all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
Cree-Scots half-breeds.

Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
place,--tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a
camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal
purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has
come to signify the revivifying juice itself.

[Illustration: Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]

One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the