upon a time, that
the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world. At the upper end of
the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood
unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who
were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand
but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music.
He had learned French in Paris, and had heard Italian in Rome, but never in
his life had he heard words or voices so beautiful as those which fell from
the red, full lips of the Cree girls. He thought more seriously than ever
of what Ransom had said about the first people, and the beginning of
things.

Late in October they swung westward through the Sissipuk and Burntwood
water ways to Nelson House, and at this point Rameses returned homeward.
Roscoe struck north, with two new guides, and on the eighteenth of November
the first of the two great storms which made the year of 1907 one of the
most tragic in the history of the far Northern people overtook them on
Split Lake, thirty miles from a Hudson's Bay post. It was two weeks later
before they reached this post, and here Roscoe was given the first of
several warnings.

"This has been the worst autumn we've had for years," said the factor to
him. "The Indians haven't caught half enough fish to carry them through,
and this storm has ruined the early-snow hunting in which they usually get
enough meat to last them until spring. We're stinting ourselves on our own
supplies now, and farther north the Company will soon be on famine rations
if the cold doesn't let up--and it won't. They won't want an extra mouth up
there, so you'd better turn back. It's going to be a starvation winter."

But Roscoe, knowing as little as the rest of man-kind of the terrible
famines of the northern people, which keep an area one-half as large as the
whole of Europe down to a population of thirty thousand, went on. A famine,
he argued, would give him greater opportunity for study.

Two weeks later he was at York Factory, and from there he continued to Fort
Churchill, farther up on Hudson's Bay. By the time he reached this point,
early in January, the famine of those few terrible weeks during which more
than fifteen hundred people died of starvation had begun. From the Barren
Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four
to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late