i 9 o THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



child by transforming the smartest suit that ever stepped out of 

 the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints of winter woods. 



This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's 

 training does not stop here. 



When the birds have gone South the silence of a winter forest 

 on a windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a 

 man's breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper 

 acquires a habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. 

 He must learn to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf 

 smell — which means that in keenness and accuracy his sight out- 

 distances the average field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned 

 how to look, how to see, and seeing — discern ; which the average 

 man cannot do even through a field-glass. Then animals have 

 a trick of deceiving the enemy into mistaking them for inanimate 

 things by suddenly standing stock-still in closest peril, unflinching 

 as stone ; and to match himself against them the trapper must 

 also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a statue, though he 

 feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws. 



And these things are only the a b c of the trapper's woodcraft. 



One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer 

 he trapped the more he thought every animal different enough from 

 the fellows of its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a 

 fresh page in the book of forest lore. 



It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout 

 month, corresponding to the late October and early November 

 of the white man, that the trapper sets out through the illimitable 

 stretches of the forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson 

 Bay, between Labrador and the Upper Missouri. 



His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, 

 splits and seams, where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must 

 be filled with rosin and pitch. A light sled, with only runners and 

 cross frame, is made to haul the canoe over still water, where the 

 ice first forms. Sled, provisions, blanket, and fish-net are put in 

 the canoe, not forgetting the most important part of his kit — the 



