FARTHER NORTH 129

guide understood it fairly well, though, on principle,
_and to be all the purer in his Carrier diction, he would
not speak it. Zaya, a Carrier who had been adopted
by the tribe after he had, long before, killed a co-
tribesman he took for a caribou, was usually acting as
interpreter to the priest at McLeod’s Lake. There, for
the lack of a church, every religious exercise had to
take place round the tent of the missionary. Every-
thing, sermons and catechizing, was therefore less
formal, especially those delightful talks between pastor
and flock, that is father and children, squatting on the
grass round the cheerful bivouack fire of the evening.
Did they listen with avidity and reverence, the poor
simple folks!

And they were only working in their own interest
in so doing. The thread which retained them to life
was so slender! They were so little sure of the morrow!
While under normal conditions their neighbours the
Carriers were increasing; the Sékanais had been
decreasing ever since they had been known of the
whites. Famine was one of their deadly enemies, but
wild beasts make also occasional victims among them,
so that one who leaves on a hunting expedition is never
sure to see his tent or hut again.

Ezooh, the swarthy shorty”! who goes around, bell
in hand, to call people to religious exercises, knew it
only too well. He formerly had a younger brother,
apparently rather childish in his ways, who went one
day hunting with him. Ezooh was not then feeling
well, and climbing up the mountain among rocks and
snow, he was soon out of breath.

21 An exception to the general Sékanais type, which is thin, slender,
generally tall, bony in structure and dolichocephalic, instead of brachy-

cephalic as the Carriers. See illustration, which seems to include two
Nakanais, the first and fourth (from the left) of the back row, p. 160.