Burned Bridges

Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches

of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python--a python that rested

its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a

great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and

hushed lakes far northward.

The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No

wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the

fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is

lord of those watery roads; when a man would diverge therefrom he must

carry his goods upon his back. There are paths, to be sure, very faint

in places, padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan

tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of Adventurers

laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long before the

Half Moon's prow first cleft those desolate waters. They have been

trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English since that

historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the blood of

all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these paths

lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man familiar

with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur posts or

villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a permanent

abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the shore of a

lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access is gained to the network of

water routes that radiate over the fur country.

Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of its

main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where mink

and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still fairly

plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed families

disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of Indian

summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's catch, a

birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs and

chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced men,

bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.

Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social instinct

had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and French

half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a

crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of

Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed

with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky

woods, at various intervals of distance, could be seen the outline of

each cabin. They were much of a sort--two or three rooms, log-walled,

brush laid upon poles, and sod on top of that for a roof, with

fireplaces built partly of mud, partly of rough stones. Folk in such

circumstances waste no labor in ornamentation. Each family's abiding

place was purely utilitarian. They cultivated no land, and the meadow

during the brief season supplied them with a profusion of delicate

flowers a southern garden could scarcely excel. Aside from a few trees

felled about each home site, their common effort had cleared away the

willows and birch which bordered the creek bank, so that an open landing

was afforded the canoes.