By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,—­tall, straight, fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch blood with Sioux.  On his coat shine two African Service medals, one granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government.  His grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white.  He married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children.  At the time of Riel’s first half-breed rising, Kennedy’s services attracted the notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley.  When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum, he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.  It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this Scots-Sioux,—­strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief.  Reaching Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who, too, was later to win his spurs.  Round the camp-fire we induce Alec Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile, of Africa’s big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of the swart Arabs and Egyptians.  But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec has little to say.  It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, “Do not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?”

Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him.  As a young fellow of the H.B.  Co. says, “It’s beastly bad form to ask any man who comes in here anything about his former history.  If he wants to be a wilful-missing, that’s his privilege.”  However, fate has thrown in our way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not.  From Chipewyan up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or less garbled chapters of it.  As great good luck will have it, Louise herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave.  We soon make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs. Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.

[Illustration:  Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron]

Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts.  Twenty years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen.  With her sister, aged eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little brothers and cousins, en famille, they pitched off from Little Red River to make winter camp in the woods.  The camp made, all the younger men set off to hunt meat for the others.  Neither moose nor caribou was seen, and on and on they went.  They shot one small beaver and ate it, and the white earth afforded no further food.  Starving and hopeless, they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.