“But every seventh year there may be famine.  Here in the North it is the varying hare, the rabbit, that feeds the children of the trap-lines and the marten and fox they trap, and every seventh year there comes a mysterious disease.  One year there are rabbits in millions, the next there are none.  The lynx and the wolf and the fox starve, there are no fur bearers in the traps, the trapper faces the blizzard and the cold to find empty deadfalls day after day, and however skillfully he may hunt there is no game for his gun.  What would he do, but starve, if it were not for the fur trader and the post, where there is flour, a little food to help John the Trapper through the winter?  The people about us are not thin in the waist.  Josephine has made a little oasis of plenty where John the Trapper is safe in good years and bad.  That’s why I buy fur.”

The giant’s eyes were flushed with enthusiasm again.  He pushed the cigars across the table to Philip, and one of his fists was knotted.

“She wants me to publish a lot of these things,” he went on.  “She says they are facts which would interest the whole world.  Perhaps that is so.  Fur is gotten with hardship and danger and suffering.  It may be there are not many people who know that up here at the top end of the world there is a country of forest and stream twenty times as large as the State of Ohio, and in which the population per square mile is less than that of the Great African Desert.  And it’s all because everyone must live off the game.  Everything goes back to that.  Let something happen, some little thing—­a migration of game, a case of measles.  The Indians will die if there are not white men near to help them.  That’s why Josephine makes me buy fur.”

He pointed to the wall behind Philip.  Over the door through which they had just come hung a huge, old-fashioned flint-lock six feet in length.  There was something like the snarl of an animal in John Adare’s voice when he spoke again.

“That’s the tool of the Northland,” he said.  “That is the only tool John the Trapper knows, all he can know in a land where even trees are stunted and there are no plows.  His clothes and the blankets he weaves of twisted strips of rabbit fur are adapted to the cold, he is a master of the canoe and the most skilful trapper in the world, but in all else he must be looked after like a child.  He is still largely one of God’s men, this John the Trapper.  He hasn’t any measurements of value.  He doesn’t know what the dollar means.  He measures his wealth in ‘skins,’ and when he trades the basis for whatever mental calculations he may make is in the form of lead bullets taken from one tin-pan and transferred to another.  He doesn’t keep track of figures.  He trusts alone to the white man’s word, and only those who understand him, who have dealt with him for years, can be trusted not to take advantage of his faith.  That’s why I buy fur—­to give John his chance to live.”