o honor, obey and
to trust you. And so I shall tell you the story without prejudice, with
the gratitude of a missioner who has lived his life for forty years in
the wilderness, gentlemen.

I am a Catholic. It is four hundred miles straight north by dog-sledge
or snowshoe to my cabin, and this is the first time in nineteen years
that I have been down to the edge of the big world which I remember now
as little more than a dream. But up there I knew that my duty lay, just
at the edge of the Big Barren. See! My hands are knotted like the snarl
of a tree. The glare of your lights hurts my eyes. I traveled to-day in
the middle of your street because my moccasined feet stumbled on the
smoothness of your walks. People stared, and some of them laughed.

Forty years I have lived in another world. You--and especially you
gentlemen who have trailed in the Patrols of the north--know what that
world is. As it shapes different hands, as it trains different feet, as
it gives to us different eyes, so also it has bred into my forest
children hearts and souls that may be a little different, and a code of
right and wrong that too frequently has had no court of law to guide
it. So judge fairly, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police! Understand,
if you can.

It was a terrible winter--that winter of Le Mort Rouge. So far down as
men and children now living will remember, it will be called by my
people the winter of Famine and Red Death. Starvation, gentlemen--and
the smallpox. People died like--what shall I say? It is not easy to
describe a thing like that. They died in tepees. They died in shacks.
They died on the trail. From late December until March I said my
prayers over the dead. You are wondering what all this has to do with
my story; why it matters that the caribou had migrated in vast herds to
the westward, and there was no food; why it matters that there were
famine and plague in the great unknown land, and that people were dying
and our world going through a cataclysm. My backwoods eyes can see your
thought. What has all this to do with Joseph Brecht? What has it to do
with Andre Beauvais? Why does this little forest priest take up so much
time in telling so little? you ask. And because it has its
place--because it has its meaning--I ask you for permission to tell my
story in my own way. For these sufferings, this hunger and pestilence
and death, had a strange and terrible effect on many human creatures
that were left alive when