Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south. That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe--the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft--with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake. That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit and ermine, the furs that clothe--not princes and millionaire, who buy silver fox and sea otter--but you and me and the rest of us whose object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since 1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game--save in the year of the unexplained rabbit pest--shows no sign of diminishing. Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves. To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer, "Poor--poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not make that answer. To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world, especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves. "The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts. V