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It seemed to him but yesterday, when a lad of thirteen, he had set out in the traders' care for France. They followed the old route up the Columbia. When he saw the wild Spokanes careering across the plain, his blood leaped as at the recognition of kindred. He longed to mount a fiery steed and ride away with them, far from books and school and gentlemen's clothes. He remembered the hunter's tales of Jemmy Jock, the half-Indian son of a Hudson's Bay trader that became a Rob Roy among the Blackfeet. Watching the daring riders he breathed deeply, and felt within him the stirring of savage instincts. It seemed only yesterday that David on snowshoes reached Jasper House beyond the head waters of the Columbia in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The old clerk Jasper was dead, but in his stead Colin Eraser played the bagpipes and danced at his shadow on the wall. How grateful seemed the blazing hearth and opulent larder of the hermit up there in the Alpine solitude!

That was a land of fat and pemmican. Thirty thousand bags, every bag as big as a pillow, hung in the company's forts that year. Every bag represented the pulverized flesh and melted marrow of two big buffaloes. David had seen pemmican down on the Columbia, salmon pemmican, but none like this with hairs in it an inch long! But in a wonderful manner it stayed the hunger of the voyageur crossing sub- Arctic snow. Never before had David seen such snow, hard and white, compact as adamant, across which the dogsleds flew to Fort Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan. All that North had been a realm of fairy-land and every old post a palace. Every bullet-hole in the gayly painted walls of Edmonton, every hack of the tomahawk on the battlemented gateway, had its