-leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"

And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
credit of Montagnais's heroism.

But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.

The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
effected.

But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.

South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.

First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and w