In my experience the honesty of the Woods Indian is of a very high
order. The sense of _mine_ and _thine_ is strongly forced by
the exigencies of the North Woods life. A man is always on the move; he
is always exploring the unknown countries. Manifestly it is impossible
for him to transport the entire sum of his worldly effects. The
implements of winter are a burden in summer. Also the return journey
from distant shores must be provided for by food-stations, to be relied
on. The solution of these needs is the cache.
And the cache is not a literal term at all. It _conceals_ nothing.
Rather does it hold aloft in long-legged prominence, for the inspection
of all who pass, what the owner has seen fit to leave behind. A heavy
platform high enough from the ground to frustrate the investigations of
animals is all that is required. Visual concealment is unnecessary,
because in the North Country a cache is sacred. On it may depend the
life of a man. He who leaves provisions must find them on his return,
for he may reach them starving, and the length of his out-journey may
depend on his certainty of relief at this point on his in-journey. So
men passing touch not his hoard, for some day they may be in the same
fix, and a precedent is a bad thing.
[Illustration: NOR NEED YOU HOPE TO POLE A CANOE UPSTREAM AS DO THESE
PEOPLE.]
Thus in parts of the wildest countries of northern Canada I have
unexpectedly come upon a birch canoe in capsized suspension between two
trees; or a whole bunch of snow-shoes depending fruit-like beneath the
fans of a spruce; or a tangle of steel traps thrust into the crevice of
a tree-root; or a supply of pork and flour, swathed like an Egyptian
mummy, occupying stately a high bier.
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