A Womans Way Through Unknown Labrador | Page 6

the stone was gone and
the bird dropped dead. Dumb with horror the two gazed at each other.
Beyond doubt all he could now expect was to go straight to torment.
After one long look they turned and walked silently away in opposite
directions. Never afterwards did they mention the incident to each
other.
A new life began for him with his trapping. He learned to fish as well,
for besides being a hunter, his father was an angler of State-wide
reputation. The days on which his father accompanied him along the
banks of the St. Joe, or to some more distant stream, were very
specially happy ones. His cup was quite filled full when, on the day he
was twelve years old, a rifle all his own was placed in his hands. Father
and son then hunted together.
While thus growing intimate with the living things of the woods and
streams, his question was not so much "What?" as "Why?" As reading
came to take a larger part in life and interest to reach out to human
beings, again his question was "Why?" So when other heroes took their
places beside his father for their share of homage, they were loved and
honoured for that which prompted their achievements more than for the
deeds themselves.

Passionately fond of history, with its natural accompaniment geography,
he revelled, as does every normal boy, in stories of the wars, Indian
stories and tales of travel and adventure. His imagination kindled by
what he had read, and the oft-repeated tales of frontier life in which the
courage, endurance, and high honour of his own pioneer forefathers
stood out strong and clear, it was but natural that the boy under the
apple trees should feel romance in every bit of forest, every stream; that
his thoughts should be reaching towards the out-of-the-way places of
the earth where life was still that of the pioneer with the untamed
wilderness lying across his path, and on into the wilderness itself.
Though born with all the instincts of the hunter, he was born also with
an exquisitely tender and sympathetic nature, which made him do
strange things for a boy.
One day a toad hopped into the beeyard and his father was about to kill
it. The boy petitioned for its life and carried it away. It came back.
Again it was carried away. Again it returned and this time was taken
clear to the river.
Once a much loved aunt came to visit at his home bringing the little
sister a beautiful, new doll. That night she trotted off to bed hugging
the new treasure close. The boy did not love dolls; but when he saw the
old, rag baby left lonely and forsaken be quietly picked it up and
carried it to bed with him.
Years afterwards, when on a canoe trip on the Moose River, a
disconsolate looking little Indian dog came and sat shyly watching us
while we broke camp. We learned that the Indian owners had gone to
the bush leaving him to fare as he might through the coming winter.
When our canoe pushed out into the river there was an extra passenger.
We brought him home to Congers, where he immediately carried
consternation into the neighbouring chicken yards, convinced that he
had found the finest partridge country on earth.
When sixteen the boy went to attend the Angola (Indiana) Normal
School. Here his decision for Christ was made. He was baptized and
united with the Church of Christ. Three years later his teaching took

him to Northern Michigan where be found a wider range than he had
yet known, and in the great pine forests of that country he did his first
real exploring. Here were clear, cold streams with their trout and
grayling, and here, when his work admitted, he hunted and fished and
dreamed out his plans, his thoughts turning ever more insistently to the
big, outside world where his heroes did their work.
He entered the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1893. High
strung and sensitive, with a driving energy and ambition to have part in
the larger work of the world, be suffered during the early part of his
course all the agonies that come to those of such a nature while they
grope in the dark for that which they are fitted to do. He reached out in
many directions in his effort to provide the needful money to enable
him to take his course, but without a sense of special fitness in any. It
came however with his earliest attempts in journalistic work. The
discovery with its measure of self-recognition brought a thrill that
compensated for all the dark hours. He now felt assured of success.
His life in the University was one of varied