up on the Cortois

The only trouble with living where there is elbow room - rather then in some built-up area the like of St. Louis is that sometimes you can't stop yourself thinking. Depite unloading the canoe, and treating myself to some flapjacks - (I'd picked up a sack of flour though the 20 lb sack cost more then the 50 lb keg of flour I'd bought last fall!! And they call this progress?) using some of the birch syrup I'd boiled down in january. The Birch is better then the red maple syrup I'd made - but it takes a lot more effort as well - and even the Birch syrup doesn't hold a candle to what my Pa used to make in the Green Mountains from Sugar maple sap. Still - at the price of sugar in St. Louis !!!!

but my brain kept working faster then my body or my jaws. And my conclusions are that that the American Fur Company can just go kiss my John Jacob Astor! the prices they;re paying aren't hardly worth packing the skins into town. Maybe I should take them downriver to New Orleans and sell them myself, instead of to the factor. Just maybe.