as the wind would whisper, for there are stories weird and strange
that must be spoken softly. They darken no printed pages. The
trees listen to them beside red camp-fires at night. Lovers tell
them in the glad sunshine of day. Some of them are chanted in
song. Some of them come down through the generations, epics of the
wilderness, remembered from father to son. And each year there are
the new things to pass from mouth to mouth, from cabin to cabin,
from the lower reaches of the Mackenzie to the far end of the
world at Athabasca Landing. For the three rivers are always makers
of romance, of tragedy, of adventure. The story will never be
forgotten of how Follette and Ladouceur swam their mad race
through the Death Chute for love of the girl who waited at the
other end, or of how Campbell O'Doone, the red-headed giant at
Fort Resolution, fought the whole of a great brigade in his effort
to run away with a scow captain's daughter.

And the brigade loved O'Doone, though it beat him, for these men
of the strong north love courage and daring. The epic of the lost
scow--how there were men who saw it disappear from under their
very eyes, floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in
the skies--is told and retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose
eyes are the smoldering flames of an undying superstition, and
these same men thrill as they tell over again the strange and
unbelievable story of Hartshope, the aristocratic Englishman who
set off into the North in all the glory of monocle and
unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war, became a
chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired,
little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.

But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are