sought at this season.
There were two methods followed in setting the marten traps. Where a
tree of sufficient diameter was available, it was cut off as high as
the trapper could wield his axe above the snow, and a notch about four
inches deep and fourteen inches high cut some distance below the top
of the stump and several feet above the snow. The bottom of this notch
was given a level surface with the axe, the trap set upon it, and the
bait hung in the side of the notch a foot above the trap. At other
times an enclosure was made with spruce boughs, and in a narrow
opening the trap was set, with the bait within the enclosure.

Fox traps were set upon the marshes, and baited with rabbits which had
been hung in the tilt until they began to smell badly, or with other
scraps of flesh. The trap securely fastened by its chain to a block of
wood or the base of willow brush, was carefully concealed under a thin
crust of snow.

The usual routine followed by Ungava Bob, after his trail was once in
order and his traps set, was to leave the river tilt on Monday
morning, and by a wide circuit around lake shores and marshes,
embracing a distance of some fifteen miles, reach his tilt at the far
end of the first lake at night. On Tuesday another wide circle of
traps around contiguous lakes brought him back again at night to the
same tilt. On Wednesday his trail led him to the tilt on the last lake
of the old portage trail.

His original intention had been to continue from this tilt to the tilt
which the Indians had robbed, and thence to the last tilt on Ed
Matheson's trail, some fifteen miles to the northeast. But after the
appearance of the Indians it had been deemed unsafe and inadvisable to
do this, and the tilt on the river above the portage trail was,
therefore, temporarily abandoned.

With this modification, his Thursday circuit of traps was so arranged
that it brought him back at night to the tilt on the last lake, and on
Friday he proceeded to Ed Matheson's last tilt. This arrangement
carried him during the five days over seventy-five miles of trail
along which his traps were distributed.

Ed Matheson's trail was so arranged that he also arrived at his last
tilt on Friday evening, and he and Bob thus shared the tilt each
fortnight from Friday until Monday.

Saturdays were occupied in making repairs and in doing the thousand
and one odd jobs always at hand, Sunday in rest, and on Monday the
return journey began which br