“For you a good long coat,” she held the muskrat skins before Mary’s eyes. “Bye and bye many more.
“And for you perhaps a cape,” she held up the mink skins as she nodded to Mrs. Hughes. “Who knows? The minks, they are harder to catch.”
“And the fox skins?” Mark asked.
“To buy more traps, always more traps,” was the big woman’s enthusiastic response.
“There is money in it,” Mark said to Dave McQueen next day.
“Yes, if she’ll show us the tricks,” Dave agreed.
“She will,” Mark declared. And she did. As Mark followed her about he saw how she cut snow thin as cardboard for concealing the traps, how she scattered drops of oil about to supply a scent leading to the traps, how she discovered a mink’s run at a river’s brink, and many other little secrets of the trapping world.
Soon both Mark and Dave were full-fledged trappers with trap lines running away and away into the hills.
Mary too was contributing her bit to the family’s wealth. The number of Speed Samson’s hunting trips with his airplane increased. He had come to relish the food served at Rainbow Farm. Knowing that his clients would enjoy it as well, and at the same time be charmed by the life there, he made a practice of dropping down upon their small lake. More often than not he brought his own supply of meat. A hunk of venison, a loin of a young moose, a leg of wild sheep, even brown bear steak went into pot or roasting pan to reappear as the delicious piece de resistance of a bountiful meal. His clients got in the way of leaving a folded bank note beneath each plate. In this way Mary began to accumulate quite a considerable little hoard.
At last, in a spending mood, she took the train at Palmer and rode all the way to Anchorage. There she made a surprising and, to her, rather disturbing discovery.