18 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



if nowhere else. At other times if he took off his face 

 net to get a breath of free air, they stung him on ears 

 and nose and cheek. So they stung all the rest of us, 

 and we itched no less than he. But we had been inocu- 

 lated in other years with the virus of the mosquito and 

 had developed antitoxins that prevented inflammation, 

 while he was almost fresh from mosquitoless England. 

 Wherever an insect bit he became flecked and bloated. 

 Then he scratched and rubbed the swellings till they were 

 raw and began to smart more than they itched. 



But if he was depressed by the appearance of his 

 prospective converts and tortured by the heat and the 

 insects, he still felt a mild craving for adventure. He 

 looked on the map to see that he was veritably hundreds 

 of miles from railway and telegraph, and thereby suc- 

 ceeded in half-convincing himself that the country could 

 not be in reality as tame as it looked. Somewhere ro- 

 mance must be lurking concealed by the tangled under- 

 brush. A few times we had seen from our steamer black 

 bears hunched up in the tops of trees, and once or twice 

 our Indian deckhands had been allowed to go ashore and 

 murder these defenseless animals that had been scared 

 into climbing a tree by the noise of our steamer. Our 

 missionary had no real thirst for blood so he never joined 

 in these expeditions. But when the steamer tied up to 

 the bank either because night was about to fall or else 

 because they needed wood for engine fuel, he used to go 

 in search of Mild adventure — to discover and report new 

 flowers, stra - qe birds or the tracks of moose. 



One evening at twilight he met in the bush a pretty 

 animal of black and white stripes, slow-moving and ap- 

 proachable. In fact, it was standing still in the path 

 before him. so he killed it with a club. Upon the 



