280 TKAVEL, ADVENTUKE, AND SPORT. 



the number of plaits with which they are coifes. The 

 women always wear leggings from the knee to the 

 ankle, with a petticoat reaching to the calf of the leg ; 

 an open cloth jacket, with a sort of boddice supported 

 by braces over the shoulders, completes their costume. 

 The men were generally clothed in woollen garments, 

 mostly of quaint old-fashioned patterns purchased at 

 the Hudson Bay posts. Having become accustomed 

 to the coats made in the style common here a hundred 

 years ago, the Indians will not purchase those of any 

 other pattern ; so that the Company, who have their 

 tailoring done in London, have to get the clothes they 

 require for exportation made accordingly. Unlike their 

 squaws, they almost always wear some sort of shirt ; 

 and although they are frequently without trousers, 

 they never, from earliest boyhood, go without a 

 breech-cloth. They seldom or never build a hut of 

 even the roughest description, living, as their ances- 

 tors have done for centuries, in wigwams made with 

 birch-bark stretched over poles driven into the ground 

 in a circle, and all meeting at the top. An aperture 

 is left to serve as a chimney, for they light a fire and 

 cook within during cold weather. The space left as 

 a door is closed by a curtain. Altogether it is a cold 

 residence in a climate where the Fahrenheit thermo- 

 meter ranges for months from zero to many degrees 

 below it. 



During the whole of our journey to Fort Francis 

 we seldom had a favourable wind. Although this 



