cal aid; but the first
thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they
considered the more dangerous.

Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
Christmas.

Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
handled differently.

Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snowbird or
rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.

If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
ermine as the ermin