have these I will be happy, and happier still if I could
know that when the time comes for me to travel the trail, the sands of
which show no imprint of returning footsteps, that I might be put to
rest on the southern slope of the ridge beside my camp, where the
sunshine chases the shadows around the birch tree, where the murmur of
the waves comes in rhythm to the robin's song, and where the red deer
play on moonlight nights. Neither will I fear the snows of winter that
come drifting over the bay, driven by the wind that whines through the
naked tree tops, nor the howl of the hungry wolf, for what had no
terror for me in life need not have afterward. And if the lessons that
I learned at my mother's knee be true; if there be that within me that
lives on, I am sure that it will be happier in its eternal home if it
may look back and know that the body which it had tried to guide
through its earthly career was having its long rest in the spot it
loved best."

Did you ever meet a character like that in northern fiction?

No, of course not; how could you? . . . When the books were written by
city-dwelling men. Then, too, is not any production of the creative
arts--a poem, a story, a play, a painting, or a statue--but a
reflection of the composer's soul? So . . . when you read a book
filled with inhuman characters, you have taken the measure of the man
who wrote it, you have seen a reflection of the author's soul.
Furthermore, when people exclaim: "What's the matter with the movies?"
The answer is: Nothing . . . save that the screens too often reflect
the degenerate souls of the movie directors.

But the Indian--how he has been slandered for centuries! When in
reality it is just as Warren, the Historian of the Ojibways,
proclaimed: "There was consequently less theft and lying, more devotion
to the Great Spirit, more obedience to their parents, and more chastity
in man and woman, than exists at the present day, since their baneful
intercourse with the white race." And Hearne, the northern traveller,
ended a similar contention--more than a hundred years ago--by saying:
"It being well known that those who have the least intercourse with
white men are by far the happiest."

That night, as I turned in, I had occasion to look through my kit bag,
and there I found, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, the photograph--lent
to me for six weeks--of the charming Athabasca. Being alone in my
tent, I carefully unfolded its wrapper,