The best way to learn is with a bathing-suit. Keep near shore, and try everything. Don't attempt the real thing until your handling in a heavy sea has become as instinctive as snap-shooting or the steps of dancing. Remain on the hither side of caution when you start out. Act at first as though every wavelet would surely swamp you. Extend the scope of your operations very gradually, until you know just what you can do. Never get careless. Never take any real chances. That's all.



VIII.

THE STRANDED STRANGERS.

As we progressed, the country grew more and more solemnly aloof. In the Southland is a certain appearance of mobility, lent by the deciduous trees, the warm sun, the intimate nooks in which grow the commoner homely weeds and flowers, the abundance of bees and musical insects, the childhood familiarity of the well-known birds, even the pleasantly fickle aspects of the skies. But the North wraps itself in a mantle of awe. Great hills rest not so much in the stillness of sleep as in the calm of a mighty comprehension. The pines, rank after rank, file after file, are always trooping somewhere, up the slope, to pause at the crest before descending on the other side into the unknown. Bodies of water exactly of the size, shape, and general appearance we are accustomed to see dotted with pleasure craft and bordered with wharves, summer cottages, pavilions, and hotels, accentuate by that very fact a solitude that harbours only a pair of weirdly laughing loons. Like the hills, these lakes are lying in a deep, still repose, but a repose that somehow suggests the comprehending calm of those behind the veil. The whole country seems to rest in a suspense of waiting. A shot breaks the stillness for an instant, but its very memory is shadowy a moment after the echoes die. Inevitably the traveller feels thrust in upon himself by a neutrality more deadly than open hostility would be. Hostility at least supposes recognition of his existence, a rousing of forces to oppose him. This ignores. One can no longer wonder at the taciturnity of the men who dwell here; nor does one fail to grasp the eminent suitability to the country of its Indian name—the Silent Places.

Even the birds, joyful, lively, commonplace little people that they are, draw some of this aloofness to themselves. The North is full of the homelier singers. A dozen species of warblers lisp music-box phrases, two or three sparrows whistle a cheerful repertoire, the nuthatches and chickadees toot away in blissful bourgeoisie. And yet, somehow, that very circumstance thrusts the imaginative voyager outside the companionship of their friendliness. In the face of the great gods they move with accustomed familiarity. Somehow they possess in their little experience that which explains the mystery, so that they no longer stand in its awe. Their everyday lives are spent under the shadow of the temple whither you dare not bend your footsteps. The intimacy of occult things isolates also these wise little birds.

The North speaks, however, only in the voices of three—the two thrushes, and the white-throated sparrow. You must hear these each at his proper time.

The hermit thrush you will rarely see. But late some afternoon, when the sun is lifting along the trunks of the hardwood forest, if you are very lucky and very quiet, you will hear him far in the depth of the blackest swamps. Musically expressed, his song is very much like that of the wood thrush—three cadenced liquid notes, a quivering pause, then three more notes of another phrase, and so on. But the fineness of its quality makes of it an entirely different performance. If you symbolize the hermit thrush by the flute, you must call the wood thrush a chime of little tinkling bells. One is a rendition; the other the essence of liquid music. An effect of gold-embroidered richness, of depth going down to the very soul of things, a haunting suggestion of having touched very near to the source of tears, a conviction that the just interpretation of the song would be an equally just interpretation of black woods, deep shadows, cloistered sunlight, brooding hills—these are the subtle and elusive impressions you will receive in the middle of the ancient forest.

The olive-backed thrush you will enjoy after your day's work is quite finished. You will see him through the tobacco haze, perched on a limb against the evening sky. He utters a loud joyful chirp pauses for the attention he thus solicits, and then deliberately runs up five mellow double notes, ending with a metallic "ting chee chee chee" that sounds as though it had been struck on a triangle. Then a silence of exactly nine seconds and repeat. As regularly as clock-work this performance goes on. Time him as often as you will, you can never convict him of a second's variation. And he is so optimistic and willing, and his notes are so golden with the yellow of sunshine!

The white-throated sparrow sings nine distinct variations of the same song. He may sing more, but that is all I have counted. He inhabits woods, berry-vines, brules, and clearings. Ordinarily he is cheerful, and occasionally aggravating. One man I knew he drove nearly crazy. To that man he was always saying, "And he never heard the man say drink and the——." Toward the last my friend used wildly to offer him a thousand dollars if he would, if he only would, finish that sentence. But occasionally, in just the proper circumstances, he forgets his stump corners, his vines, his jolly sunlight, and his delightful bugs to become the intimate voice of the wilds. It is night, very still, Very dark. The subdued murmur of the forest ebbs and flows with the voices of the furtive folk—an undertone fearful to break the night calm. Suddenly across the dusk of silence flashes a single thread of silver, vibrating, trembling with some unguessed ecstasy of emotion: "Ah! poor Canada Canada Canada Canada!" it mourns passionately, and falls silent. That is all.

You will hear at various times other birds peculiarly of the North. Loons alternately calling and uttering their maniac laughter; purple finches or some of the pine sparrows warbling high and clear; the winter wren, whose rapturous ravings never fail to strike the attention of the dullest passer; all these are exclusively Northern voices, and each expresses some phase or mood of the Silent Places. But none symbolizes as do the three. And when first you hear one of them after an absence, you are satisfied that things are right in the world, for the North Country's spirit is as it was.

Now ensued a spell of calm weather, with a film of haze over the sky. The water lay like quicksilver, heavy and inert. Toward afternoon it became opalescent. The very substance of the liquid itself seemed impregnated with dyes ranging in shade from wine colour to the most delicate lilac. Through a smoke veil the sun hung, a ball of red, while beneath every island, every rock, every tree, every wild fowl floating idly in a medium apparently too delicate for its support, lurked the beautiful crimson shadows of the North.



Hour after hour, day after day, we slipped on. Point after point, island after island, presented itself silently to our inspection and dropped quietly astern. The beat of paddles fitted monotonously into the almost portentous stillness. It seemed that we might be able to go on thus for ever, lapped in the dream of some forgotten magic that had stricken breathless the life of the world. And then, suddenly, three weeks on our journey, we came to a town.

It was not the typical fur town of the Far North, but it lay at the threshold. A single street, worn smooth by the feet of men and dogs, but innocent of hoofs, fronted the channel. A board walk, elevated against the snows, bordered a row of whitewashed log and frame houses, each with its garden of brilliant flowers. A dozen wharves of various sizes, over whose edges peeped the double masts of Mackinaw boats, spoke of a fishing community. Between the roofs one caught glimpses of a low sparse woods and some thousand-foot hills beyond. We subsequently added the charm of isolation in learning that the nearest telegraph line was fifteen miles distant, while the railroad passed some fifty miles away.

Dick immediately went wild. It was his first glimpse of the mixed peoples. A dozen loungers, handsome, careless, graceful with the inimitable elegance of the half-breed's leisure, chatted, rolled cigarettes, and surveyed with heavy-eyed indolence such of the town as could be viewed from the shade in which they lay. Three girls, in whose dark cheeks glowed a rich French comeliness, were comparing purchases near the store. A group of rivermen, spike-booted, short-trousered, reckless of air, with their little round hats over one ear, sat chair-tilted outside the "hotel." Across the dividing fences of two of the blazoned gardens a pair of old crones gossiped under their breaths. Some Indians smoked silently at the edge of one of the docks. In the distance of the street's end a French priest added the quaintness of his cassock to the exotic atmosphere of the scene. At once a pack of the fierce sledge-dogs left their foraging for the offal of the fisheries, to bound challenging in the direction of poor Deuce. That highbred animal fruitlessly attempted to combine dignity with a discretionary lurking between our legs. We made demonstrations with sticks, and sought out the hotel, for it was about time to eat.

We had supper at a table with three Forest Rangers, two lumber-jacks, and a cat-like handsome "breed" whose business did not appear. Then we lit up and strolled about to see what we could see.

On the text of a pair of brass knuckles hanging behind the hotel bar I embroidered many experiences with the lumberjack. I told of a Wisconsin town where an enforced wait of five hours enabled me to establish the proportion of fourteen saloons out of a total of twenty frame buildings. I descanted craftily on the character of the woodsman out of the woods and in the right frame of mind for deviltry. I related how Jack Boyd, irritated beyond endurance at the annoyances of a stranger, finally with the flat of his hand boxed the man's head so mightily that he whirled around twice and sat down.

"Now," said Jack softly, "be more careful, my friend, or next time I'll hit you." Or of a little Irishman who shouted to his friends about to pull a big man from pounding the life quite out of him, "Let him alone! let him alone! I may be on top myself in a few minutes!" And of Dave Walker, who fought to a standstill with his bare fists alone five men who had sworn to kill him. And again of that doughty knight of the peavie who, when attacked by an axe, waved aside interference with the truly dauntless cry, "Leave him be, boys; there's an axe between us!"

I tried to sketch, too, the drive, wherein a dozen times in an hour these men face death with a smile or a curse—the raging untamed river, the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they herd their brutish multitudes.

There was Jimmy, the river boss, who could not swim a stroke, and who was incontinently swept over a dam and into the boiling back-set of the eddy below. Three times, gasping, strangling, drowning, he was carried in the wide swirl of the circle, sometimes under, sometimes on top. Then his knee touched a sand-bar, and he dragged himself painfully ashore. He coughed up a quantity of water, and gave vent to his feelings over a miraculous escape. "Damn it all!" he wailed, "I lost my peavie!"

"On the Paint River drive one spring," said I, "a jam formed that extended up river some three miles. The men were working at the breast of it, some underneath, some on top. After a time the jam apparently broke, pulled downstream a hundred feet or so, and plugged again. Then it was seen that only a small section had moved, leaving the main body still jammed, so that between the two sections lay a narrow stretch of open water. Into this open water one of the men had fallen. Before he could recover, the second or tail section of the jam started to pull. Apparently nothing could prevent him from being crushed. A man called Sam—I don't know his last name—ran down the tail of the first section, across the loose logs bobbing in the open water, seized the victim of the accident by the collar, desperately scaled the face of the moving jam, and reached the top just as the two sections ground together with the brutish noise of wrecking timbers. It was a magnificent rescue. Any but these men of iron would have adjourned for thanks and congratulations.

"Still retaining his hold on the other man's collar, Sam twisted him about and delivered a vigorous kick. 'There, damn you!' said he. That was all. They fell to work at once to keep the jam moving."

I instanced, too, some of the feats of river-work these men could perform. Of how Jack Boyd has been known to float twenty miles without shifting his feet, on a log so small that he carried it to the water on his shoulder; of how a dozen rivermen, one after the other, would often go through the chute of a dam standing upright on single logs; of O'Donnell, who could turn a somersault on a floating pine log; of the birling matches, wherein two men on a single log try to throw each other into the river by treading, squirrel fashion, in faster and faster rotation; of how a riverman and spiked boots and a saw-log can do more work than an ordinary man with a rowboat.

I do not suppose Dick believed all this—although it was strictly and literally true—but his imagination was impressed. He gazed with respect on the group at the far end of the street, where fifteen or twenty lumber-jacks were interested in some amusement concealed from us.

"What do you suppose they are doing?" murmured Dick, awestricken.

"Wrestling, or boxing, or gambling, or jumping," said I.

We approached. Gravely, silently, intensely interested, the cock-hatted, spikeshod, dangerous men were playing—croquet!

The sight was too much for our nerves. We went away.

The permanent inhabitants of the place we discovered to be friendly to a degree.

The Indian strain was evident in various dilution through all. Dick's enthusiasm grew steadily until his artistic instincts became aggressive, and he flatly announced his intention of staying at least four days for the purpose of making sketches. We talked the matter over. Finally it was agreed. Deuce and I were to make a wide circle to the north and west as far as the Hudson's Bay post of Cloche, while Dick filled his notebook. That night we slept in beds for the first time.

That is to say, we slept until about three o'clock. Then we became vaguely conscious, through a haze of drowse—as one becomes conscious in the pause of a sleeping-car—of voices outside our doors. Some one said something about its being hardly much use to go to bed. Another hoped the sheets were not damp. A succession of lights twinkled across the walls of our room, and were vaguely explained by the coughing of a steamboat. We sank into oblivion until the calling-bell brought us to our feet.

I happened to finish my toilet a little before Dick, and so descended to the sunlight until he might be ready. Roosting on a gray old boulder ten feet outside the door were two figures that made me want to rub my eyes.

The older was a square, ruddy-faced man of sixty, with neatly trimmed, snow-white whiskers. He had on a soft Alpine hat of pearl gray, a modishly cut gray homespun suit, a tie in which glimmered an opal pin, wore tan gloves, and had slung over one shoulder by a narrow black strap a pair of field-glasses.

The younger was a tall and angular young fellow, of an eager and sophomoric youth. His hair was very light and very smoothly brushed, his eyes blue and rather near-sighted, his complexion pink, with an obviously recent and superficial sunburn, and his clothes, from the white Panama to the broad-soled low shoes, of the latest cut and material. Instinctively I sought his fraternity pin. He looked as though he might say "Rah! Rah!" something or other. A camera completed his outfit.

Tourists! How in the world did they get here? And then I remembered the twinkle of the lights and the coughing of the steamboat. But what in time could they be doing here? Picturesque as the place was, it held nothing to appeal to the Baedeker spirit. I surveyed the pair with some interest.

"I suppose there is pretty good fishing around here," ventured the elder.

He evidently took me for an inhabitant. Remembering my faded blue shirt and my floppy old hat and the red handkerchief about my neck and the moccasins on my feet, I did not blame him.

"I suppose there are bass among the islands," I replied.

We fell into conversation. I learned that he and his son were from New York.

He learned, by a final direct question which was most significant of his not belonging to the country, who I was. By chance he knew my name. He opened his heart.

"We came down on the City of Flint," said he. "My son and I are on a vacation. We have been as far as the Yellowstone, and thought we would like to see some of this country. I was assured that on this date I could make connection with the North Star for the south. I told the purser of the Flint not to wake us up unless the North Star was here at the docks. He bundled us off here at three in the morning. The North Star was not here; it is an outrage!"

He uttered various threats.

"I thought the North Star was running away south around the Perry Sound region," I suggested.

"Yes, but she was to begin to-day, June 16, to make this connection." He produced a railroad folder. "It's in this," he continued.

"Did you go by that thing?" I marvelled.

"Why, of course," said he.

"I forgot you were an American," said I. "You're in Canada now."

He looked his bewilderment, so I hunted up Dick. I detailed the situation. "He doesn't know the race," I concluded. "Soon he will be trying to get information out of the agent. Let's be on hand."

We were on hand. The tourist, his face very red, his whiskers very white and bristly, marched importantly to the agent's office. The latter comprised also the post-office, the fish depot, and a general store. The agent was for the moment dickering in re two pounds of sugar. This transaction took five minutes to the pound. Mr. Tourist waited. Then he opened up. The agent heard him placidly, as one who listens to a curious tale.

"What I want to know is, where's that boat?" ended the tourist.

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"Aren't you the agent of this company?"

"Sure," replied the agent.

"Then why don't you know something about its business and plans and intentions?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"Do you think it would be any good to wait for the North Star? Do you suppose they can be coming? Do you suppose they've altered the schedule?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"When is the next boat through here?"

I listened for the answer in trepidation, for I saw that another "Couldn't say" would cause the red-faced tourist to blow up. To my relief, the agent merely inquired,—

"North or south?"

"South, of course. I just came from the north. What in the name of everlasting blazes should I want to go north again for?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent. "The next boat south gets in next week, Tuesday or Wednesday."

"Next week!" shrieked the tourist.

"When's the next boat north?" interposed the son.

"To-morrow morning."

"What time?"

"Couldn't say; you'd have to watch for her."

"That's our boat, dad," said the young man.

"But we've just come from there!" snorted his father; "it's three hundred miles back. It'll put us behind two days. I've got to be in New York Friday. I've got an engagement." He turned suddenly to the agent. "Here, I've got to send a telegram."

The agent blinked placidly. "You'll not send it from here. This ain't a telegraph station."

"Where's the nearest station?"

"Fifteen mile."

Without further parley the old man turned and walked, stiff and military, from the place. Near the end of the broad walk he met the usual doddering but amiable oldest inhabitant.

"Fine day," chirped the patriarch in well-meant friendliness. "They jest brought in a bear cub over to Antoine's. If you'd like to take a look at him, I'll show you where it is."

The tourist stopped short and glared fiercely.

"Sir," said he, "damn your bear!" Then he strode on, leaving grandpa staring after him.

In the course of the morning we became quite well acquainted, and he resigned. The son appeared to take somewhat the humorous view all through the affair, which must have irritated the old gentleman. They discussed it rather thoroughly, and finally decided to retrace their steps for a fresh start over a better-known route. This settled, the senior seemed to feel relieved of a weight. He even saw and relished certain funny phases of the incident, though he never ceased to foretell different kinds of trouble for the company, varying in range from mere complaints to the most tremendous of damage suits.

He was much interested, finally, in our methods of travel, and then, in logical sequence, with what he could see about him. He watched curiously my loading of the canoe, for I had a three-mile stretch of open water, and the wind was abroad. Deuce's empirical boat wisdom aroused his admiration. He and his son were both at the shore to see me off.

Deuce settled himself in the bottom. I lifted the stern from the shore and gently set it afloat. In a moment I was ready to start.

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" suddenly cried the father.

I swirled my paddle back. The old gentleman was hastily fumbling in his pockets. After an instant he descended to the water's edge.

"Here," said he, "you are a judge of fiction; take this."

It was his steamboat and railway folder.



IX.

ON FLIES.

All the rest of the day I paddled under the frowning cliffs of the hill ranges. Bold, bare, scarred, seamed with fissures, their precipice rocks gave the impression of ten thousand feet rather that only so many hundreds. Late in the afternoon we landed against a formation of basaltic blocks cut as squarely up and down as a dock, and dropping off into as deep water. The waves chug-chug-chugged sullenly against them, and the fringe of a dark pine forest, drawn back from a breadth of natural grass, lowered across the horizon like a thunder-cloud.

Deuce and I made camp with the uneasy feeling of being under inimical inspection. A cold wind ruffled lead-like waters. No comfort was in the prospect, so we retired early. Then it appeared that the coarse grass of the park had bred innumerable black flies, and that we had our work cut out for us.

The question of flies—using that, to a woodsman, eminently connotive word in its wide embracement of mosquitoes, sandflies, deer-flies, black flies, and midges—is one much mooted in the craft. On no subject are more widely divergent ideas expressed. One writer claims that black flies' bites are but the temporary inconvenience of a pin-prick; another tells of boils lasting a week as the invariable result of their attentions; a third sweeps aside the whole question as unimportant to concentrate his anathemas on the musical mosquito; still a fourth descants on the maddening midge, and is prepared to defend his claims against the world. A like dogmatic partisanship obtains in the question of defences. Each and every man possessed of a tongue wherewith to speak or a pen wherewith to write, heralds the particular merits of his own fly-dope, head-net, or mosquito-proof tent-lining. Eager advocates of the advantages of pork fat, kerosene, pine tar, pennyroyal, oil of cloves, castor oil, lollacapop, or a half hundred other concoctions, will assure you, tears in eyes, that his is the only true faith. So many men, so many minds, until the theorist is confused into doing the most uncomfortable thing possible—that is, to learn by experience.

As for the truth, it is at once in all of them and in none of them. The annoyance of after-effects from a sting depends entirely on the individual's physical makeup. Some people are so poisoned by mosquito bites that three or four on the forehead suffice to close entirely the victim's eyes. On others they leave but a small red mark without swelling. Black flies caused festering sores on one man I accompanied to the woods. In my own case they leave only a tiny blood-spot the size of a pin-head, which bothers me not a bit. Midges nearly drove crazy the same companion of mine, so that finally he jumped into the river, clothes and all, to get rid of them. Again, merely my own experience would lead me to regard them as a tremendous nuisance, but one quite bearable. Indians are less susceptible than whites; nevertheless I have seen them badly swelled behind the ears from the bites of the big hardwood mosquito.

You can make up your mind to one thing: from the first warm weather until August you must expect to cope with insect pests. The black fly will keep you busy until late afternoon; the midges will swarm you about sunset; and the mosquito will preserve the tradition after you have turned in. As for the deer-fly, and others of his piratical breed, he will bite like a dog at any time.

To me the most annoying species is the mosquito. The black fly is sometimes most industrious—I have seen trout fishermen come into camp with the blood literally streaming from their faces—but his great recommendation is that he holds still to be killed. No frantic slaps, no waving of arms, no muffled curses. You just place your finger calmly and firmly on the spot. You get him every time. In this is great, heart-lifting joy. It may be unholy joy, perhaps even vengeful, but it leaves the spirit ecstatic. The satisfaction of murdering the beast that has had the nerve to light on you just as you are reeling in almost counterbalances the pain of a sting. The midge, again, or punkie, or "no-see-'um," just as you please, swarms down upon you suddenly and with commendable vigour, so that you feel as though red-hot pepper were being sprinkled on your bare skin; and his invisibility and intangibility are such that you can never tell whether you have killed him or not; but he doesn't last long, and dope routs him totally. Your mosquito, however, is such a deliberate brute. He has in him some of that divine fire which causes a dog to turn around nine times before lying down.

Whether he is selecting or gloating I do not know, but I do maintain that the price of your life's blood is often not too great to pay for the cessation of that hum.

"Eet is not hees bite," said Billy the half-breed to me once—"eet is hees sing."

I agree with Billy. One mosquito in a tent can keep you awake for hours.

As to protection, it is varied enough in all conscience, and always theoretically perfect. A head-net falling well down over your chest, or even tied under your arm-pits, is at once the simplest and most fallacious of these theories. It will keep vast numbers of flies out, to be sure. It will also keep the few adventurous discoverers in, where you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe; and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction, so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that head-net is to be picked to holes by the brush, and finally to be snatched from you to sapling height, whence your pains will rescue it only in a useless condition. Probably then you will dance the war-dance of exasperation on its dismembered remains. Still, there are times—in case of straight-away river paddling, or open walking, or lengthened waiting—when the net is a great comfort. And it is easily included in the pack.

Next in order come the various "dopes." And they are various. From the stickiest, blackest pastes to the silkiest, suavest oils they range, through the grades of essence, salve, and cream. Every man has his own recipe—the infallible. As a general rule, it may be stated that the thicker kinds last longer and are generally more thoroughly effective, but the lighter are pleasanter to wear, though requiring more frequent application. At a pinch, ordinary pork fat is good. The Indians often make temporary use of the broad caribou leaf, crushing it between their palms and rubbing the juices on the skin. I know by experience that this is effective, but very transitory. It is, however, a good thing to use when resting on the trail, for, by the grace of Providence, flies are rarely bothersome as long as you are moving at a fair gait.

This does not always hold good, however, any more than the best fly-dope is always effective. I remember most vividly the first day of a return journey from the shores of the Hudson Bay. The weather was rather oppressively close and overcast.

We had paddled a few miles up river from the fur trading-post, and then had landed in order to lighten the canoe for the ascent against the current. At that point the forest has already begun to dwindle towards the Land of Little Sticks, so that often miles and miles of open muskegs will intervene between groups of the stunted trees. Jim and I found ourselves a little over waist deep in luxuriant and tangled grasses that impeded and clogged our every footstep. Never shall I forget that country—its sad and lonely isolation, its dull lead sky, its silence, and the closeness of its stifling atmosphere—and never shall I see it otherwise than as in a dense brown haze, a haze composed of swarming millions of mosquitoes. There is not the slightest exaggeration in the statement. At every step new multitudes rushed into our faces to join the old. At times Jim's back was so covered with them that they almost overlaid the colour of the cloth. And as near as we could see, every square foot of the thousands of acres quartered its hordes.

We doped liberally, but without the slightest apparent effect. Probably two million squeamish mosquitoes were driven away by the disgust of our medicaments, but what good did that do us when eight million others were not so particular? At the last we hung bandanas under our hats, cut fans of leaves, and stumbled on through a most miserable day until we could build a smudge at evening.

For smoke is usually a specific. Not always, however: some midges seem to delight in it. The Indians make a tiny blaze of birch bark and pine twigs deep in a nest of grass and caribou leaves. When the flame is well started, they twist the growing vegetation canopy-wise above it.

In that manner they gain a few minutes of dense, acrid smoke, which is enough for an Indian. A white man, however, needs something more elaborate.

The chief reason for your initial failure in making an effective smudge will be that you will not get your fire well started before piling on the damp smoke-material. It need not be a conflagration, but it should be bright and glowing, so that the punk birch or maple wood you add will not smother it entirely. After it is completed, you will not have to sit coughing in the thick of fumigation, as do many, but only to leeward and underneath. Your hat used as a fan will eddy the smoke temporarily into desirable nooks and crevices. I have slept without annoyance on the Great Plains, where the mosquitoes seem to go in organized and predatory bands, merely by lying beneath a smudge that passed at least five feet above me. You will find the frying-pan a handy brazier for the accommodation of a movable smoke to be transported to the interior of the tent. And it does not in the least hurt the frying-pan. These be hints, briefly spoken, out of which at times you may have to construct elaborate campaigns.

But you come to grapples in the defence of comfort when night approaches. If you can eat and sleep well, you can stand almost any hardship. The night's rest is as carefully to be fore-assured as the food that sustains you. No precaution is too elaborate to certify unbroken repose. By dark you will discover the peak of your tent to be liberally speckled with insects of all sorts. Especially is this true of an evening that threatens rain. Your smudge-pan may drive away the mosquitoes, but merely stupefies the other varieties. You are forced to the manipulation of a balsam fan.

In your use of this simple implement you will betray the extent of your experience. Dick used at first to begin at the rear peak and brush as rapidly as possible toward the opening. The flies, thoroughly aroused, eddied about a few frantic moments, like leaves in an autumn wind, finally to settle close to the sod in the crannies between the tent-wall and the ground. Then Dick would lie flat on his belly in order to brush with equal vigour at these new lurking-places. The flies repeated the autumn-leaf effect, and returned to the rear peak. This was amusing to me, and furnished the flies with healthful, appetizing exercise, but was bad for Dick's soul. After a time he discovered the only successful method is the gentle one. Then he began at the peak and brushed forward slowly, very, very slowly, so that the limited intellect of his visitors did not become confused. Thus when they arrived at the opening they saw it and used it, instead of searching frantically for corners in which to hide from apparently vengeful destruction. Then he would close his tent-flap securely, and turn in at once. So he was able to sleep until earliest daylight. At that time the mosquitoes again found him out.

Nine out of ten—perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred—sleep in open tents. For absolute and perfect comfort proceed as follows:—Have your tent-maker sew you a tent of cheese-cloth[*] with the same dimensions as your shelter, except that the walls should be loose and voluminous at the bottom. It should have no openings.

[Footnote *: Do not allow yourself to be talked into substituting mosquito-bar or bobinet. Any mesh coarser than cheese-cloth will prove pregnable to the most enterprising of the smaller species.]

Suspend this affair inside your tent by means of cords or tapes. Drop it about you. Spread it out. Lay rod-cases, duffel-bags, or rocks along its lower edges to keep it spread. You will sleep beneath it like a child in winter. No driving out of reluctant flies; no enforced early rising; no danger of a single overlooked insect to make the midnight miserable. The cheese-cloth weighs almost nothing, can be looped up out of the way in the daytime, admits the air readily. Nothing could fill the soul with more ecstatic satisfaction than to lie for a moment before going to sleep listening to a noise outside like an able-bodied sawmill that indicates the ping-gosh are abroad.

It would be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the human mind is capable.

The picture rises before my mind of the cabin of a twenty-eight-foot cutter-sloop just before the dawn of a midsummer day. The sloop was made for business, and the cabin harmonized exactly with the sloop—painted pine, wooden bunks without mattresses, camp-blankets, duffel-bags slung up because all the floor place had been requisitioned for sleeping purposes. We were anchored a hundred feet off land from Pilot Cove, on the uninhabited north shore. The mosquitoes had adventured on the deep. We lay half asleep.

"On the middle rafter," murmured the Football Man, "is one old fellow giving signals."

"A quartette is singing drinking-songs on my nose," muttered the Glee Club Man.

"We won't need to cook," I suggested somnolently. "We can run up and down on deck with our mouths open and get enough for breakfast."

The fourth member opened one eye. "Boys," he breathed, "we won't be able to go on to-morrow unless we give up having any more biscuits."

After a time some one murmured, "Why?"

"We'll have to use all the lard on the mast. They're so mad because they can't get at us that they're biting the mast. It's already swelled up as big as a barrel. We'll never be able to get the mainsail up. Any of you boys got any vaseline? Perhaps a little fly-dope—"

But we snored vigorously in unison. The Indians say that when Kitch' Manitou had created men he was dissatisfied, and so brought women into being. At once love-making began, and then, as now, the couples sought solitude for their exchanges of vows, their sighings to the moon, their claspings of hands. Marriages ensued. The situation remained unchanged. Life was one perpetual honeymoon. I suppose the novelty was fresh and the sexes had not yet realized they would not part as abruptly as they had been brought together. The villages were deserted, while the woods and bushes were populous with wedded and unwedded lovers. Kitch' Manitou looked on the proceedings with disapproval. All this was most romantic and beautiful, no doubt, but in the meantime mi-daw-min, the corn, mi-no-men, the rice, grew rank and uncultivated; while bis-iw, the lynx, and swingwaage, the wolverine, and me-en-gan, the wolf, committed unchecked depredations among the weaker forest creatures. The business of life was being sadly neglected. So Kitch' Manitou took counsel with himself, and created saw-gi-may, the mosquito, to whom he gave as dwelling the woods and bushes. That took the romance out of the situation. As my narrator grimly expressed it, "Him come back, go to work."

Certainly it should be most effective. Even the thick-skinned moose is not exempt from discomfort. At certain seasons the canoe voyager in the Far North will run upon a dozen in the course of a day's travel, standing nose-deep in the river merely to escape the insect pests.

However, this is to be remembered: after the first of August they bother very little; before that time the campaign I have outlined is effective; even in fly season the worst days are infrequent. In the woods you must expect to pay a certain price in discomfort for a very real and very deep pleasure. Wet, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, difficult travel, insects, hard beds, aching muscles—all these at one time or another will be your portion. If you are of the class that cannot have a good time unless everything is right with it, stay out of the woods. One thing at least will always be wrong. When you have gained the faculty of ignoring the one disagreeable thing and concentrating your powers on the compensations, then you will have become a true woodsman, and to your desires the forest will always be calling.



X.

CLOCHE.

Imagine a many-armed lake, like a starfish, nested among rugged Laurentian hills, whose brows are bare and forbidding, but whose concealed ravines harbour each its cool screen of forest growth. Imagine a brawling stream escaping at one of the arms, to tumble, intermittently visible among the trees, down a series of cascades and rapids, to the broad, island-dotted calm of the big lake. Imagine a meadow at the mouth of this stream, and on the meadow a single white dot. Thus you will see Cloche, a trading-post of the Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company, as Deuce and I saw it from the summit of the hills.

We had accomplished a very hard scramble, which started well enough in a ravine so leafy and green and impenetrable that we might well have imagined ourselves in a boundless forest. Deuce had scented sundry partridges, which he had pointed with entire deference to the good form of a sporting dog's conventions. As usual, to Deuce's never-failing surprise and disgust, the birds had proved themselves most uncultivated and rude persons by hopping promptly into trees instead of lying to point and then flushing as a well-taught partridge should. I had refused to pull pistol on them. Deuce's heart was broken. Then, finally, we came to cliffs up which we had to scale, and boulders which we had to climb, and fissures which we had to jump or cross on fallen trees, and wide, bare sweeps of rock and blueberry bushes which we had to cover, until at last we stood where we could look all ways at once.

The starfish thrust his insinuating arms in among the distant hills to the north. League after league, rising and falling and rising again into ever bluer distance, forest-covered, mysterious, other ranges and systems lifted, until at last, far out, nearly at the horizon-height of my eye, flashed again the gleam of water. And so the starfish arms of the little lake at my feet seemed to have plunged into this wilderness tangle only to reappear at greater distance. Like swamp-fire, it lured the imagination always on and on and on through the secret waterways of the uninhabited North. It was as though I stood on the dividing ridge between the old and the new. Through the southern haze, hull down, I thought to make out the smoke of a Great Lake freighter; from the shelter of a distant cove I was not surprised a moment later to see emerge a tiny speck whose movements betrayed it as a birch canoe. The great North was at this, the most southern of the Hudson's Bay posts, striking a pin-point of contact with the world of men.

Deuce and I angled down the mountain toward the stream. Our arrival coincided with that of the canoe. It was of the Ojibway three-fathom pattern, and contained a half-dozen packs, a sledge-dog, with whom Deuce at once opened guarded negotiations, an old Indian, a squaw, and a child of six or eight. We exchanged brief greetings. Then I sat on a stump and watched the portage.

These were evidently "Woods Indians," an entirely different article from the "Post Indians." They wore their hair long, and bound by a narrow strip or fillet; their faces were hard and deeply lined, with a fine, bold, far-seeing look to the eyes which comes only from long woods dwelling. They walked, even under heavy loads, with a sagging, springy gait, at once sure-footed and swift. Instead of tump-lines the man used his sash, and the woman a blanket knotted loosely together at the ends. The details of their costumes were interesting in combination of jeans and buckskin, broadcloth and blanket, stroud and a material evidently made from the strong white sacking in which flour intended for frontier consumption is always packed. After the first double-barrelled "bo' jou', bo' jou'," they paid no further attention to me. In a few moments the portage was completed. The woman thrust her paddle against the stream's bottom and the canoe, and so embarked. The man stepped smoothly to his place like a cat leaping from a chair. They shot away with the current, leaving behind them a strange and mysterious impression of silence.

I followed down a narrow but well-beaten trail, and so at the end of a half-mile came to the meadow and the post of Cloche.

The building itself was accurately of the Hudson Bay type—a steep, sloping roof greater in front than behind, a deep recessed veranda, squared logs sheathed with whitewashed boards. About it was a little garden, which, besides the usual flowers and vegetables, contained such exotics as a deer confined to a pen and a bear chained to a stake. As I approached, the door opened and the Trader came out.

Now, often along the southern fringe your Hudson's Bay Trader will prove to be a distinct disappointment. In fact, one of the historic old posts is now kept by a pert little cockney Englishman, cringing or impudent as the main chance seems to advise. When you have penetrated further into the wilderness, however, where the hardships of winter and summer travel, the loneliness of winter posts, the necessity of dealing directly with savage men and savage nature, develops the quality of a man or wrecks him early in the game, you will be certain of meeting your type. But here, within fifty miles of the railroad!

The man who now stepped into view, however, preserved in his appearance all the old traditions. He was, briefly, a short black-and-white man built very square. Immense power lurked in the broad, heavy shoulders, the massive chest, the thick arms, the sturdy, column-like legs. As for his face, it was almost entirely concealed behind a curly square black beard that grew above his cheek-bones nearly to his eyes. Only a thick hawk nose, an inscrutable pair of black eyes under phenomenally heavy eyebrows, and a short black pipe showed plainly from the hirsute tangle. He was lock, stock, and barrel of the Far North, one of the old regime. I was rejoiced to see him there, but did not betray a glimmer of interest. I knew my type too well for that.

"How are you?" he said grudgingly.

"Good-day," said I.

We leaned against the fence and smoked, each contemplating carefully the end of his pipe. I knew better than to say anything. The Trader was looking me over, making up his mind about me. Speech on my part would argue lightness of disposition, for it would seem to indicate that I was not also making up my mind about him.

In this pause there was not the least unfriendliness. Only, in the woods you prefer to know first the business and character of a chance acquaintance. Afterwards you may ingratiate to his good will. All of which possesses a beautiful simplicity, for it proves that good or bad opinion need not depend on how gracefully you can chatter assurances. At the end of a long period the Trader inquired, "Which way you headed?"

"Out in a canoe for pleasure. Headed almost anywhere."

Again we smoked.

"Dog any good?" asked the Trader, removing his pipe and pointing to the observant Deuce.

"He'll hunt shade on a hot day," said I tentatively. "How's the fur in this district?"

We were off. He invited me in and showed me his bear. In ten minutes we were seated chair-tilted on the veranda, and slowly, very cautiously, in abbreviated syncopation, were feeling our way toward an intimacy.

Now came the Indians I had seen at the lake to barter for some flour and pork. I was glad of the chance to follow them all into the trading-room. A low wooden counter backed by a grill divided the main body of the room from the entrance. It was deliciously dim. All the charm of the Aromatic Shop was in the place, and an additional flavour of the wilds. Everything here was meant for the Indian trade: bolts of bright-patterned ginghams, blankets of red or blue, articles of clothing, boxes of beads for decoration, skeins of brilliant silk, lead bars for bullet-making, stacks of long brass-bound "trade guns" in the corner, small mirrors, red and parti-coloured worsted sashes with tassels on the ends, steel traps of various sizes, and a dozen other articles to be desired by the forest people. And here, unlike the Aromatic Shop, were none of the products of the Far North. All that, I knew, was to be found elsewhere, in another apartment, equally dim, but delightful in the orderly disorder of a storeroom.

Afterwards I made the excuse of a pair of moccasins to see this other room. We climbed a steep, rough flight of stairs to emerge through a sort of trap-door into a space directly under the roof. It was lit only by a single little square at one end. Deep under the eaves I could make out row after row of boxes and chests. From the rafters hung a dozen pair of snow-shoes. In the centre of the floor, half overturned, lay an open box from which tumbled dozens of pairs of moose-hide snow-shoe moccasins.

Shades of childhood, what a place! No one of us can fail to recall with a thrill the delights of a rummage in the attic—the joy of pulling from some half-forgotten trunk a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes would be to rummage, not in the fictions of imagination, but the facts of the most real picturesque. In yonder square box are the smoke-tanned shoes of silence; that velvet dimness would prove to be the fur of a bear; this birch-bark package contains maple sugar savoured of the wilds. Buckskin, both white and buff, bears' claws in strings, bundles of medicinal herbs, sweet-grass baskets fragrant as an Eastern tale, birch-bark boxes embroidered with stained quills of the porcupines, bows of hickory and arrows of maple, queer half-boots of stiff sealskin from the very shores of the Hudson Bay, belts of beadwork, yellow and green, for the Corn Dance, even a costume or so of buckskin complete for ceremonial—all these the fortunate child would find were he to take the rainy-day privilege in this, the most wonderful attic in all the world. And then, after he had stroked the soft fur, and smelled the buckskin and sweet grasses, and tasted the crumbling maple sugar, and dressed himself in the barbaric splendours of the North, he could flatten his little nose against the dim square of light and look out over the glistening yellow backs of a dozen birchbark canoes to the distant, rain-blurred hills, beyond which lay the country whence all these things had come. Do you wonder that in after years that child hits the Long Trail? Do you still wonder at finding these strange, taciturn, formidable, tender-hearted men dwelling lonely in the Silent Places?

The Trader yanked several of the boxes to the centre and prosaically tumbled about their contents. He brought to light heavy moose-hide moccasins with high linen tops for the snow; lighter buckskin moccasins, again with the high tops, but this time of white tanned doeskin; slipper-like deer-skin moccasins with rolled edges, for the summer; oil-tanned shoepacs, with and without the flexible leather sole; "cruisers" of varying degree of height—each and every sort of footgear in use in the Far North, excepting and saving always the beautiful soft doeskin slippers finished with white fawnskin and ornamented with the Ojibway flower pattern for which I sought. Finally he gave it up.

"I had a few pair. They must have been sent out," said he.

We rummaged a little further for luck's sake, then descended to the outer air. I left him to fetch my canoe, but returned in the afternoon. We became friends. That evening we sat in the little sitting-room and talked far into the night.

He was a true Hudson's Bay man, steadfastly loyal to the Company. I mentioned the legend of La Longue Traverse; he stoutly asserted he had never heard of it. I tried to buy a mink-skin or so to hang on the wall as souvenir of my visit; he was genuinely distressed, but had to refuse because the Company had not authorized him to sell, and he had nothing of his own to give. I mentioned the River of the Moose, the Land of Little Sticks; his deep eyes sparkled with excitement, and he asked eagerly a multitude of details concerning late news from the northern posts.

And as the evening dwindled, after the manner of Traders everywhere, he began to tell me the "ghost stories" of this station of Cloche. Every post has gathered a mass of legendary lore in the slow years, but this had been on the route of the voyageurs from Montreal and Quebec at the time when the lords of the North journeyed to the scenes of their annual revels at Fort Williams. The Trader had much to say of the magnificence and luxury of these men—their cooks, their silken tents, their strange and costly foods, their rare wines, their hordes of French and Indian canoemen and packers. Then Cloche was a halting-place for the night. Its meadows had blossomed many times with the gay tents and banners of a great company. He told me, as vividly as though he had been an eye-witness, of how the canoes must have loomed up suddenly from between the islands. By-and-by he seized the lamp and conducted me outside, where hung ponderous ornamental steelyards, on which in the old days the peltries were weighed.

"It is not so now," said he. "We buy by count, and modern scales weigh the provisions. And the beaver are all gone."

We re-entered the house in silence. After a while he began briefly to sketch his own career. Then, indeed, the flavour of the Far North breathed its crisp, bracing ozone through the atmosphere of the room.

He had started life at one of the posts of the Far North-West. At the age of twelve he enlisted in the Company. Throughout forty years he had served her. He had travelled to all the strange places of the North, and claimed to have stood on the shores of that half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh.

"It was snowing at the time," he said prosaically; "and I couldn't see anything, except that I'd have to bear to the east to get away from open water. Maybe she wasn't the lake. The Injins said she was, but I was too almighty shy of grub to bother with lakes."

Other names fell from him in the course of talk, some of which I had heard and some not, but all of which rang sweet and clear with no uncertain note of adventure. Especially haunts my memory an impression of desolate burned trees standing stick-like in death on the shores of Lost River.

He told me he had been four years at Cloche, but expected shortly to be transferred, as the fur was getting scarce, and another post one hundred miles to the west could care for the dwindling trade. He hoped to be sent into the North-West, but shrugged his shoulders as he said so, as though that were in the hands of the gods. At the last he fished out a concertina and played for me. Have you ever heard, after dark, in the North, where the hills grow big at sunset, a la Claire Fontaine crooned to such an accompaniment, and by a man of impassive bulk and countenance, but with glowing eyes?

I said good-night, and stumbled, sight-dazed, through the cool dark to my tent near the beach. The weird minor strains breathed after me as I went.

"A la claire fontaine M'en allant promener, J'ai trouve l'eau si belle Que je m'y suis baigne, Il y a longtemps que je t'aime Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

The next day, with the combers of a howling north-westerly gale clutching at the stern of the canoe, I rode in a glory of spray and copper-tasting excitement back to Dick and his half-breed settlement.

But the incident had its sequel. The following season, as I was sitting writing at my desk, a strange package was brought me. It was wrapped in linen sewn strongly with waxed cord. Its contents lie before me now—a pair of moccasins fashioned of the finest doeskin, tanned so beautifully that the delicious smoke fragrance fills the room, and so effectively that they could be washed with soap and water without destroying their softness. The tongue-shaped piece over the instep is of white fawnskin heavily ornamented in five colours of silk. Where it joins the foot of the slipper it is worked over and over into a narrow cord of red and blue silk. The edge about the ankle is turned over, deeply scalloped, and bound at the top with a broad band of blue silk stitched with pink. Two tiny blue bows at either side the ankle ornament the front. Altogether a most magnificent foot-gear. No word accompanied them, apparently, but after some search I drew a bit of paper from the toe of one of them. It was inscribed simply—"Fort la Cloche."



XI.

THE HABITANTS.

During my absence Dick had made many friends. Wherein lies his secret I do not know, but he has a peculiar power of ingratiation with people whose lives are quite outside his experience or sympathies. In the short space of four days he had earned joyous greetings from every one in town. The children grinned at him cheerfully; the old women cackled good-natured little teasing jests to him as he passed; the pretty, dusky half-breed girls dropped their eyelashes fascinatingly across their cheeks, tempering their coyness with a smile; the men painfully demanded information as to artistic achievement which was evidently as well meant as it was foreign to any real thirst for knowledge they might possess; even the lumber-jacks addressed him as "Bub." And withal Dick's methods of approach were radically wrong, for he blundered upon new acquaintance with a beaming smile, which is ordinarily a sure repellent to the cautious, taciturn men of the woods. Perhaps their keenness penetrated to the fact that he was absolutely without guile, and that his kindness was an essential part of himself. I should be curious to know whether Billy Knapp of the Black Hills would surrender his gun to Dick for inspection.

"I want you to go out this afternoon to see some friends of mine," said Dick. "They're on a farm about two miles back in the brush. They're ancestors."

"They're what?" I inquired.

"Ancestors. You can go down to Grosse Point near Detroit, and find people living in beautiful country places next the water, and after dinner they'll show you an old silhouette or a daguerreotype or something like that, and will say to you proudly, 'This is old Jules, my ancestor, who was a pioneer in this country. The Place has been in the family ever since his time.'"

"Well?"

"Well, this is a French family, and they are pioneers, and the family has a place that slopes down to the water through white birch trees, and it is of the kind very tenacious of its own land. In two hundred years this will be a great resort; bound to be—beautiful, salubrious, good sport, fine scenery, accessible—"

"Railroad fifty miles away; boat every once in a while," said I sarcastically.

"Accessible in two hundred years, all right," insisted Dick serenely. "Even Canada can build a quarter of a mile of railway a year. Accessible," he went on; "good shipping-point for country now undeveloped."

"You ought to be a real estate agent," I advised.

"Lived two hundred years too soon," disclaimed Dick. "What more obvious? These are certainly ancestors."

"Family may die out," I suggested.

"It has a good start," said Dick sweetly. "There are eighty-seven in it now."

"What!" I gasped.

"One great-grandfather, twelve grandparents, thirty-seven parents, and thirty-seven children," tabulated Dick.

"I should like to see the great-grandfather," said I; "he must be very old and feeble."

"He is eighty-five years old," said Dick, "and the last time I saw him he was engaged with an axe in clearing trees off his farm."

All of these astonishing statements I found to be absolutely true.

We started out afoot soon after dinner, through a scattering growth of popples that alternately drew the veil of coyness over the blue hills and caught our breath with the delight of a momentary prospect. Deuce, remembering autumn days, concluded partridges, and scurried away on the expert diagonal, his hind legs tucked well under his flanks. The road itself was a mere cutting through the miniature woods, winding to right or left for the purpose of avoiding a log-end or a boulder, surmounting little knolls with an idle disregard for the straight line, knobby with big, round stones, and interestingly diversified by circular mud holes a foot or so in diameter. After a mile and a half we came to the corner of a snake fence. This, Dick informed me, marked the limits of the "farm."

We burst through the screen of popples definitely into the clear. A two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land, and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and gained the house. Dick was at once among friends.

The mother had no English, so smiled expansively, her bony arms folded across her stomach. Her oldest daughter, a frail-looking girl in the twenties, but with a sad and spiritual beauty of the Madonna in her big eyes and straight black hair, gave us a shy good-day. Three boys, just alike in their slender, stolid Indian good looks, except that they differed in size, nodded with the awkwardness of the male. Two babies stared solemnly. A little girl with a beautiful, oval face, large mischievous gray eyes behind long black lashes, a mischievously quirked mouth to match the eyes, and black hair banged straight, both front and behind, in almost mediaeval fashion, twirked a pair of brown bare legs all about us. Another light-haired, curly little girl, surmounted by an old yachting-cap, spread apart sturdy shoes in an attitude at once critical and expectant.

Dick rose to the occasion by sorting out from some concealed recess of his garments a huge paper parcel of candy.

With infinite tact, he presented this bag to Madame rather than the children. Madame instituted judicious distribution and appropriate reservation for the future. We entered the cabin.

Never have I seen a place more exquisitely neat. The floor had not only been washed clean; it had been scrubbed white. The walls of logs were freshly whitewashed. The chairs were polished. The few ornaments were new, and not at all dusty or dingy or tawdry. Several religious pictures, a portrait of royalty, a lithographed advertisement of some buggy, a photograph or so—and then just the fresh, wholesome cleanliness of scrubbed pine. Madame made us welcome with smiles—a faded, lean woman with a remnant of beauty peeping from her soft eyes, but worn down to the first principles of pioneer bone and gristle by toil, care, and the bearing of children. I spoke to her in French, complimenting her on the appearance of the place. She was genuinely pleased, saying in reply that one did one's possible, but that children!—with an expressive pause.

Next we called for volunteers to show us to the great-grandfather. Our elfish little girls at once offered, and went dancing off down the trail like autumn leaves in a wind. Whether it was the Indian in them, or the effects of environment, or merely our own imaginations, we both had the same thought—that in these strange, taciturn, friendly, smiling, pirouetting little creatures was some eerie, wild strain akin to the woods and birds and animals. As they danced on ahead of us, turning to throw us a delicious smile or a half-veiled roguish glance of nascent coquetry, we seemed to swing into an orbit of experience foreign to our own. These bright-eyed woods people were in the last analysis as inscrutable to us as the squirrels.

We followed our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a startlingly sudden repose.

"V'la le gran'pere," said they in unison.

At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the quality of his work—a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause, a painful recovery—labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes, like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame, gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to exchange slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the fact that his seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water, the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.

Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We conversed.

Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said, eighty-seven—that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.

We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no danger of loneliness.

Yes, he went on, he was old—eighty-five. He was not as quick as he used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance. He wished us good-day.

We left him seated on the pine log, his axe between his knees, his great, gnarled brown hands hanging idly. After a time we heard the whack of his implement; then after another long time we heard it whack again. We knew that those two blows had gone straight and true and forceful to the mark. So old a man had no energy to expend in the indirections of haste.

Our elfish guides led us back along the trail to the farmhouse. A girl of thirteen had just arrived from school. In the summer the little ones divided the educational advantages among themselves, turn and turn about.

The newcomer had been out into the world, and was dressed accordingly. A neat dark-blue cloth dress, plainly made, a dull red and blue checked apron; a broad, round hat, shoes and stockings, all in the best and quietest taste—marked contrast to the usual garish Sunday best of the Anglo-Saxon. She herself exemplified the most striking type of beauty to be found in the mixed bloods. Her hair was thick and glossy and black in the mode that throws deep purple shadows under the rolls and coils. Her face was a regular oval, like the opening in a wishbone. Her skin was dark, but rich and dusky with life and red blood that ebbed and flowed with her shyness. Her lips were full, and of a dark cherry red. Her eyes were deep, rather musing, and furnished with the most gloriously tangling of eyelashes. Dick went into ecstasies, took several photographs which did not turn out well, and made one sketch which did. Perpetually did he bewail the absence of oils. The type is not uncommon, but its beauty rarely remains perfect after the fifteenth year.

We made our ceremonious adieus to the Madame, and started back to town under the guidance of one of the boys, who promised us a short cut.

This youth proved to be filled with the old, wandering spirit that lures so many of his race into the wilderness life. He confided to us as we walked that he liked to tramp extended distances, and that the days were really not made long enough for those who had to return home at night.

"I is been top of dose hills," he said. "Bime by I mak' heem go to dose lak' beyon'."

He told us that some day he hoped to go out with the fur traders. In his vocabulary "I wish" occurred with such wistful frequency that finally I inquired curiously what use he would make of the Fairy Gift.

"If you could have just one wish come true, Pierre," I asked, "what would you desire?"

His answer came without a moment's hesitation.

"I is lak' be one giant," said he.

"Why?" I demanded.

"So I can mak' heem de walk far," he replied simply.

I was tempted to point out to him the fact that big men do not outlast the little men, and that vast strength rarely endures, but then a better feeling persuaded me to leave him his illusions. The power, even in fancy, of striding on seven-league boots across the fascinations spread out below his kindling vision from "dose hills" was too precious a possession lightly to be taken away.

Strangely enough, though his woodcraft naturally was not inconsiderable, it did not hold his paramount interest. He knew something about animals and their ways and their methods of capture, but the chase did not appeal strongly to him, nor apparently did he possess much skill along that line. He liked the actual physical labour, the walking, the paddling, the tump-line, the camp-making, the new country, the companionship of the wild life, the wilderness as a whole rather than in any one of its single aspects as Fish Pond, Game Preserve, Picture Gallery. In this he showed the true spirit of the voyageur. I should confidently look to meet him in another ten years—if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long—girdled with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the portage load, trolling Isabeau to the silent land somewhere under the Arctic Circle. The French of the North have never been great fighters nor great hunters, in the terms of the Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen, but they have laughed in farther places.



XII.

THE RIVER.

At a certain spot on the North Shore—I am not going to tell you where—you board one of the two or three fishing-steamers that collect from the different stations the big ice-boxes of Lake Superior whitefish. After a certain number of hours—I am not going to tell you how many—your craft will turn in toward a semicircle of bold, beautiful hills, that seem at first to be many less miles distant than the reality, and at the last to be many more miles remote than is the fact. From the prow you will make out first a uniform velvet green; then the differentiation of many shades; then the dull neutrals of rocks and crags; finally the narrow white of a pebble beach against which the waves utter continually a rattling undertone. The steamer pushes boldly in. The cool green of the water underneath changes to gray. Suddenly you make out the bottom, as through a thick green glass, and the big suckers and catfish idling over its riffled sands, inconceivably far down through the unbelievably clear liquid. So absorbed are you in this marvellous clarity that a slight, grinding jar alone brings you to yourself. The steamer's nose is actually touching the white strip of pebbles!

Now you can do one of a number of things. The forest slants down to your feet in dwindling scrub, which half conceals an abandoned log structure. This latter is the old Hudson's Bay post. Behind it is the Fur Trail, and the Fur Trail will take you three miles to Burned Rock Pool, where are spring water and mighty trout. But again, half a mile to the left, is the mouth of the River. And the River meanders charmingly through the woods of the flat country over numberless riffles and rapids, beneath various steep gravel banks, until it sweeps boldly under the cliff of the first high hill. There a rugged precipice rises sheer and jagged and damp-dark to overhanging trees clinging to the shoulder of the mountain. And precisely at that spot is a bend where the water hits square, to divide right and left in whiteness, to swirl into convolutions of foam, to lurk darkly for a moment on the edge of tumult before racing away. And there you can stand hip-deep, and just reach the eddy foam with a cast tied craftily of Royal Coachman, Parmachenee Belle, and Montreal.

From that point you are with the hills. They draw back to leave wide forest, but always they return to the River—as you would return season after season were I to tell you how—throwing across your woods-progress a sheer cliff forty or fifty feet high, shouldering you incontinently into the necessity of fording to the other side. More and more jealous they become as you penetrate, until at the Big Falls they close in entirely, warning you that here they take the wilderness to themselves. At the Big Falls anglers make their last camp. About the fire they may discuss idly various academic questions—as to whether the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls; and so on.

These questions, as I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of it. Already he commands ten miles of water—swift, clear water—running over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast. It is to be waded in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the mood suits him. One bank is apt to be precipitous, the other to stretch away in a mile or so of the coolest, greenest, stillest primeval forest to be imagined. Thus he can cut across the wide bends of the River, should he so desire and should haste be necessary to make camp before dark. And, last, but not least by any manner of means, there are trout.

I mean real trout—big fellows, the kind the fishers of little streams dream of but awake to call Morpheus a liar, just as they are too polite to call you a liar when you are so indiscreet as to tell them a few plain facts. I have one solemnly attested and witnessed record of twenty-nine inches, caught in running water. I saw a friend land on one cast three whose aggregate weight was four and one half pounds. I witnessed, and partly shared, an exciting struggle in which three fish on three rods were played in the same pool at the same time. They weighed just fourteen pounds. One pool, a backset, was known as the Idiot's Delight, because any one could catch fish there. I have lain on my stomach at the Burned Rock Pool and seen the great fish lying so close together as nearly to cover the bottom, rank after rank of them, and the smallest not under a half pound. As to the largest—well, every true fisherman knows him!

So it came about for many years that the natural barrier interposed by the Big Falls successfully turned the idle tide of anglers' exploration. Beyond them lay an unknown country, but you had to climb cruelly to see it, and you couldn't gain above what you already had in any case. The nearest settlement was nearly sixty miles away, so even added isolation had not its usual quickening effect on camper's effort. The River is visited by few, anyway. An occasional adventurous steam yacht pauses at the mouth, fishes a few little ones from the shallow pools there, or a few big ones from the reefs, and pushes on. It never dreams of sending an expedition to the interior. Our own people, and two other parties, are all I know of who visit the River regularly. Our camp-sites alone break the forest; our blazes alone continue the initial short cut of the Fur Trail; our names alone distinguish the various pools. We had always been satisfied to compromise with the frowning Hills. In return for the delicious necks and points and forest areas through which our clipped trails ran, we had tacitly respected the mystery of the upper reaches.

This year, however, a number of unusual conditions changed our spirit. I have perhaps neglected to state that our trip up to now had been a rather singularly damp one. Of the first fourteen days twelve had been rainy. This was only a slightly exaggerated sample for the rest of the time. As a consequence we found the River filled even to the limit of its freshet banks. The broad borders of stone beach between the stream's edge and the bushes had quite disappeared; the riffles had become rapids, and the rapids roaring torrents; the bends boiled angrily with a smashing eddy that sucked air into pirouetting cavities inches in depth. Plainly, fly-fishing was out of the question. No self-respecting trout would rise to the surface of such a moil, or abandon for syllabubs of tinsel the magnificent solidities of ground-bait such a freshet would bring down from the hills. Also the River was unfordable.

We made camp at the mouth and consulted together. Billy, the half-breed who had joined us for the labour of a permanent camp, shook his head.

"I t'ink one week, ten day," he vouchsafed. "P'rhaps she go down den. We mus' wait." We did not want to wait; the idleness of a permanent camp is the most deadly in the world.

"Billy," said I, "have you ever been above the Big Falls?"

The half-breed's eyes flashed.

"Non," he replied simply. "Ba, I lak' mak' heem firs' rate."

"All right, Billy; we'll do it."

The next day it rained, and the River went up two inches. The morning following was fair enough, but so cold you could see your breath. We began to experiment.

Now, this expedition had become a fishing vacation, so we had all the comforts of home with us. When said comforts of home were laden into the canoe, there remained forward and aft just about one square foot of space for Billy and me, and not over two inches of freeboard for the River. We could not stand up and pole; tracking with a tow-line was out of the question, because there existed no banks on which to walk; the current was too swift for paddling. So we knelt and poled. We knew it before, but we had to be convinced by trial, that two inches of freeboard will dip under the most gingerly effort. It did so. We groaned, stepped out into ice-water up to our waists, and so began the day's journey with fleeting reference to Dante's nethermost hell.

Next the shore the water was most of the time a little above our knees, but the swirl of a rushing current brought an apron of foam to our hips. Billy took the bow and pulled; I took the stern and pushed. In places our combined efforts could but just counterbalance the strength of the current. Then Billy had to hang on until I could get my shoulder against the stern for a mighty heave, the few inches gain of which he would guard as jealously as possible, until I could get into position for another shove. At other places we were in nearly to our armpits, but close under the banks where we could help ourselves by seizing bushes.

Sometimes I lost my footing entirely and trailed out behind like a streamer; sometimes Billy would be swept away, the canoe's bow would swing down-stream, and I would have to dig my heels and hang on until he had floundered upright. Fortunately for our provisions, this never happened to both at the same time. The difficulties were still further complicated by the fact that our feet speedily became so numb from the cold that we could not feel the bottom, and so were much inclined to aimless stumblings. By-and-by we got out and kicked trees to start the circulation. In the meantime the sun had retired behind thick, leaden clouds.

At the First Bend we were forced to carry some fifty feet. There the River rushed down in a smooth apron straight against the cliff, where its force actually raised the mass of water a good three feet higher than the level of the surrounding pool. I tied on a bait-hook, and two cartridges for sinkers, and in fifteen minutes had caught three trout, one of which weighed three pounds, and the others two pounds and a pound and a half respectively. At this point Dick and Deuce, who had been paralleling through the woods, joined us. We broiled the trout, and boiled tea, and shivered as near the fire as we could. That afternoon, by dint of labour and labour, and yet more labour, we made Burned Rock, and there we camped for the night, utterly beaten out by about as hard a day's travel as a man would want to undertake.

The following day was even worse, for as the natural bed of the River narrowed, we found less and less footing and swifter and swifter water. The journey to Burned Rock had been a matter of dogged hard work; this was an affair of alertness, of taking advantage of every little eddy, of breathless suspense during long seconds while the question of supremacy between our strength and the stream's was being debated. And the thermometer must have registered well towards freezing. Three times we were forced to cross the River in order to get even precarious footing. Those were the really doubtful moments. We had to get in carefully, to sit craftily, and to paddle gingerly and firmly, without attempting to counteract the downward sweep of the current. All our energies and care were given to preventing those miserable curling little waves from over-topping our precious two inches, and that miserable little canoe from departing even by a hair's-breadth from the exactly level keel. Where we were going did not matter. After an interminable interval the tail of our eyes would catch the sway of bushes near at hand.

"Now," Billy would mutter abstractedly.

With one accord we would arise from six inches of wet and step swiftly into the River. The lightened canoe would strain back; we would brace our legs. The traverse was accomplished.



Being thus under the other bank, I would hold the canoe while Billy, astraddle the other end for the purpose of depressing the water to within reach of his hand, would bail away the consequences of our crossing. Then we would make up the quarter of a mile we had lost.

We quit at the Organ Pool about three o'clock of the afternoon. Not much was said that evening.

The day following we tied into it again. This time we put Dick and Deuce on an old Indian trail that promised a short cut, with instructions to wait at the end of it. In the joyous anticipation of another wet day we forgot they had never before followed an Indian trail. Let us now turn aside to the adventures of Dick and Deuce.

Be it premised here that Dick is a regular Indian of taciturnity when it becomes a question of his own experience, so that for a long time we knew of what follows but the single explanatory monosyllable which you shall read in due time. But Dick has a beloved uncle. In moments of expansion to this relative after his return he held forth as to the happenings of that morning.

Dick and the setter managed the Indian trail for about twenty rods. They thought they managed it for perhaps twice that distance. Then it became borne in on them that the bushes went back, the faint knife-clippings, and the half weather-browned brush-cuttings that alone constitute an Indian trail had taken another direction, and that they had now their own way to make through the forest. Dick knew the direction well enough, so he broke ahead confidently. After a half-hour's walk he crossed a tiny streamlet. After another half-hour's walk he came to another. It was flowing the wrong way.