LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 113 



It had a hole in it for a stovepipe. There was plenty of 

 driftwood everywhere and we kept a roaring fire in a 

 sheet-iron stove every evening until bed time. When we 

 went to sleep the camp became exceedingly cold. While 

 the fire was going, sparks used to drop on our canvas 

 roof and burn holes in it, so that before the trip was over 

 it looked a good deal like a sieve. By shifting my head 

 a little I used to be able to lie in bed and follow for an 

 hour through one of the holes the motion of some good- 

 sized star. When it was forty below outside, I think the 

 night temperature inside of the camp must have been 

 about twenty below. This is an easily avoidable hardship, 

 as I discovered later. However, I was expecting hard- 

 ships and was rather pleased to find that at last I had to 

 endure something disagreeable. We had plenty of bed- 

 ding and were not actually cold, but I had to cover up 

 my head in sleeping, and that is unpleasant. 



As a boy I had read James Fenimore Cooper and many 

 other stories about Indians and Eskimos. One of the 

 ideas I got from all these books was that an Indian never 

 gets lost. Traveling down the Mackenzie River I had 

 been told by some of the Hudson's Bay traders that this 

 was correct and that an Indian is almost infallible in find- 

 ing his way. Other traders told me that an Indian gets 

 lost as easily as anybody, and those called me to notice 

 that the other traders who had told me that an Indian 

 never loses his way were stay-at-homes. This I verified. 

 Perhaps two-thirds of the northern fur traders are traders 

 primarily and remain in or near their cabins the whole 

 time, no matter how many years they live in the North. 

 A few are of an adventurous disposition and travel and 

 hunt with Indians. These latter were usually if not al- 

 ways of the opinion that a white man with the same 



