city-dwelling men. Then, too, is not any production of the creative
arts--a poem, a story, a play, a painting, or a statue--but a
reflection of the composer's soul? So . . . when you read a book
filled with inhuman characters, you have taken the measure of the man
who wrote it, you have seen a reflection of the author's soul.
Furthermore, when people exclaim: "What's the matter with the movies?"
The answer is: Nothing . . . save that the screens too often reflect
the degenerate souls of the movie directors.

But the Indian--how he has been slandered for centuries! When in
reality it is just as Warren, the Historian of the Ojibways,
proclaimed: "There was consequently less theft and lying, more devotion
to the Great Spirit, more obedience to their parents, and more chastity
in man and woman, than exists at the present day, since their baneful
intercourse with the white race." And Hearne, the northern traveller,
ended a similar contention--more than a hundred years ago--by saying:
"It being well known that those who have the least intercourse with
white men are by far the happiest."

That night, as I turned in, I had occasion to look through my kit bag,
and there I found, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, the photograph--lent
to me for six weeks--of the charming Athabasca. Being alone in my
tent, I carefully unfolded its wrapper, and drawing the candle a little
nearer, I gazed at her beautiful face. Again I wondered about
Son-in-law. . . .


A RACE FOR THE PORTAGE

At three o'clock next morning the camp was astir. In the half light of