Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches
of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python--a python that rested
its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a
great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and
hushed lakes far northward.
The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No
wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the
fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is
lord of those watery roads; when a man would diverge therefrom he must
carry his goods upon his back. There are paths, to be sure, very faint
in places, padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan
tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of Adventurers
laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long before the
Half Moon's prow first cleft those desolate waters. They have been
trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English since that
historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the blood of
all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these paths
lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man familiar
with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur posts or
villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a permanent
abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the shore of a
lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access is gained to the network of
water routes that radiate over the fur country.
Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of its
main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where mink
and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still fairly
plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed families
disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of Indian
summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's catch, a
birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs and
chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced men,
bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.
Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social instinct
had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and French
half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a
crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of
Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed
with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky
woods, at various intervals of distance, could be seen the outline of
each cabin. They were much of a sort--two or three rooms, log-walled,
brush laid upon poles, and sod on top of that for a roof, with
fireplaces built partly of mud, partly of rough stones. Folk in such
circumstances waste no labor in ornamentation. Each family's abiding
place was purely utilitarian. They cultivated no land, and the meadow
during the brief season supplied them with a profusion of delicate
flowers a southern garden could scarcely excel. Aside from a few trees
felled about each home site, their common effort had cleared away the
willows and birch which bordered the creek bank, so that an open landing
was afforded the canoes.