Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks above the reach of animal marauders—­testimony to the honesty of the passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city can not boast of its denizens.

“I’ve gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times,” declared the head of one of the big fur companies, “and left five hundred dollars’ worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were starving owing to the rabbit famine.”

In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice—­a matter of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to Prince Albert and back.  “Oh, no, we’re not far,” said a lonely-faced Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me.  “When my little boy took sick last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles.  There happened to be a doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge.”

But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate where you can’t find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind his dog sleigh in this section.  He had become overheated running and had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins.  At a bend in the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes.  Before he had thought he had sicked the dogs on them.  With a yell they were off out of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his garments.  Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet.  To make matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on.  The wind was against the direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse without an answering sound.  It was two o’clock in the morning before the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.

Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North.  They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith.  The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—­make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out.  In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters.  The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the slow keel.