And then, after he had stroked the soft fur, and smelled the
buckskin and sweet grasses, and tasted the crumbling maple sugar, and
dressed himself in the barbaric splendours of the North, he could
flatten his little nose against the dim square of light and look out
over the glistening yellow backs of a dozen birchbark canoes to the
distant, rain-blurred hills, beyond which lay the country whence all
these things had come. Do you wonder that in after years that child
hits the Long Trail? Do you still wonder at finding these strange,
taciturn, formidable, tender-hearted men dwelling lonely in the Silent
Places?
The Trader yanked several of the boxes to the centre and prosaically
tumbled about their contents. He brought to light heavy moose-hide
moccasins with high linen tops for the snow; lighter buckskin
moccasins, again with the high tops, but this time of white tanned
doeskin; slipper-like deer-skin moccasins with rolled edges, for the
summer; oil-tanned shoepacs, with and without the flexible leather
sole; "cruisers" of varying degree of height--each and every sort of
footgear in use in the Far North, excepting and saving always the
beautiful soft doeskin slippers finished with white fawnskin and
ornamented with the Ojibway flower pattern for which I sought. Finally
he gave it up.
"I had a few pair. They must have been sent out," said he.
We rummaged a little further for luck's sake, then descended to the
outer air.
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