As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and can give no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined, if they have one, in symbols which they use as decorations, painted on the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of the years from some event which was once important to themselves, or to their tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a robe represent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a broken leg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina, One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparatively immediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to be inquisitive.
"Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."
So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is not necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion, whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a _dream-being_, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy again--always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream going from them, they awake--motionlessly pass out of life, and enter into _What_?
If smoothness of passage and apparent endlessness be the two main qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing agony.
The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have succumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.