t swam boldly ahead of us in the river. He kept far
enough away to be out of range, so that no one shot him. I use the
word shot in deference to the untaught urban folk into whose hands this
book may pass. What the men really desired was to "trump" him.

We did not see him take to the bank, for we took to the bank ourselves
in order to load wood for the engine. He is a worthy gentleman, the
moose, and should be well esteemed. Dropped in a thicket, hunted by
wolves, unprotected save by his sharp hoof, which, however, will rip
anything softer than a steel plate, he ranges the forests till his
antlers are full-branched, and then, at the age of three, without
costing the Province or the Indian a cent, he tips the scales at a
thousand pounds of meat.

We are invited to the tent of Mrs. Jack Fish, who receives us seated.
This is not owing to any lack of hospitality on her part, but because
she is very old and quite blind. The Oblate Brothers say she is over a
hundred years old, and truly she might pass for the honourable
great-grandmother of all Canada. Her son, with whom she lives, minds a
wood-pile on the Athabasca, but in the winter he has a house of logs at
Tomato Creek to which he retires. All Indians live in tents from
preference, and not from the sordid reason assigned them by the
would-be poet who declares that "Itchie, Mitchie lives in a tent," for
"He can't afford to pay the rent." There are no rented houses in this
country, and no man has ever heard of a landlord. Every person holds
his house, or his several houses, in fee simple. In Great Britain,
these residences would be designated as "shooting boxes."

Neither would it be a sign of mental superiority on the part of the
traveller to consider Jack Knife's job a menial one. Banking
situations or provincial politics may have an importance in the fence
country, but in boreal regions the prime test of intelligence is a
knowledge of how to handle a boat or an axe.

Madam, our hostess, informs the Factor's widow that she keeps quite
well except for an evil and tormenting spirit in her chest. She
desires to know who are in our company, and when she learns that the
_Okimow_, or Great Chief of the Peace River Country, is one of us, she
asks for tobacco. Ah! the Chief at Fort Edmonton would be generous to
her, but he is dead now and there is no tobacco to soothe her pain.
When she was young, her people fought with the Blackfeet tribe in the
Bear Hills, an