AN INDIAN VILLAGE 225 



Lesser Slave you stumble upon a London 

 University graduate, who finds the search for 

 fur more fascinating than integral calculus 

 or conic sections. 



"It is becoming usual among hunters and 

 trappers to specialize, as doctors do, and so 

 one hunter, bearwise, bends all his energies 

 towards bearskins; another studies foxes to 

 their downfall; a third hunts moose alone, 

 that big-nosed Hebrew of the woods. Here 

 as elsewhere the man who mixes brain with 

 his bait, and makes a scientific art of a rude 

 craft is the man who succeeds. His trapping 

 is the highest product of nemoral science and 

 not the cometary career of luck of the rule- 

 of-thumb trapper. It is a contest of wits 

 worthy the cleverest. The furbearers, as the 

 years pass, become more, rather than less 

 wary, and the days of the magenta string tying 

 a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are 

 long past. The man who used to 'make 

 fur' in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's 

 Indian, the extinct product of a past race that 

 never existed. 



"The Canadian trapper eats or dries every 

 ounce of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh- 

 covering of the skull to the feet and the en- 

 trails. As soon as the skins of bear and mus- 



