all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these paths
lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man familiar
with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur posts or
villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a permanent
abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the shore of a
lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access is gained to the network of
water routes that radiate over the fur country.

Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of its
main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where mink
and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still fairly
plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed families
disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of Indian
summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's catch, a
birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs and
chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced men,
bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.

Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social instinct
had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and French
half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a
crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of
Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed
with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky
woods, at various intervals of distance, could be seen the outline of
each cabin. They were much of a sort--two or three rooms, log-walled,
brush laid upon poles, and sod on top of that for a roof, with
fireplaces built partly of mud, partly of rough stones. Folk in such
circumstances waste no labor in ornamentation. Each family's abiding
place was purely utilitarian. They cultivated no land, and the meadow