And yet life at the Chateau, after the first two weeks, was anything but dull and unexciting.  They were in the heart of the great trapping country.  Forty miles to the north was a Hudson’s Bay post where an ordained minister of the Church of England had a mission.  But Father Roland belonged to the forest people alone.  They were his “children,” scattered in their shacks and tepees over ten thousand square miles of country, with the Chateau as its centre.  He was ceaselessly on the move after that first fortnight, and David was always with him.  The Indians worshipped him, and the quarter-breeds and half-breeds and occasional French called him “mon Pere” in very much the same tone of voice as they said “Our Father” in their prayers.  These people of the trap-lines were a revelation to David.  They were wild, living in a savage primitiveness, and yet they reverenced a divinity with a conviction that amazed him.  And they died.  That was the tragedy of it.  They died—­too easily.  He understood, after a while, why a country ten times as large as the state of Ohio had altogether a population of less than twenty-five thousand, a fair-sized town.  Their belts were drawn too tight—­men, women, and little children—­their belts too tight.  That was it!  Father Roland emphasized it.  Too much hunger in the long, terrible months of winter, when to keep body and soul together they trapped the furred creatures for the hordes of luxurious barbarians in the great cities of the earth.  Just a steady, gnawing hunger all through the winter—­hunger for something besides meat, a hunger that got into the bones, into the eyes, into arms and legs—­a hunger that brought sickness, and then death.

That winter he saw grown men and women die of measles as easily as flies that had devoured poison.  They were over at Metoosin’s, sixty miles to the west of the Chateau, when Metoosin returned to his shack with supplies from a Post.  Metoosin had taken up lynx and marten and mink that would sell the next year in London and Paris for a thousand dollars, and he had brought back a few small cans of vegetables at fifty cents a can, a little flour at forty cents a pound, a bit of cheap cloth at the price of rare silk, some tobacco and a pittance of tea, and he was happy.  A half season’s work on the trap-line and his family could have eaten it all in a week—­if they had dared to eat as much as they needed.

“And still they’re always in the debt of the Posts,” the Missioner said, the lines settling deeply on his face.

And yet David could not but feel more and more deeply the thrill, the fascination, and, in spite of its hardships, the recompense of this life of which he had become a part.  For the first time in his life he clearly perceived the primal measurements of riches, of contentment and of ambition, and these three things that he saw stripped naked for his eyes many other things which he had not understood, or in blindness had failed to see, in the life from which he had come.