reat Slave Lake. He has held
council. The cunning of the pale-face, who comes to take the musk-oxen,
is well known. Let the pale-face hunter return to his own
hunting-grounds; let him turn his face from the north. Never will the
chiefs permit the white man to take musk-oxen alive from their country.
The Ageter, the Musk-ox, is their god. He gives them food and fur. He
will never come back if he is taken away, and the reindeer will follow
him. The chiefs and their people would starve. They command the
pale-face hunter to go back. They cry Naza! Naza! Naza!"

"Say, for a thousand miles I've heard that word Naza!" returned the
hunter, with mingled curiosity and disgust. "At Edmonton Indian runners
started ahead of me, and every village I struck the redskins would
crowd round me and an old chief would harangue at me, and motion me
back, and point north with Naza! Naza! Naza! What does it mean?"

"No white man knows; no Indian will tell," answered the interpreter.
"The traders think it means the Great Slave, the North Star, the North
Spirit, the North Wind, the North Lights and the musk-ox god."

"Well, say to the chiefs to tell Ageter I have been four moons on the
way after some of his little Ageters, and I'm going to keep on after
them."

"Hunter, you are most unwise," broke in the commandant, in his
officious voice. "The Indians will never permit you to take a musk-ox
alive from the north. They worship him, pray to him. It is a wonder you
have not been stopped."

"Who'll stop me?"

"The Indians. They will kill you if you do not turn back."

"Faugh! to tell an American plainsman that!" The hunter paused a steady
moment, with his eyelids narrowing over slits of blue fire. "There is
no law to keep me out, nothing but Indian superstition and Naza! And
the greed of the Hudson's Bay people. I am an old fox, not to be fooled
by pretty baits. For years the officers of this fur-trading company
have tried to keep out explorers. Even Sir John Franklin, an
Englishman, could not buy food of them. The policy of the company is to
side with the Indians, to keep out traders and trappers. Why? So they
can keep on cheating the poor savages out of clothing and food by
trading a few trinkets and blankets, a little tobacco and rum for
millions of dollars worth of furs. Have I failed to hire man after man,
Indian after Indian, not to know why I cannot get a helper? Have I, a
plainsman, come a thousand miles alone to be scared by you, or