Off a little jetty some lads are fishing.  There is a camaraderie felt by all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of moose-meat which is the community bait.  Within half an hour, rejoicing in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the little village.  The elements that compose it?  Here we have a large establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of Cree-Scots half-breeds.

Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire.  But English is at a discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all sides.  The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the place,—­tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike dogs.  From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the silences.  The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the language of the latitude.  As Count von Hammerstein says, “What means a camel to a Cree?  I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a needle’s eye.”  The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its coat of shimmering whiteness.  Into the prohibition territory that stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only “for medicinal purposes.”  By an easy transferring of epithets, the term “permit” has come to signify the revivifying juice itself.

[Illustration:  Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]

One illusion vanishes here.  We had expected to find the people of the North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a rule they are not.  There is no discussion of American banks and equally no mention of the wheat crop.  The one conjecture round the bar and in the home is, “When will the rabbits run this year?” The rabbits in the North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.  Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year means a scarcity of all kinds of fur.  As surely as wheat stands for bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of the North.

It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson’s Bay Company making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in barter during the previous winter.  The big open scows, or “sturgeon-heads,” which are to form our convoy have been built, the freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the word which is the keynote of the Cree character,—­“Kee-am,” freely translated, “Never mind,” “Don’t get excited,” “There’s plenty of time,” “It’s all right,” “It will all come out in the wash.”