“Moosetooth and La Biche are all right,” commented Norman. “Do they wear shoes?”
“No,” explained Roy, “they’re in moccasins—plain mooseskin wrapped around the ankles. You’d know ’em by that. And they both carry the Cree tobacco pouch, with the long tassels hanging out of their hip pocket—so they can find the pouch in the dark, I suppose.”
“And black Stetson hats?” added Norman, “with big silver buttons all around the leather band?”
“Sure!” answered the other boy. “But you ought to see their arms. Neither one of ’em is big, but if you saw their arms you’d know how they swing those twenty-foot steering oars. I got a hankerin’ after those fellows. Any man who can stand in the stern of an old Hudson Bay Company ‘sturgeon head’ and steer it through fifteen hundred miles o’ rivers and lakes, clear down to the Arctic Ocean, and then walk back if necessary, has got it all over the kind of Indians I know.”
Norman looked at him a few moments and then got up and motioned him out of the aerodrome. He swung the big doors together, locked them, and then exclaimed:
“I don’t care to get excited over every old greasy Indian that comes along but lead me to old Moosetooth.”
Roy, who was well pleased over so easily placating his chum, at once led the way around the race track and through the fringe of tepees, tents and other shelters being erected for the housing of the fast gathering arrivals. At last he stood before a group of mooseskin tepees in which were gathered several families of Cree Indians. These people had been brought from the present famous Indian encampment on the shores of Lac la Biche, just south of Athabasca River, where it turns on its long northward journey to the Arctic Ocean.
It is the men of this region who are sought by the great fur companies, by adventurers and sportsmen and by all those traffickers who use the great riverway to the north. And it is from them that the skilled canoe men and the experienced flatboat steersmen are selected for the conduct of the precious flotillas on these northern waters.
From Lac la Biche the veterans are called each year when the ice is gone out of the Athabasca, to take charge of the great Hudson’s Bay Company’s fleet of batteaux whose descent of the river means life to those who pass their winters in the far north. These things both boys knew, and hence their interest in Moosetooth Martin and old man La Biche.
“Here they are!” announced young Moulton as, without hesitation, he made his way through the litter of the little camp where the women were already cooking the inevitable bannock.