n one old trading
list I found--vanity of vanities--"one beaver equals looking-glass."

Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
fort with the harvest of winter furs.

Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
falls--falls--falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
the shady side--that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
that a wanderer use his eyes--which the white man seldom does--the limbs
of the northern trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.

One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in