year.

And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written"?

"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as
long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong
men set forth to traverse lone places with no defense but their own
valiant spirit.

The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and
Chicago and St. Paul--Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the
Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own
words--in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid
the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing
and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening
counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around
his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in
British Columbia--a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He
had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from
MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter.
Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved
very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it
plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of
underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if
Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to
Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.

He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his
pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran
on winged feet--feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily
with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack
down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with
hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches
sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day
beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped
mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail--you are
hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch
handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring
big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from
his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness
off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smo