When the first settlements were made, Northern Ontario had no railroads to market its produce. Four thousand miles of track have since been built, including two lines now a part of the Canadian National. One of these goes through the very centre of the Clay Belt and has settlements all along it. At almost every river crossing is a lumber mill, for Northern Ontario’s vast forest stretches and the water-power in its streams have made it an important producer of lumber and wood pulp. The trees of the Clay Belt are mostly of a small growth, therefore chiefly valuable for pulp and easier to handle in clearing the land. Ontario has set aside thirteen million acres of forest reserves, nine tenths of which is in the northern part of the province. The Nipigon and Timagami reserves are each larger than Rhode Island and provide camping grounds unequalled in the Dominion. Lake Timagami is dotted with hundreds of islands and is a favourite haunt of canoeists. Farther west, near the Manitoba boundary, the beautiful Lake of the Woods is another famous camping and hunting district. Immense herds of caribou roam through Northern Ontario. They are to be seen in droves of hundreds and sometimes of thousands. They have cut their trails across the country, and a hunter to whom I have been talking tells me that from his camp at night he can often hear the rushing noise they make as they move through the woods. In the forests farther south moose are found in great numbers. These animals are browsers rather than grass eaters, their necks being so short that they have to get down on their knees when they eat grass. Deer and smaller animals also abound, wild ducks and geese are plentiful, and the streams are filled with fish. Indeed, it is little wonder that each year sees thousands of campers making their way to this “sportsman’s paradise.” CHAPTER XIX THE TWIN LAKE PORTS I am at the nozzle of the mighty grain funnel down which Canada’s wheat crop is pouring into the boats of Lake Superior. The prairie provinces of the Dominion produce in one year almost a half billion bushels of wheat, and after the harvest a steady stream of golden grain rolls into the huge elevators of Port Arthur and Fort William, its sister city, three miles away.