Islands as a servant of the Hudson's Bay Company. A few years later
he married a native girl, and then left the company's service to
become a hunter.

He had been careful of his wages, and as he blazed new hunting trails
into the wilderness, used his savings to purchase steel traps with
which to stock the trails. Other trappers, too poor to buy traps for
themselves, were glad to hunt on shares the trails Douglas made, and
now he was reaping a good income from them. He was in fact the richest
man in the Bay.

He was kind, generous and fatherly. The people of the Bay looked up to
him and came to him when they were in trouble, for his advice and
help. Many a poor family had Douglas Campbell's flour barrel saved
from starvation in a bad winter, and God knows bad winters come often
enough on the Labrador. Many an ambitious youngster had he started in
life, as he was starting Bob Gray now.

The Big Hill trail, far up the Grand River, was the newest and deepest
in the wilderness of all the trails Douglas owned--deeper in the
wilderness than that of any other hunter. Just below it and adjoining
it was William Campbell's--a son of Douglas--a young man of nineteen
who had made his first winter's hunt the year before our story
begins; below that, Dick Blake's, and below Dick's was Ed Matheson's.

In preparing for the winter hunt it was more convenient for these men
to take their supplies to their tilts by boat up the Grand River than
to haul them in on toboggans on the spring ice, as nearly every other
hunter, whose trapping ground was not upon so good a waterway, was
compelled to do, and so it was that they were now at the trading post