wild, wet morning we started hiking for
the railroad track. That was the toughest
trip I have ever been through.

The going was bad, we were all hungry,
we had not had our normal rest, and over
the entire district there seemed to brood the
haunting spirit of the wild character for
whom we were hunting.

I felt rather bad about giving up the
chase but I figured the fellow had vanished
and was miles away by now, so we had
nothing to gain by staying on waiting in
his tent for him to return.

Eventually we hit the railroad and caught
the train, a passenger this time, and headed
for Fort George. On the train was a young
Russian lad, a fellow about 20, and he got
talking to us as people will in a pioneer
country. i

“You know,” he told us, “I met a brute
in the woods here the other day and I’m
sure he is crazy.

“He is a regular giant. His face is cov-
ered with a black beard and he hasn’t had

his hair cut in years. His eyes are mad—

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Page Fifty-six

the maddest eyes I have ever seen in a
human.

“In fact, he doesn’t look human. He’s
an animal.”

That sounded like our man so we called
another council of war right on the train
and the upshot was that we started back
to the tent again.

We had to cross the Nechako River. . .
it was frozen over, of course . . . and that
night we rested in a shack about ten miles
from the tent. We knew that the madman
wandered from shack to shack in the district
and we thought if he came to our shack
we had better be prepared for him.

We placed a lot of newspapers around
outside so that we would hear him approach.
One of us kept watch, a huge club in his
hand, and the others tried to sleep. I
couldn’t rest. I kept tossing about on the
cold floor and I had a feeling that the giant
was closer to us than we knew.

Finally, at about three o'clock in the
morning, we roused ourselves and held an-
other pow-wow. We started out toward the
tent and that was the most miserable morn-
ing I have experienced before or since.

4
St eet de

a
sy

—

Photo of Mad Giant—Height 6 ft. 4 ins.

While prowling around through the bush
the day before we had found a lot of junk
that the man had stolen from unoccupied
cabins and cached away. There were bed
springs, a stable lantern and other odds and
ends that he had shoved under logs and
covered with piles of brush.

The young Russian was excited. I had
sworn him in as a special constable and he
had never encountered anything like this
before. I could see that he was all keyed
up and he would just as soon he had kept
his mouth shut on the train. We trudged
along through the heavy snow and it was
still pitch dark there in the deep woods.

None of us felt very happy about the
affair. We knew that the madman was right
at home in the woods and it would no
have surprised us if he had suddenly started
blasting at us from the darkness. All the
while as we neared the tent I was turning
over in my mind the possibility of smoking
him out.

He was armed and he was desperate. He
was not going to allow us to get too clos
and, as I said before, the manner in which
he had erected his barricades, he could have
held off an army if he felt so inclined.

The low-hanging branches of the ever
greens were loaded with wet snow and we

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