Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer. But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians. And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism? Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes; Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies--splendid types of manhood because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains; coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot--low and lazy because the great rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work. Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a single year. Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten, twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But, then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single year.