1224 
FOREST AND STREAM 
It is Something of a Trick to Round up a Team of Husky Dogs, and Trying on the Temper When the Thermometer is Forty Below and Falling. 
that of the clerks, the store wherein is kept and 
displayed the gaudy trade goods; the depot 
which each year holds a king’s ransom in furry 
pelts, these are the chief buildings of the place. 
Stretched on either flank along the bank are 
the houses of the half-breeds and dependents. 
Smoke wreaths curl from every chimney; per¬ 
haps a mission, a chapel, and a school. Smoke- 
blackened smithy and boat-building shed are in¬ 
dispensable and at some of the larger establish¬ 
ments a barn and stables, and a saw-mill, have 
become fixtures. Several of these fur-trading 
posts have grown into little cities of the wilds. 
Lounging about the buildings, or on the bank 
in front, one sees a half-breed in tasselated cap, 
or a group of Indians in blanket robes or dirty 
white capotes; everyone is smoking; the pointed 
poles of a wigwam or two rise beyond the houses 
and over all is the tapering flagstaff. Around 
the great silent hills stand shrouded in their 
winter white, or fringed with spear-pointed 
spruce tops and some few hundred yards back 
of the post a rude cross or wooden railing 
blown over by the tempest, discolored by rain 
or snowdrift, peeps pitifully forth from the deep 
mantle of snow, marking the lonely resting-places 
of the dead. 
I doubt if it be possible to know more acute 
comfort, for its measure is exactly the measure 
of that other extremity of discomfort which x- 
cessive cold and hardship have carried with them. 
Nor does that feeling of home and contentment 
lose aught for want of a welcome at the thres¬ 
hold of the lonely stopping-place. Nothing 's 
held too good for the way-farer; the best bed 
and the best table are his. He perhaps has 
brought letters or messages from long absent 
friends, or he comes with news of the outside 
world; but be he bearer of such things, or only 
the chance carrier of his own fortunes, he is 
still a welcome visitor to the Hudson’s Bay Fort. 
A year passed at Fort George and once more 
the eyes of the little colony were turned anx¬ 
iously toward the south. This time I was 
numbered among the exiles and throughout many 
weary months the home-hunger had been gnaw¬ 
ing at tired hearts. Eight days of March had 
passed without a sign of an in-coming dog- 
train darkening the expansion of the frozen sea. 
The morning of the ninth, though, brought a 
change. Far away in the hazy drift and powder 
which hung low upon the surface of the ice the 
figures of two men and one sled of dogs became 
visible. Was it only Thomas Bluefeather, one 
of the Fort George tribe, coming like a good 
convert to his prayers at the Mission House? 
Or was it the much-wished-for, long-looked-for 
packet? 
It soon declared itself; the dogs were steer¬ 
ing for the fort and not for the Mission. Blue- 
feather might be an indifferent Christian, but 
had the whole college of Cardinals been lodged 
at Fort George they must have rejoiced that it 
was not Bluefeather coming to mass, but the 
winter packet from the great “outside” coming 
to the fort. 
What a welcome did those frost-burnt guides 
receive when their tired dogs had scrambled up 
the bank and dropped, panting in their tracks! 
What reading we had on that glorious afternoon ! 
News from the far-off busy world; letters from 
the far-off quiet home; tidings of great men 
passed away, word of new achievements, rumors 
of war; glad news and sorry news, borne through 
months of toil a thousand miles over the winter 
waste. The news might be a hundred days old 
—it was that morning’s mail for us. 
What does the year-old journal, or the letter 
from home, mean to those whose home is now 
made in the wilderness. Few of us can know; 
few still could realize. Even civilization—what 
the man south of the Height of Land knows as 
civilization—has scarcely reached these dreary 
outposts in the wilds. ’Tis true, the trader, 
the missionary, the soldier, forerunners of the 
army of civilization, are there. But the main- 
guard is yet hundreds of miles in the rear. To 
know the loneliness of these exiles of the north¬ 
ern wastes one must spend a twelvemonth north 
of “fifty-eight”; get away from roll-top desks, 
paved streets, and a menu card; forget the color 
of the mail-carrier’s uniform, and the music of 
an orchestra; put the cities “smoke dawn” below 
the horizon; and get away beyond the end of 
steel. Then would one join the other exiles 
in calling the state of human existence on those 
barren, ice-bound shores, what the trader and 
the soldier before you have called it, what the 
But Notice the Smile That Won’t Come Off, on 
This Fellow-He’s Been Fed. 
missionary dare not. Full well would be learnt 
that the sum of civilization is not made up 
of the few paltry necessities one has with him, 
but of all those tempting desirable things that 
had to be left behind. 
So, to the fur traders at Fort George, and 
those at its companion posts in the farther north, 
the arrival of the mail packet is the event of the 
year. It is the one ray of sunshine breaking from 
a twelve months’ cloud of gloom. God knows 
their lives are lonely. They come from the 
remote isles or hill-sheltered hamlets of the 
Scottish highlands; many from a city desk; and 
the mind tires when one thinks of the remote¬ 
ness of some of these more northern fur posts. 
Long years pass ere they can again set eyes on 
the shores of the old land, or return to tread the 
streets of the cities of their birth. For some of 
them there is no return; they may have married 
native women of the country; the “call of the 
wild”, the wanderlust, that indefinable something 
that draws and holds men to the out of the way 
places of the earth, has many in its bondage; 
in some cases the home circles in the old land 
are forever barred to the prodigal. These life 
exiles scattered throughout the fur-trader’s coun¬ 
try are fancifully known to their comrades as 
“the men who can’t come back.” 
Dreary and monotonous beyond words is the 
winter home life and hardship often is its rule. 
To spend the long, long cold winter months, 
when the dawn and the dusk, separated by only a 
few hours’ daylight, closes into the long, dark 
night. What memory of early days in High¬ 
land glen, or wave-swept Stornaway beach, must 
come to these men as the storm sweeps ’ the 
stunted spruces, and wrack and drift hurl; in 
from across the frozen sea. Perhaps some viAa 
of the paternal fireside, or a dreamy vision of a 
lonely Scottish loch banishes the dreary Hudsan’s 
Bay. But only for the hour. 
The log fire in the main hall had burned low 
to a glowing red ere the last letter had been 
read. The quiet of the room was unbroken. 
Then the junior clerk, a raw Scotch lad just 
a year out from Aberdeen, slowly wound up the 
phonograph. Gently, as though loth to disturb 
the sacred atmosphere of the faraway homes 
brought thus near by the loving messages just 
received, he went through the pile of worn 
records till he found the one he sought. Then 
from the horn floated out on those wondrous 
notes, the simple words of that old, old song— 
the song which is heard at lonely camp-fires 
and in the snow-enshrouded wilderness shack; 
which is sung by sailors at the wheel as the 
canvas-clouded ship reels on under the midnight 
stars through tumbling seas—the song which has 
reached the hearts of a nation and lives in the 
memory of a people—“Be it ever so humble, 
there is no place like home.” 
