3 2o THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



them stand while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a 

 blizzard for the lost path ? In the middle of the last century, one 

 of that famous family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown 

 to go north to Red River in Canada. He never went back to 

 Georgetown and he never reached Red River ; but his coat was 

 found fluttering from a tree, a death signal to attract the first 

 passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was discovered not far 

 off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit pest and the 

 rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves seldom 

 give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains, lick- 

 ing up the stains of the bleeding feet, or hanging spectrally on the 

 dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on ; but 

 they seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where 

 the wolves followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family 

 from the North down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. 

 What man hunter would follow so far ? 



The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the 

 days, till at last the sun, which has rolled down in a wheel of fire, 

 dwindles to a disc, the disc to a rim — then no rim at all comes up, 

 and it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of 

 endless unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the 

 starlight brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains 

 and shafts and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-colored fire — 

 all brighten the polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is 

 the region chiefly hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and 

 Chippewyan half-breeds. The regular Northern hunters do not 

 go as far as the Arctics, but choose their hunting-ground somewhere 

 in the region of "little sticks," meaning the land where timber 

 growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs. 



The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written 

 across the white page of the snow. If there are> claw-marks, bird 

 signs of northern grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, 

 ermine will be plentiful ; for the northern birds with their clogged 

 stockings of feet feathers have a habit of floundering under the 



