Two of the animals of our forest I never could stomach and very few Indians eat them, be they ever so much pushed for food, and these are: the otter and mink. Their flesh is oily, black and highly flavored, resembling the meat of seal, only more so! The Indians as a rule look down with contempt on a fellow Indian who eats otter or mink, whether from necessity or from an acquired and perverse taste. I venture to opine my little sketch will set many of my hunter friends thinking and perhaps make a few converts. You won't repent it. * * * Forty years ago, before the country was opened up to civilization and the usual provisions of the white man were imported into the wilds, the great staple foods of the territories, from the Labrador Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, consisted of buffalo, caribou, white fish and rabbits. According to the parts of the country where these animals resorted, the Indians, traders and trappers, lived almost exclusively on their flesh, either in the fresh, dried or pemican state. All foods, not imported, went under the name of country produce, and as flour is the staff of life to the white man, so was buffalo, caribou, rabbit or white fish to the dwellers of the north country. Beaver, partridge, porcupine and other small prey, a kind of entree, or side dish, got only at odd times, and not to be depended on for regular three times a day diet. The quantity of any one of these four foods required to sustain, even a family of six, during a long northern winter, was something to make a layman incredulous. The Indians living about the plains of the lower Saskatchewan and foothills of the Rockies not only lived on the buffalo, but made up immense quantities of pemican, which was parched in summer skin bags, weighing about sixty pounds each, and traded for ammunition, cloth, beads, hatchets, etc., at the forts. From these bases of supply the bags of meat were sent to posts farther north, and used for tripping and feeding the men about the post. Large quantities were floated down each spring from Fort Ellis, Qu Appelli and other plain forts, by the Assiniboine to Fort Garry and from there in larger boats to Norway House, on Lake Winnipeg, which in those days was the receiving and distributing factory for all the country north and east, and had the distinction of being the place of council each year. The people inhabiting the country embraced by the Mackenzie River, Great Bear Lake, and the coast of Lake Winnipeg, subsisted almost entirely on white fish. These were killed in great numbers each spawning season, not only for their own food, but for their team dogs as well, the posts putting past from ten to one hundred thousand, according to the importance of the place and the mouths to feed. The fish were hung in number on skewers as taken from the water, the sharpened stake being run through the fish near the tail.