and therefore to require constant drying and oiling; and for the same
reason, in winter time, when a hunter is camped for the night, he does
not place his gun near the open fire, but sets it back against a tree,
well out of range of the heat.

On one of their rounds of the trapping trails the boys discovered a
splendid black fox in one of Oo-koo-hoo's traps, and it was with great
pride that the little chaps returned home with the prize.

One sunny day, late in November, while tobogganing with the children on
the hillside, our sport was interrupted by the approach of a young
stranger, an Indian youth of about seventeen. He came tramping along
on snowshoes with his little hunting toboggan behind him on which was
lashed his caribou robe, his tea-pail, his kit bag, and a haunch of
young moose as a present to Amik and his wife. In his hand he carried
his gun in a moose-skin case. He was a good-looking young fellow, and
wore the regulation cream-coloured H. B. _capote_ with hood and
turned-back cuffs of dark blue. He wore no cap, but his hair was
fastened back by a broad yellow ribbon that encircled his head. At
first I thought he was the advance member of a hunting party, but when
I saw the bashful yet persistent way in which he sidled up to Neykia,
and when I observed, too, the shy, radiant glance of welcome she gave
him, I understood; so also did the children, but the little rogues,
instead of leaving the young couple alone, teased their sister aloud,
and followed the teasing with boisterous laughter. It was then that I
obtained my first impression of the mating of the natives of the
northern forest. The sylvan scene reminded me of the mating, too, of
the white people of that same region, and I thought again of the
beautiful Athabasca. Was it in the same way that her young white man
had come so many miles on snowshoes through the winter woods just to