mal's skull
to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.

The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range
is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
the graves by the wayside.

[Illustration: Birch-barks at Fond du Lac]

Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are _cached_, and the trail strikes into
the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.

Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an