84 The Haute of the Wolverejie and Beaver. 



the articles they need are sold at a very high pi ice, 

 the Company realise an enormous profit. 



But it must be remembered that the labour and 

 expense of getting stores up to these lonely places 

 is excessive. Captain Butler puts the whole case so 

 clearly before the reader that I venture to quote the 

 following passage from his admirable book. He 

 says: "That rough flint gun, which might have 

 done duty in the days of the Stuarts, is worth 

 many a rich sable in the country of the Dogribs and 

 the Loucheaux, and is bartered for skins whose value 

 can be rated at four times their weight in gold ; but 

 the gun on the banks of the Thames, and the gun 

 in the pine woods of the Mackenzie are two widely 

 different articles. The old rough flint, whose bent 

 barrel the Indians will often straighten between the 

 cleft of a tree or in the crevice of a rock, has been 

 made precious by the long labour of many men, by 

 the trackless wastes through which it has been 

 carried, by winter-famine of those who have to 

 vend it, by the years which elapse between its 

 departure from the workshop and the return of that 

 skin of sable or silver fox for which it has been 

 bartered. They are short-sighted men who hold 

 that because the flint pun and the sable possess 

 such different values in London, these articles should 

 also possess their relative values in North America, 



