r cabin or
tepee, John Cummins would give up the duties of his trap line to
accompany her, and would pitch his tent or make him a shack close by,
where he could watch over her, hunt food for the afflicted people and
keep up the stack of needed firewood and water.

But there were times when the "calls" came during the husband's
absence, and, if they were urgent, Meleese went alone, trusting to her
own splendid strength and courage. A half-breed woman came to her one
day, in the dead of winter, from twenty miles across the lake. Her
husband had frozen one of his feet, and the "frost malady" would kill
him, she said, unless he had help. Scarcely knowing what she could do
in such a case, Meleese left a note for her husband, and on snowshoes
the two heroic women set off across the wind-swept and unsheltered
lake, with the thermometer fifty degrees below zero. It was a terrible
venture, but the two won out. When Meleese saw the frozen man, she knew
that there was but one thing to do, and with all the courage of her
splendid heart she amputated his foot. The torture of that terrible
hour no one will ever know. But when John Cummins returned to his home
and, wild with fear, followed across the lake, he scarcely recognized
the Meleese who flung herself sobbing into his arms when he found her.
For two weeks after that Meleese herself was sick. Thus, through the
course of years, it came about that it was, indeed, a stranger in the
land who had not heard her name. During the summer months Meleese's
work, in place of duty, was a pleasure. With her husband she made canoe
journeys for fifty miles about her home, hearing with her the teachings
of cleanliness, of health and of God. She was the first to hold to her
own loving breast many little children who came into their wild and
desolate inheritance of life. She was the first to teach a hundred
childish lips to say "Now I lay me down to sleep," and more than one
woman she made to see the clear and starry way to brighter life.

Far up on Reindeer Lake, close to the shore, there is a towering
"lob-stick tree"--which is a tall spruce or cedar lopped of all its
branches to the very crest, which is trimmed in the form of a plume. A
tree thus shriven and trimmed is the Cree cenotaph to one held in
almost spiritual reverence, and the tree far up on Reindeer Lake is one
of the half dozen or more "lob-sticks" dedicated to Meleese. Six weeks
Meleese and John Cummins spent in an Indian camp at