"
The subject of a guide was considered.
Jimmie Friday always brought a big toboggan-load of furs into Fort
Tiemogamie every spring, and was accounted good in his business. He and
his big brother trapped together, and in turn followed the ten days'
swing through the snow-laden forest which they had covered with their
dead-falls and steel-jawed traps; but when the ice went out in the
rivers, and the great pines dripped with the melting snows, they had
nothing more to do but cut a few cords of wood for their widowed
mother's cabin near the post. Then the brother and he paddled down to
Bais des Pierres, where the brother engaged as a deck hand on a
steamboat, and Jimmie hired himself as a guide for some bush-rangers, as
the men are called who explore for pine lands for the great lumber
firms. Having worked all summer and got through with that business,
Jimmie bethought him to dissipate for a few days in the bustling lumber
town down on the Ottawa River. He had been there before to feel the
exhilaration of civilization, but beyond that clearing he had never
known anything more inspiring than a Hudson Bay post, which is generally
a log store, a house where the agent lives, and a few tiny Indian cabins
set higgledy-piggledy in a sunburnt gash of stumps and bowlders, lost in
the middle of the solemn, unresponsive forest. On this morning in
question he had stepped from his friend's cabin up in the Indian
village, and after lighting a perfectly round and rather yellow cigar,
he had instinctively wandered down to the Hudson Bay store, there to
find himself amused by a strange sight.
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