Читать книгу The Drama of the Forests онлайн

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Another example worth quoting is taken from Sir William Butler's "The Wild North Land."

"The 'Moose That Walks' arrived at Hudson's Hope early in the spring. He was sorely in want of gunpowder and shot, for it was the season when the beaver leave their winter houses and when it is easy to shoot them. So he carried his thirty martens' skins to the fort, to barter them for shot, powder, and tobacco.

"There was no person at the Hope. The dwelling-house was closed, the store shut up, the man in charge had not yet come up from St. John's; now what was to be done? Inside that wooden house lay piles and piles of all that the 'Moose That Walks' most needed. There was a whole keg of powder; there were bags of shot, and tobacco—there was as much as the Moose could smoke in his whole life.

"Through a rent in the parchment window the Moose looked at all those wonderful things, and at the red flannel shirts, and at the four flint guns and the spotted cotton handkerchiefs, each worth a sable skin at one end of the fur trade, half a six-pence at the other. There was tea, too—tea, that magic medicine before which life's cares vanished like snow in spring sunshine.