and dogs, and the winter catch of pelts. Soon the trade-house would swarm with swarthy trappers, red-man and half-breed, bartering fox and mink, lynx and otter, for powder, flour, and cloth, or lounging about, smoking Company niggerhead as they gossiped of winter camps and winter trails in the silent places.
Beyond the tepees, where the cleared ground rose to a miniature sand-cliff above the lake, sat a motionless figure silhouetted against the waning western light. Throughout the hours of the long twilight he had been there, as if carved from stone, chin in hands, gazing across the sleeping lake to purple western ridges. But his eyes had not seen the timbered hills of Jackfish, for they looked on a green, northern valley, where swift streams sang through forests of spruce and birch and fir, seeking lakes shimmering in the sun.
It was a valley that had been the hunting-ground of his father and his father's father. For generations, by the law of the north, it had belonged to the family of the Makwa—the bear. For forty miles none but the Makwa trapped its ridges and streams or netted its fish-filled lakes. In the Ojibway tongue it was called Gwanatch Tawadina, The Beautiful Valley, and there David had been born, and as a boy first learned to snare the ptarmigan and snow-shoe rabbit, and later hunt the moose and caribou. In the outlet of these lakes his father had taught him the art of running the white-water and poling the swift current in a birch-bark. There, as a child, he had lain when the camp was asleep, gazing in awe and wonder at the
