forests and the wild things that had made him.

Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three
generations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of
Sixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a
canoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great
Slave and thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a
number of remarkable ethnological changes. The racial
characteristics of the world he is entering change swiftly. The
thin-faced Chippewa with his alert movements and high-bowed canoe
turns into the slower moving Cree, with his broader cheeks, his
more slanting eyes, and his racier birchbark. And even the Cree
changes as he lives farther north; each new tribe is a little
different from its southernmost neighbor, until at last the Cree
looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place. And the
Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.
Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is
still broader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human
history call him Eskimo.

The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular
point. There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of
that hundred year story which was to have its finality in Bram.
But there were more in time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first
with the Chippewa, and then with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa
Johnson blood, when at last it reached the Eskimo, had in it also
a strain of Chippewyan. It is curious how the name itself lived.
Johnson! One entered a tepee or a cabin expecting to find there a
white man, and was startled when he discovered the truth.