Part 2

A very long lake next north of Sissaginega is Cacaskanan, not shown at all on the maps. On this lake, about eleven o'clock the second day out, while Joe was rowing, and merely casting an occasional perfunctory glance over his left shoulder, he suddenly hissed, "See de moose!" We were at least a mile from shore, and though I have seldom met any one, civilized or savage, who could beat me at seeing game, I took off my hat to Joe from then on. Sure enough, over Joe's left shoulder he had seen a cow moose in the edge of the timber on shore. A projecting point allowed us to get pretty close to the animal. The wind was partly off shore, and all the time we were approaching we could see her watching the shore, starting at every sound made by the wind among the dead tree-trunks, but paying no attention to the water side at all. This enabled us, considering the difficulty of navigating among fallen tree-trunks, to make one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever taken. We got to the very shore, and crept within thirty-five feet of that moose. I made my exposure of the negative before she saw us at all. This photograph will give a better idea than could ever be conveyed in words, of the tremendous difficulty of still-hunting the moose in thick, dry timber, where the crackling of a twig will spoil the best-made stalk.

That photograph was more satisfactory to me than the shooting of fifty moose would have been. The moose does not show to the best advantage in the picture, but that was her fault, and not ours. At the click of the shutter she went to find the rest of her folks.

Late that afternoon we came to a place where Lake Cacaskanan narrows to about one hundred yards wide, and here there were many moose tracks. Just beyond, we met a family of the Indians who had killed two moose that very day, and had more than a hundred musquash freshly skinned. Billy was wonderfully impressed by the dirty, unkempt appearance of the little children, whose shocks of matted hair he unconsciously Kiplingized by referring to them afterward as "haystacks." The Indian who was the head of this family, on being told by Joe where we were going, said that we would walk on the ice before we got back. I fear he was a sluggard, who saw lions or bears in the path of every enterprise. He was burning logs twenty feet long, to save the trouble of cutting them in two, and so he had fire enough for four tents, instead of one.

Monday morning, October 18th, we had breakfast by starlight. Venus and Jupiter were two particularly bright morning stars. Billy looked long at the waning planets and remarked, in an awe-struck tone, "My, but they must be high up!"

That day we reached Ross Lake, where there is a lumberman's supply depot for operations over on the main Ottawa, in the direction of Lake Expanse. We had no occasion to stop there, and all the afternoon followed the directions we had received from Mr. Christopherson, pursuing the Hudson's Bay Company trail through some small beaver ponds, till we reached Trout Lake, a beautiful sheet of water about fifteen miles long, where we expected to find an Indian to guide us to the Grand Lake Victoria.

We found the summer camp all right, where the Indians had a potato-patch, which they had not dug, so Joe said they had not left for the winter; but not a smoke or sign of life could we find. We explored the lake, finding abundant moose signs and trolled for salmon trout, which at this time were up near the surface. One we caught was the largest I ever saw. We had no means of determining its weight, but when placed in the centre of the canoe, crosswise, on the bottom, its nose protruded over one gunwale and its tail above the other.

On the morning of our third day on the lake we heard a dog bark, and found the Indians encamped on a secluded island. The wretches had seen us the first day, but, fearing we were game wardens or other evil-disposed persons, had kept out of our way. Joe said the Indians up there had a reputation for hiding from passers-by. After we had met them and given evidence of good intentions, they were sociable enough. While we were inviting the Indians to pass judgment on the contents of a certain jug, an extremely large domestic cat belonging to them ate much of the moose meat in our canoe. Nearly every Indian camp in these woods has at least one cat, to keep the moose-birds and wood-mice in subjugation, and the cats, being hard to get, are highly prized.

We soon made a bargain with Kakwanee, a young Indian just married and needing money, to show us the way to the Hudson's Bay post on the Grand Lake Victoria. Without knowing it, all the time we had been on Trout Lake we were quite near a crew of lumbermen who were building a dam at the outlet, to raise the water for a reserve supply, to be used, when needed, to drive logs down the Ottawa, the water running out through Lake Expanse. The intention was to raise the water six feet; and as there are at least seventy-five square miles of water in Trout Lake, it will be seen that a large reservoir would be produced by closing the outlet, perhaps fifty feet wide. The Indians were doing a good deal of laughing among themselves, as they said there was a marsh on the other side of the lake, where, unless another very long dam was built, the water would run off in the direction of Lake Kippewa as soon as it was raised a foot or so; and the lumbermen did not know this.

In the evening while we were camped, waiting for Kakwanee to bid farewell to his bride, Billy heard a trout splash the water. He at once got some birch-bark and placed it in the cleft of a split stick, warming it by the fire to make it curl up, and then lighting it on the edge. In this way he made a torch which burned brightly for a long time. Getting into the canoe he pushed silently out, standing up. Letting the light shine into the clear water, he soon located the big trout, which lay quietly on the bottom in the full blaze of light. Then he made the motions of spearing, though he had no spear; and there was no doubt, from the realism of the pantomime, that Billy, child as he was, well knew a very unsportsmanlike way to kill fish. It was a beautiful sight to see Billy stand up in a very tottlish birch-bark canoe, as confident as a bare-back rider on a circus horse.

Joe had done some work as a "shanty-man," and the sight of the crew who were building the dam made him reminiscent. "One time," said he, "I do de chainin' for a gang; dat is, fasten de logs wid de chain, and bind em fas'. My chum, he was French, and he drive de sled. He was goin' for git marry so soon it was time for de camp to break up, an' he was sing an' smile to hisself de whole time. De ver' las' day, de las' load, he say, 'Now, Joe, dis load be de las' I ever drive fore I go home to my Julie.' So he start de sled, an' de sled hit a dead birch. When I come 'long behine him, dere he was dead. A limb break off de birch when de sled strike it. It was all rotten, an' de piece of de limb not so big as your arm. But de limb was freeze, an' it hit him on de head, an' he never move. He go home to Julie, sure, but not de way he expec'."

"My," said Billy, solemnly, "it must be awful for a man's peoples when he go 'way from home feelin' good, and laugh and sing, and, the next thing his peoples know, he come home dead!"

The next morning Kakwanee appeared and we resumed our interrupted journey, running all day through two lakes, neither of which has ever appeared on any map of Quebec. It seems wonderful that after white men have used watercourses for canoe routes for a century or two, and when lumbermen have investigated the country, there are stretches of many miles together which are not indicated on official maps except by white spots. But this is true of over half a million square miles of British-American territory. The two lakes we traversed are called by Indian names which mean "Crosswise Lake" and "Old Man Lake." Out of the latter runs a river which falls into the Grand Lake Victoria. This lake is really an expansion of the Ottawa. In many places its shores are covered with medium-sized pines, and in others bare rocks are the only things to be seen. The greatest enemy to these forests is fire, and in all parts of the country are vast tracts which have been so devastated.

It was a long day's paddle from the lower end of the Grand Lake Victoria to the old Hudson's Bay agency near its northern extremity. Here Mr. Christopherson received us with great hospitality. He said I was the fourth white man who had visited the post that year. The Indians who came there to get their annual supplies, material and spiritual, had long since left their little summer cabins for winter hunting-grounds. Though the sun shone warm and bright, it might turn cold any night now, and so Mr. Christopherson sent Jocko to show us the portages as far as an Indian village, twenty-seven miles up the river. There we could get a guide to see us through to the place where the water runs the other way. Jocko, himself, wanted to go away hunting, so he only accompanied us as far as the Indian settlement.

This procuring of guides through an unknown country, on the instalment plan, was very fascinating to me, and it illustrated a characteristic of the northern forest Indian which is universal. The red man of the prairies was a nomad, but the son of the woods does not make very long pilgrimages, or know much about the world beyond his own hunting-ground. Before he is old enough to remember any thing he makes his first journey to the trading-post where his ancestors have for generations been regular customers and perpetual debtors. He does not remember how or when he learned the way. On his own stream and its tributaries he is an infallible guide, for he learned all the landmarks before he could pronounce their names. But every forest traveller has found the Indians in one locality reluctant to go far from home. When Alexander Mackenzie felt his way, by stream and portage, to the great river which bears his name, and thence down to the Frozen Ocean, he found that the Indians on one reach of the river always believed that below their own country there were impassable rapids and insurmountable rocks, ferocious beasts and hidden perils. If you will journey toward the head of the Ottawa, in the fall of this year, you will find precisely the same state of aboriginal mind. The Indians around the Grand Lake Victoria are within a few miles of the sources of rivers flowing toward the four quarters of the American continent. Ten days' steady canoeing in any direction would take them to Hudson's Bay or Lake Huron or Lake Ontario or Montreal. But they never travel for the sake of seeing the country, or get far from home.

It was on the last day Jocko was with us, October 26th, that I made the photograph of him which is one of the illustrations of this article. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore an old straw hat. While we were eating our lunch at noon, the black flies were a little attentive and it was uncomfortably warm. That was the climate of the far Upper Ottawa in the last days of October. There was not yet a suggestion of snow. For all the atmospheric indications told us, we might have been in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

The Ottawa above Grand Lake House comes down out of the rocky hills, and is full of rapids. In many smooth places the current is very swift, and it was worth coming a long way to see Joe and Jocko paddle up places where Billy and I could not go. Fighting inch by inch against a rapid current is one of the most trying tests of endurance I know. It is unlike anything else in the world. You pull and pull, and realize that an instant's relaxation will cost you all you have gained. If the water only would stop for an instant! But it is so easy for the current to rush on and on. How futile are human energy and perseverance against a power which has never for one second faltered in uncounted years!

Jocko told Joe—he could not say it in English—that he enjoyed travelling with us more than he did with the Hudson's Bay Company people, because they travelled for dear life, making fifty or sixty miles a day, and nearly paralyzed his arms. When he had gone from Hunter's Point to Grand Lake House a few weeks before, he and Mr. Christopherson had made the trip in less than three days, but his arms were numb all the next night. He liked to find a white man who travelled "like an Indian," and said if I would come up this fall he would show me some moose and deer hunting around the head of the Coulonge and Dumoine, the like of which white men did not often see.

We reached the camp of the old chief, Jocko's objective point, just at purple twilight, when the smoke was rising straight toward the sky, and we witnessed one of the most peaceful and beautiful bits of wilderness comfort I have ever beheld. It seemed more like approaching a white man's farm than an Indian camp.

There were two or three log-houses, a few acres of cleared land, and two or three horses and cows. A tame horned owl scolded us from the roof of a barn. The Indian girls were singing and calling to each other across the wide river. A score of children and grandchildren of the fat old chief turned out to welcome us, and we slept in one of the log-barns, on the hay. Jocko sat up and visited with his Indian girl friends, and I heard them laughing and chatting until long after midnight.

As I lay looking out at the shining surface of the Ottawa, from my cosey nest in the sweet, wild hay, it was bewildering to remember that so much of Canada lay south of us. Only a rifle-shot away, at the end of a forest path, were the bubbling springs which form the sources of the Coulonge, that pine-embowered stream which, for two hundred miles, straight away to the south, traverses the centre of the great interior island whose borders we were encircling. I thought of the long reaches of moonlit river, where the timid deer were drinking, and the moose, in all the ardor of their courtship, roared hoarse contempt for impertinent rivals. And this was only one of the streams whose sources we were circumnavigating: the Maganasipi, the Bear, the swamp-fed Black, the Dumoine, the Tomasine, the Desert—all these rivers and a thousand lakes, gathered all at last in the generous arms of the twin rivers, and borne away to join the grand chorus, the voice of many waters.

In the morning there was a pow-wow, as the result of which a son and grandson of the chief agreed to see us out to the Gatineau, the boy going along to help his father if a freeze-up should make it necessary to carry their canoe back over the ice. For many miles through devious channels and short cuts, we ran past natural meadows where the unsown grass had grown high and dried up for the lack of something to feed upon it—ancient beaver meadows, from which all trace of the original forest had long ago disappeared. Joe and the Indian discussed the beaver question earnestly. It appears that the most interesting issue in Algonquin politics is what to do about the beavers. There are plenty of them all through the back country, and the Indians regard them as their personal property. They only kill a certain proportion of the little animals, and carefully preserve the supply. The beaver's habit of building for himself and family a comfortable and conspicuous residence enables the hunters to take a pretty accurate census of the population, and to tell just where the animals are to be found. On our way we turned aside and photographed a beaver-dam and a house. The natural history books generally picture these constructions as quite symmetrical affairs, but all I have ever seen have been rough piles of sticks and mud, and the photographs show typical beaver construction.

A few years ago a sportsman's club in Quebec induced the legislature to pass a law entirely prohibiting the killing of beaver until the year 1900. Two hundred years ago, when the Iroquois made raids on the Ottawa country, and prevented the annual catch of beaver skins from coming down to Montreal and Quebec, hard times fell upon Canada. Precisely the same condition has confronted the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company recently. It is almost as bad a situation as it would be in Illinois if the farmers were forbidden by law to kill hogs. The Hudson's Bay Company's agents at Grand Lake Victoria and the Barriere lake have not dared to buy the skins. The Indians have had no other reliable way to pay for their supplies. Ruin for the traders and starvation for the Indians would inevitably follow the continued enforcement of the law. Some relief has been afforded by the fact that the post at Abittibi ships all its furs by way of Hudson's Bay, so they cannot be seized by the Quebec authorities; and thousands of skins, worth $10 apiece, were diverted to that market last year. The Indians have been very much disturbed over the matter, for they find the law of necessity more urgent than a statute whose logic they cannot understand. "Some families up here starve to death last winter," interpreted Joe, after listening for awhile to Jonas, our new guide. "I t'ink I no starve, w'en de beaver build his house close by my water-hole."

Our newly acquired pilot had no idea of losing any business opportunities. His canoe was ahead of the one in which Joe, Billy, and I travelled, and he had his muzzle-loading, cylinder-bore double shot-gun, a handy little weapon, lying in front of him, both hammers at full cock, hour after hour as he paddled, the muzzle pointing squarely at the back of his boy in the bow. It was trying to unaccustomed nerves, but the boy seemed to be used to the idea of sudden death. Jonas had a curious habit of holding a bullet in his mouth, ready to drop it in an instant down the gun-barrel, on top of the shot. The utility of keeping his decks cleared for action appeared when, toward evening, he cleverly snapped up a reckless mink which darted along the bank, where the stream was narrow and crooked. The report startled a caribou, which crashed out of the alders, not fifty feet away. Jonas spat his bullet down the left barrel and fired again, neatly missing both his boy's head and the reindeer. Joe derided Jonas in choice Algonquin, and said to me, confidentially, "I t'ink we better go in front in de mornin'." All the same, the Indian's idea of a gun which will do for partridges one minute and moose the next is a sound one, in a country where one's breakfast flies or runs away.

At noon the next day, we reached the head of that branch of the Ottawa rising in the Barriere lake. Long ago forgotten Gatineau timber-cutters built a dam, to divert this water to the Jean de Terre, but now the dam has fallen into disuse, and the stream seeks its ancient bed. Just beyond the dam is the Hudson's Bay post, a branch of the one on the Grand Lake Victoria. Mr. Edwards, the agent, was delighted to see strangers, especially when I produced a letter which Mr. Christopherson had sent by me, enclosing his three months' salary. Mrs. Edwards soon discovered that our Billy was her nephew, and that much-related young person was at once honored with a seat at the family dinner-table with the twelve little Edwardses, fraternizing with them in the three-ply language which is the natural speech of these mixed races. Mr. Edwards told me he had that season refused hundreds of beaver-skins from Indians, every one of whom was on his books for a year's supplies, and now he did not quite see what the post was going to do, with beavers demonetized.

Jonas, our most recent guide, did not wish to linger, being haunted by the fear of coming frost which the warm air belied. So that same afternoon we hastened on, regretfully declining Mr. Edwards's invitation to go on a caribou hunt. These reindeer abound in the Barrière lake country.

We camped perhaps fifteen miles from the post that night, and the next morning, soon after starting up the lake, came to a narrow place where the water, instead of coming toward us as it had been doing all the time for days, formed a little rapid, running the same way we were going. The day before we had seen the water pouring into the Ottawa through the lumbermen's worn-out dam, and here, twenty-four hours afterward, continuing up the same lake, we found the current was with us instead of against us, down instead of up, and we were drifting out toward the Gatineau, in the other direction. If we had not known about the two outlets to the lake we should have thought the water was bewitched.

All that day we ran through Lake Kakebonga, which the Hudson's Bay people consider the most bewildering sheet of water in the Gatineau Valley. There are dozens of deep bays, which look about alike, and if you start into the wrong one, you get wholly astray. Once during the day it became a little foggy, and Jonas at once went ashore and waited for the veil to lift, as he said no one could find his way there in thick weather. These large lakes are all long and narrow, and very crooked. Like Kippewa and Victoria, Lake Kakebonga is nowhere wide, but its shore-line is very long, and the canoe route often cuts across a portage to save miles of travelling.

East of Lake Kakebonga there is a very rough bit of country which we crossed by what are locally known as the Sixteen Portages, or "the Sixteen," where we clambered into and out of the canoe on an average about once in half a mile. At last we came to a long, wide path over a level plain. "I know dis portage so well I know my own house," said Joe. "I was up here from de Gatineau fourteen year ago." And there our forest friends turned back, and left Joe and Billy and me to make our way by the smooth current of the Jean de Terre out to the Gatineau. I suppose we ran twenty miles after three o'clock that afternoon. Then, when it was so dark we could see no longer, we camped on a dry sand-bar, cooked our supper by a little fire, turned the canoe on edge, spread our blankets, threw the tent over all, and were lost in dreamless oblivion.

"De wolf was howl pretty good las' night, wasn't he?" commented Joe, as he waked Billy and me in the smoky dawn. "I tink I hear em close by onetime." And in the sand, about one hundred feet from our resting-place, were plenty of tracks, where the deer-killing brutes had prowled around while we slept; perfectly harmless creatures, but unable to resist the temptation to come near the fat and juicy Billy.

Of all northern wilderness streams, the most interesting I have ever seen is the Gatineau, into which we were soon carried by the current of the Jean de Terre. The descent which the devious Ottawa makes in seven hundred miles or so, is accomplished by the Gatineau in its straight course of less than two hundred, and there are few places where you cannot hear the roar of the next rapid. In the spring every bend is a maelstrom. On the banks and overhanging cedars we could see the marks made by the spring freshets, fifteen feet above the fall level of the water. And even then, as we approached a rapid, it was necessary to know on which side the portage was, because generally the opposite bank was a vertical wall, and once in the sweep of the current, there could be no return.