Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
Mosquito Portage and we do not.
We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order _Diptera_," "sub-order
_Nemocera_," and chiefly "of the family _Culicidae_," and he also goes
so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the
muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the
female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the
natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant.
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