"A little while ago you seemed like my friend. Now you are willing to leave me here where there are no fish, and the deer do not come, and the mosquitoes are worse than any wild animals. What is the meaning of all this?" "I will tell you," the Indian answered, very slowly. "You must pay us for what a white man did to us." "What do you mean?" "Listen, and you shall hear. "Last year, we had fox furs--very many and very fine. We had risked our lives: we had starved and frozen to get them. All over Ungava we had tracked and trapped in the wilderness. "Then--see what happened. A trader came among us. He had much money. It was not like any money we had seen before, but he said it was a new kind of money. And he would give us more of it for our furs than any man had given us before. "He gave us much to drink. We had a feast, and dancing. The trader gave handsome presents to our wives. Beads and bright cloth for dresses. He gave us tobacco, and whiskey. "When we did not know what we were doing, he bought our furs. He bought them all. He gave us this new, strange money and much of it. Then he went away. We fired guns in the air to honor him. We shook hands with him. We thought he was our friend. We promised to be friends with him as long as sun and moon endured. "He smiled, and waved, and went away--and we, we had nothing of him but the money. It was paper, all of it, very bright and new and green, with printed marks on it we could not read. "Some shook their heads when he had gone, and said, 'No, no, brothers. We should not have taken this green paper and given him those furs.' "But others said, 'Look what he has paid us! We are all rich men. The price is better than we ever had before!' "The old, wise men said, 'How do you know that it is more, when you do not know how much it is?' "So, night and day, there was talking to and fro--along the trail by day, around the camp-fire when the sun had set. "It soon came time for us to send men down to Rigolet, on Hamilton Inlet, there to buy at the Hudson's Bay store the things that we would need in the winter time. "We sent twelve of the strong young men in their canoes to get the things and bring them home to our tents. We were happy when we thought of all the guns and tobacco, all the flour and the fine clothes so much money would buy. "They went: and they were gone many days, while we waited in one fixed place for them, and in our minds spent the money many times over." Then the Indian paused. He was squatting on his haunches, and puffing at his pipe. Mr. Cabot's leg was giving him much pain, but he was too proud to ask the Indian to do anything for him.