nding along the northern coast; but
officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
terms of justice with their men.

The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
Times without number under the old _regime_ has a Hudson's Bay officer
set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.

Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt
to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says
the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.

And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?

Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies