He told me, as vividly as though he had
been an eye-witness, of how the canoes must have loomed up suddenly
from between the islands. By-and-by he seized the lamp and conducted me
outside, where hung ponderous ornamental steelyards, on which in the
old days the peltries were weighed.
"It is not so now," said he. "We buy by count, and modern scales weigh
the provisions. And the beaver are all gone."
We re-entered the house in silence. After a while he began briefly to
sketch his own career. Then, indeed, the flavour of the Far North
breathed its crisp, bracing ozone through the atmosphere of the room.
He had started life at one of the posts of the Far North-West. At the
age of twelve he enlisted in the Company. Throughout forty years he had
served her. He had travelled to all the strange places of the North,
and claimed to have stood on the shores of that half-mythical lake of
Yamba Tooh.
"It was snowing at the time," he said prosaically; "and I couldn't see
anything, except that I'd have to bear to the east to get away from
open water. Maybe she wasn't the lake. The Injins said she was, but I
was too almighty shy of grub to bother with lakes."
Other names fell from him in the course of talk, some of which I had
heard and some not, but all of which rang sweet and clear with no
uncertain note of adventure. Especially haunts my memory an impression
of desolate burned trees standing stick-like in death on the shores of
Lost River.
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