irst boom of the cannon
unlocks the long-closed portals of connection between Moose Fort and
England; the second salvo shuts them up again in their frozen domains
for another year! A century and a half ago, the band of "adventurers
trading into Hudson's Bay" felled the first trees and pitched their
tents on the shores of James's Bay, and successive generations of
fur-traders have kept the post until the present day; yet there is
scarcely a symptom of the presence of man beyond a few miles round the
establishment. Years ago the fort was built, and there it stands now,
with new tenants, it is true, but in its general aspect unchanged; and
there it is likely to remain, wrapped in its barrier of all but
impregnable solitude, for centuries to come.

Nevertheless, Moose is a comfortable place in its way, and when
contrasted with other trading establishments is a very palace and temple
of luxury. There are men within its walls who can tell of log-huts and
starvation, solitude and desolation, compared with which Moose is a
terrestrial paradise. Frank Morton, whom we have introduced in the
first chapter, said, on his arrival at Moose, that it appeared to him to
be the very fag-end of creation. He had travelled night and day for six
weeks from what he considered the very outskirts of civilisation,
through uninhabited forests and almost unknown rivers, in order to get
to it; and while the feeling of desolation that overwhelmed him on his
first arrival was strong upon him, he sighed deeply, and called it a
"horrid dull hole." But Frank was of a gay, hearty, joyous disposition,
and had not been there long ere he loved the old fort dearly. Poor
fellow! far removed though he was from his fellow-men at Moose, he
afterwards learned that he had but obtained an indistinct notion of the
signification of the word "solitude."

There were probably about thirty human beings at Moose, when Mr George
Stanley, one of the principal fur-traders of the place, received orders
from the governor to make preparations, and select men, for the purpose
of proceeding many hundred miles deeper into the northern wilderness,
and establishing a station on the distant, almost unknown, shores of
Ungava Bay. No one at Moose had ever been there before; no one knew
anything about the route, except from the vague report of a few Indians;
and the only thing that was definitely known about the locality at all
was, that its inhabitants were a few wandering trib