the lodge.
Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had
been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
dead.[41]

The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
the outside world.

Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
the leagueless world of the Far North.

Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
the huskies can gallop.

Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
ox-carts that used to screech and creak an