four o'clock before
-LSB- Illustration : Bartering with the Indians -RSB- But Katherine was patient and tactful too . After all , the training of a teacher is not lost in the buying and selling of a backwoods store . The same gifts of persuasion are needful in both cases , and the same gentle firmness is useful in settling the bargain which has come to completion . It was four o'clock before Katherine was able to turn her back on the Indian village , but by then she had sold every article which had been brought up river , and was laden with a currency of valuable furs and some specimens of narwhal ivory , very beautiful , but apparently of great age . The same kind of thing had happened before , and she could never quite make out where it had come from , for the narwhal was so rarely met with in the Hudson Bay waters now , and was a creature so fierce , that it was puzzling to know how people in birchbark canoes , armed only with spears , could ever manage to secure it . A theory held by her father in his days of health was , that in places along those little-known shores the tusks of narwhals dead centuries before might be found by the Indians buried in the sands , and it was finds of this sort which they dug up and offered for sale . Their stay at Mrs. M'Kree 's house was very short after all , though Katherine was thankful indeed for the cup of tea awaiting her there , and much too grateful for the kindness to be fastidious about its overdrawn condition .