a primitive people, not without fault or
depravities, lived on Nature's food, and throve on her unfailing
harvest of fur. A region in which they often left their beaver, silver
fox, or marten packs--the envy of Fashion--lying by the dog-trail, or
hanging to some sheltering tree, because no one stole, and took their
fellow's word without question, because no one lied. A very simple
folk indeed, in whose language profanity was unknown, and who had no
desire to leave their congenital solitudes for any other spot on earth:
solitudes which so charmed the educated minds who brought the white
man's religion, or traffic, to their doors, that, like the
Lotus-eaters, they, too, felt little craving to depart. Yet they were
not regions of sloth or idleness, but of necessary toil; of the
laborious chase and the endless activities of aboriginal life: the
regions of a people familiar with its fauna and flora--of skilled but
unconscious naturalists, who knew no science . . . But theft such as
white men practice was a puzzle to these people, amongst whom it was
unknown."

Another example worth quoting is taken from Sir William Butler's "The
Wild North Land":

"The 'Moose That Walks' arrived at Hudson's Hope early in the spring.
He was sorely in want of gunpowder and shot, for it was the season when
the beaver leave their winter houses and when it is easy to shoot them.
So he carried his thirty martens' skins to the fort, to barter them for
shot, powder, and tobacco.

"There was no person at the Hope. The dwelling-house was closed, the
store shut up, the man in charge had not yet come up from St. John's;
now what was to be done? Inside that wooden house lay piles and piles
of all that the 'Moose that Walks' most needed. There was a whole keg
of powder; there were bags of shot, and tobacco--there was as much as
the Moose could smoke in his whole life.

"Through a rent in the parchment window the Moose looked at all those
wonderful things, and at the red flannel shirts, and at the four flint
guns and the spotted cotton handerchiefs, each worth a sable skin at
one end of the fur trade, half a six-pence at the other. There was
tea, too--tea, that magic medicine before which life's cares vanished
like snow in spring sunshine.

"The Moose sat down to think about all these things, but thinking only
made matters worse. He was short of ammunition, therefore he had no
food, and to think of food when one is very hungry is an unsatisf