"I kill t'ousand an' t'ousand," he said. "I kill t'ousand more."
"And there are twenty thousand others just like you in this northern quarter of the continent—all killing, killing for hundreds of years back, and yet you can't kill out wild life. The war of Man and the Beast, you might call it. And, if you could return five hundred years from now, Henri, you'd still find wild life here. Nearly all the rest of the world is changing, but you can't change these almost impenetrable thousands of square miles of ridges and swamps and forests. The railroads won't come here, and I, for one, thank God for that. Take all the great prairies to the west, for instance. Why, the old buffalo trails are still there, plain as day—and yet, towns and cities are growing up everywhere. Did you ever hear of North Battleford?"
"Is she near Montreal or Quebec?" Henri asked.
Weyman smiled, and drew a photograph from his pocket. It was the picture of a girl.
"No. It's far to the west, in Saskatchewan. Seven years ago I used to go up there every year, to shoot prairie chickens, coyotes and elk. There wasn't any North Battleford then—just the glorious prairie, hundreds and hundreds of square miles of it. There was a single shack on the Saskatchewan River, where North Battleford now stands, and I used to stay there. In that shack there was a little girl, twelve years old. We used to go out hunting together—for I used to kill things in those days. And the little girl would cry sometimes when I killed, and I'd laugh at her.
"Then a railroad came, and then another, and they joined near the shack, and all at once a town sprang up. Seven years ago there was only the shack there, Henri. Two years ago there were eighteen hundred people. This year, when I came through, there were five thousand, and two years from now there'll be ten thousand.
"On the ground where that shack stood are three banks, with a capital of forty million dollars; you can see the glow of the electric lights of the city twenty miles away. It has a hundred-thousand dollar college, a high school, the provincial asylum, a fire department, two clubs, a board of trade, and it's going to have a street-car line within two years. Think of that—all where the coyotes howled a few years ago!
"People are coming in so fast that they can't keep a census. Five years from now there'll be a city of twenty thousand where the old shack stood. And the little girl in that shack, Henri—she's a young lady now, and her people are—well, rich. I don't care about that. The chief thing is that she is going to marry me in the spring. Because of her I stopped killing things when she was only sixteen. The last thing I killed was a prairie wolf, and it had young. Eileen kept the little puppy. She's got it now—tamed. That's why above all other wild things I love the wolves. And I hope these two leave your trap-line safe."
Henri was staring at him. Weyman gave him the picture. It was of a sweet-faced girl, with deep pure eyes, and there came a twitch at the corners of Henri's mouth as he looked at it.
"My Iowaka died t'ree year ago," he said. "She too loved the wild thing. But them wolf—damn! They drive me out if I can not kill them!" He put fresh fuel into the stove, and prepared for bed.