Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of its
main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where mink
and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still fairly
plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed families
disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of Indian
summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's catch, a
birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs and
chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced men,
bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.
Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social instinct
had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and French
half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a
crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of
Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed
with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky
woods, at various intervals of distance, could be seen the outline of
each cabin. They were much of a sort--two or three rooms, log-walled,
brush laid upon poles, and sod on top of that for a roof, with
fireplaces built partly of mud, partly of rough stones.
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