old, male and female.

The true trapper does not kill the young; for that would destroy his
next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with the
young. He kills the grown males which--it can be safely said--have
killed more of each other than man has killed in all the history of
trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the pot-hunter, whether
the sportsman for amusement or the settler supplying his larder, game
has been exterminated. This is illustrated by all the stretch of country
between the Platte and the Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been
hunted only by the trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been.
This is illustrated by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land
south of Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come
destroying grisly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and
mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have increased.

But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, something
more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys _animal_ life--a
life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and rapine and
cruelty--in order that _human_ life may be preserved, may be rendered
independent of the elemental powers that wage war against it.

It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against the
elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors
conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing Fenris
wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets of
life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha hunting
beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the trapper stands
forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the
obstacles that earth can offer to human will under his feet, finding
paths through the wilderness for the explorer who was to come after him,
opening doors of escape from stifled life in crowded centres of
population, preparing a highway for the civilization that was to follow
his own wandering trail through the wilds.

APPENDIX

When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the
entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life.
It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian
mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the
diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she
lived at Hamilton Inlet.