ce a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen
paddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a
little band of red-sashed _voyageurs_ forced their exhausted
sledge-dogs across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was
all.

Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very
pathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the Indians
to trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts to rest,
came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or ornament
she had ordered a full year before. Within a short time all were gone,
into the wilderness, into the great unknown world. The snow fell; the
river and the bay froze. Strange men from the North glided silently
to the Factor's door, bearing the meat and pelts of the seal. Bitter
iron cold shackled the northland, the abode of desolation. Armies of
caribou drifted by, ghostly under the aurora, moose, lordly and
scornful, stalked majestically along the shore; wolves howled
invisible, or trotted dog-like in organized packs along the river
banks. Day and night the ice artillery thundered. Night and day the
fireplaces roared defiance to a frost they could not subdue, while the
people of desolation crouched beneath the tyranny of winter.

Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, the Moose
roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot by foot to the
very dooryard of her father's house. Strange spirits were abroad at
night, howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning in voices of ice and
flood. Her Indian nurse told her of them all--of Maunabosho, the good;
of Nenaubosho the evil--in her lisping Ojibway dialect that sounded
like the softer voices of the forest.

At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eager
blossoming of the land into new leaves, lush grasses, an abandon of
sweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, a thousand singing birds
sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph. Overhead shone
the hot sun of the Northern summer.

From the wilderness came the _brigades_ bearing their pelts, the hardy
traders of the winter posts, striking hot the imagination through the
mysterious and lonely allurement of their callings. For a brief
season, transient as the flash of a loon's wing on the shadow of a
lake, the post was bright with the thronging of many people. The
Indians pitched their wigwams on the broad meadows below the bend; the
half-breeds saun