rv 



THE INCONNU WHAT IT IS NOT 



WHO of sporting tastes has not from his 

 boyhood read of the voyages of the early 

 explorers of the sub-Arctic regions 

 Hearne and Pond and Mackenzie, and those others 

 who went North before there were even those car- 

 tographic bluffs which now pass as maps of that far- 

 off country ? And which of us, so reading, has not 

 retained some vague remembrance of the mysterious 

 animal known as the inconnu, found in the fauna 

 of that far-off land? 



Such, at least, was my own youthful experience. 

 Later on, passing from callow youth, when I had 

 ceased to read of early voyageurs and was trying to 

 pay for a dress suit on the installment plan which 

 fully occupied my mind for some years I still 

 retained a hazy idea that somewhere up North there 

 was an animal which Sir Alexander Mackenzie had 

 been unable to place and which he had called the 

 what-is-it or the unknown or the inconnu. In my 

 trusting soul I hoped one day to meet an inconnu, 

 whatever it might be. 



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