Excerpt from The Long TraverseHe had received, that same morning, reports from the half-dozen posts he operated, all sent down from the headquarters post. None was less than five months old, but that is recent news in fur land. In each brief statement he read of added conquests, more hunters weaned from the Hudson's Bay Com pany, new outposts established, fresh territory gained.Mr. Pattison twisted his chair away from the win dow and abandoned himself to that grim ecstasy known only to the fighting man in his retrospective moments. For the first time in his strenuous life he paused to look back. The reports had suggested, in a way, that he was at the top, that he had won, and he found himself luxuriating in the sensations victory induced.It had been a long fight since that day when he had first gone into the bush with a pack on his back to trade with the Indians. He had met disappoint ments and failures, even disasters. Twice he had been forced to begin again at the bottom. Each time, grimly, patiently, cunningly, he had built anew.But he had built well in the end. No other man in fur land could point to such an individual achieve ment. It had been a long trail of toil, of hardship, of grim combat, but he had travelled it alone. Now he was David Pattison, sole owner of a company which boasted six ¿ourishing posts in a large territory that once had been the exclusive domain of the Hudson's Bay Company, and he faced a year which promised to be even more successful than the last.There was something disquieting in this thought. It would be a successful year, but it would be equally successful were he to do nothing, were he to have no part in the work. It would be a machine he had built, not he himself, that would maintain the suc cess. His work was done.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.