these earth-coloured
fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.

On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering <big>V</big> lines, wing
geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.

Unless it is raining, the _voyageurs_ do not erect their tent; for they
will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
care. When the hunter came suddenly on them, over the old hen went,
flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
for shelter--when--lo!--of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
they died of