60 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

connection, not only at Stuart Lake, where his action
was, of course, more powerful because his vigilance
more incessant, but even throughout his whole district.

Woman, by herself, could never have bettered her
own condition. She had been so long kept in the
strictest subjection that she had come to possess but
the meanest possible opinion of her own kind. Unless
she was the heir to a landed title, which sometimes
happened when males were not available in the proper
line of succession, she had in ceremonious banquets to
share the part of the lodge reserved for dogs, the door-
way and near it; she could not claim any social right in
the tribe, was not admitted to proffer an opinion or give
advice.

When absorbed in his linguistic studies, a difficulty
would at times arise in Father Morice’s mind, which
would prevent his going on with his writing. He
would then rush out and try to elucidate it with the
help of the first person he would meet. Should that
one be a woman, she would stare at him in a silly and
wondering way, and remark:

‘‘How could you think of asking me that? I am
nothing but a woman.”

Supposedly possessed of no linguistic knowledge,
courage would, of course, be just as foreign to her
make-up. Truth to tell, few Carriers or Babines could
normally boast anything like bravery. Ina paroxysm
of anger, they could, like big children that they are,
do almost anything, go to the most unlikely excesses,
but when not excited by passion, they were the most
pusillanimous pieces of humanity that could be
dreamt of.

In common with other northern Dénés, they even
formerly had_ periodical fits of unreasonable fear or
phobia, the object of which was usually an absent,