the caribou. Him fish plenty good. Him kill much
seal. Make big trade. Oh, yes. Plenty big trade. So him come plenty old
man. No him die young. Only very old. Him much wise man."

The white man smiled tolerantly. He shrugged.

"Guess you got a nightmare, Julyman," he said. "Best turn over."

Steve had nothing to add. He knew his scouts as he knew all other
Indians in the wide wilderness of the extreme Canadian north. These
creatures were submerged under a mental cloud of superstition and
mystery. He had no more reason to believe the story of "hibernating"
Indians than he had for believing the hundred and one stories of Indian
folklore he had listened to in his time.

Julyman, too, considered the subject closed. He had said all he had to
say. So the spasm of talk was swallowed up by the silence of the summer
night.

The fire burned low, and was replenished from the wood pile which stood
between the two teepees standing a few yards away in the shadow of the
bush which lined the trail. These men, both white and coloured, had the
habit of the trail deeply ingrained in them. But then, was it not their
life, practically the whole of it? Stephen Allenwood was a police
officer who represented the white man's law in a district as wide as a
good-sized European country, and these scouts were his only assistants.

They were at headquarters now enjoying a brief respite from the endless
trail which claimed all their life and energies. And such was the nature
of their work, and so absorbing the endless struggle of it, that their
focus of holiday-making was little better than sitting over a camp-fire
at night smoking, and occasionally talking, and waiting for the call of
nature summoning them to their blankets.

It was a wonderful night, still and calm, and with a radiance of
starlight overhead. There was the busy hum of insect life from the
adjacent woods, a deep murmur from the sluggish tide of the great
Caribou River which drained the country for miles around. The occasional
sigh that floated upon the air spoke of lofty pine crests bending under
a light top breeze which refrained from disturbing the lower air. The
night left the impression of unbreakable peace, of human content, and a
world where elemental storms were unknown.

But the impression was misleading, as are all such impressions in
nature's wild, and where the human heart beats strongly. There was no
content in the grey eyes of the white man as he sat gazing into