spring came. It was like a great storm that
had swept through a forest of tall trees. A storm of suffering that
left heads bowed, shoulders bent, and minds gone. Yes, GONE!

Since that winter of Le Mort Rouge I know of eyes into which the life
of laughter will never come again; I know of strong men who became as
little children; I have seen faces that were fair with youth shrivel
into age--and my people call it noot' akutawin keskwawin--the cold and
hungry madness. May God help Andre Beauvais!

I will tell the story now.

It was in June. The last of the mush-snows had gone early, nearly a
fortnight before, and the waters were free from ice, when word was
brought to me that Father Boget was dying at Old Fort Reliance. Father
Boget was twenty years older than I, and I called him mon pere. He was
a father to me in our earlier years. I made haste to reach him that I
might hold his hand before he died, if that was possible. And you,
Sergeant McVeigh, who have spent years in that country of the Great
Slave, know what a race with death from Christie Bay to Old Fort
Reliance would be. To follow the broken and twisted waters of the Great
Slave would mean two hundred miles, while to cut straight across the
land by smaller streams and lakelets meant less than seventy. But on
your maps that space of seventy miles is a blank. You have in it no
streams and no larger waters. You know little of it. But I can tell
you, for I have been though it. It is a Lost Hell. It is a vast country
in which berry bushes grow abundantly, but on which there are no
berries, where there are forests and swamps, but not a living creature
to inhabit them; a country of water in which there are no fish, of air
in which there are no birds, of plants without flowers--a reeking,
stinking country of brimstone, a hell. In your Blue Books you have
called it the Sulphur Country. And this country, as you draw a line
from Christie Bay to Old Fort Reliance, is straight between. Mon pere
was dying, and my time was short. I decided to venture it--cut across
that Sulphur Country, and I sought for a man to accompany me. I could
find none. To the Indian it was the land of Wetikoo--the Devil Country;
to the Breeds it was filled with horror. Forty miles distant there was
a man I knew would go, a white man. But to reach him would lose me
three days, and I was about to set out alone when the stranger came. He
was, indeed, a strange man. When he came to what I called my chatea