It was due to a mysterious dispensation of Providence, and a good deal
to Leslie Graeme, that I found myself in the heart of the Selkirks for
my Christmas Eve as the year 1882 was dying. It had been my plan to
spend my Christmas far away in Toronto, with such Bohemian and boon
companions as could be found in that cosmopolitan and kindly city. But
Leslie Graeme changed all that, for, discovering me in the village of
Black Rock, with my traps all packed, waiting for the stage to start
for the Landing, thirty miles away, he bore down upon me with resistless
force, and I found myself recovering from my surprise only after we had
gone in his lumber sleigh some six miles on our way to his camp up in
the mountains. I was surprised and much delighted, though I would not
allow him to think so, to find that his old-time power over me was still
there. He could always in the old 'Varsity days--dear, wild days--make
me do what he liked. He was so handsome and so reckless, brilliant in
his class-work, and the prince of half-backs on the Rugby field, and
with such power of fascination, as would 'extract the heart out of a
wheelbarrow,' as Barney Lundy used to say. And thus it was that I
found myself just three weeks later--I was to have spent two or three
days,--on the afternoon of the 24th of December, standing in Graeme's
Lumber Camp No. 2, wondering at myself. But I did not regret my changed
plans, for in those three weeks I had raided a cinnamon bear's den and
had wakened up a grizzly--But I shall let the grizzly finish the tale;
he probably sees more humour in it than I.

The camp stood in a little clearing, and consisted of a group of three
long, low shanties with smaller shacks near them, all built of heavy,
unhewn logs, with door and window in each. The grub camp, with cook-shed
attached, stood in the middle of the clearing; at a little distance was
the sleeping-camp with the office built against it, and about a hundred