Can you see Otelne as he visits his traps? He walks on snow shoes to keep from sinking into the snow which is now three feet deep. His big dog pulls a toboggan on which is an axe, a package of raw smoked meat in a little box of birch bark, and a roll of blankets. Akusk, the twelve-year-old boy, goes with his father, from whom he learns all the Indian arts and the ways of the animals in the forest. It is all the schooling he ever gets. How would you like to get your schooling that way?
The first trap is empty and the bait gone, so Otelne puts fresh bait in it. The second trap holds a fine mink, dead and frozen stiff. His skin is worth ten dollars. The fifth trap has in it the foot of a muskrat and some scraps of fur lying around. Some hungry animal has raided the trap, and the big dog, Wagush, smells the trail, whines, and jumps about so that he upsets the sled. Otelne turns him loose, and away he goes yelping through the forest, until at last his regular baying tells Otelne that he has treed the animal. It is a lynx. The rifle brings him down and he is placed on the sled along with the mink.
At nightfall, ten miles from the tent, they come to a shelter made of boughs. When Otelne set the traps, he built this shelter to keep off the cold wind, for he knew he would have to sleep here on bitter cold nights. He builds a roaring fire in front of the shelter. They eat the mink, give the scraps and bones to Wagush, wrap up in rabbit-skin blankets, and lie down with their heads toward the shelter, their feet toward the fire, and the dog beside them. Two hours later Wagush wakes them with a growl. Two wolves are prowling around in the spruce trees, but wolves fear fire, so Otelne throws on more wood and they slink away. At dawn the Indians are up and on their way to the rest of the traps.
They kill a bear. This is great luck, for now they have meat enough to last for weeks. Even with the help of Akusk and Wagush, Otelne has hard work to drag that bear on the toboggan six miles back to the tent. All three are so weary they have to rest all the next day. Sulian, the mother, who skins the animals, takes care of the skins and smokes the meat. That is her part of the work. You may be sure that the children are glad to see their father and brother come back, for there isn't another family within twenty miles, nor is there one white man within a hundred miles.
Day after day, through the long, cold winter, Otelne and his family hunt the fur that they can trade for the white man's tools and supplies. When the trapping season ends, Otelne is four hundred miles from the post, and it takes many weeks of canoeing to get back there for summer trading. They carry with them a bundle of smoked meat to eat where game or fish cannot be found.
Each year Indian families go out for furs and never come back. The canoe may upset and swift water carry away all their things. Sometimes they get lost and freeze to death in terrible blizzards. The hunting may be bad, so they starve. The father may be drowned or break his leg and freeze to death away out in the forest. Then the mother cannot get enough game to keep the children alive, so they all starve and the wolves eat them. The fur gatherer has a hard, cold life in the far North, but it is better than it used to be before he traded with the white man and got guns, knives, traps, and fish hooks.
When all goes well with the fur gatherer, the boys and girls in the little tent play many games. They are fond of checkers. To make a checker-board, they split a piece of wood out of a log, smooth one side of it with an axe, mark it into squares with a knife, and blacken some of them with charcoal. For men, they saw off short pieces of a stick as thick as your thumb. Jackstraws is another favorite game, but the straws are tiny canoe paddles, knives, guns, snowshoes, snow shovels, and canoes, all whittled out of wood, making a queer looking pile. They have one campfire game in which they shake up eight disks of bone in a bowl. This game is so hard to learn that my friend, Professor Speck, spent three days learning it, and the rules for counting the score would fill three pages of a book like this one. This game, so hard to learn, shows that the Indian would be as smart as the white man if he had a chance to learn the same things. White men who hunt with the Indians like them and say they are good companions.
The white men from the trading posts bring the furs down to our great cities, where they are made into mittens and muffs and coats and ladies' furs, and the next winter, while the Indian is back in the forest following his traps, we can see people wearing the furs in almost any part of the United States.
—J. Russell Smith.
Courtesy of The John C. Winston Co.