or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.

The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.

Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.

Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
the letters H. B. C.[42] Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
and rampart.

Again to