But up there I knew that my duty lay, just at
the edge of the Big Barren. See! My hands are knotted like the snarl of a
tree. The glare of your lights hurts my eyes. I traveled to-day in the
middle of your street because my moccasined feet stumbled on the
smoothness of your walks. People stared, and some of them laughed.
Forty years I have lived in another world. You--and especially you
gentlemen who have trailed in the Patrols of the north--know what that
world is. As it shapes different hands, as it trains different feet, as
it gives to us different eyes, so also it has bred into my forest
children hearts and souls that may be a little different, and a code of
right and wrong that too frequently has had no court of law to guide it.
So judge fairly, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police! Understand, if
you can.
It was a terrible winter--that winter of Le Mort Rouge. So far down as
men and children now living will remember, it will be called by my people
the winter of Famine and Red Death. Starvation, gentlemen--and the
smallpox. People died like--what shall I say? It is not easy to describe
a thing like that. They died in tepees. They died in shacks. They died on
the trail. From late December until March I said my prayers over the
dead. You are wondering what all this has to do with my story; why it
matters that the caribou had migrated in vast herds to the westward, and
there was no food; why it matters that there were famine and plague in
the great unknown land, and that people were dying and our world going
through a cataclysm.
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