The lads wondered still more at the skill of an Indian when Ganawa, after cutting the skin with his sharp hunting-knife, showed to the boys the fine white threads he had made of the tendons of the moose. These threads had to be moistened before they were used, but unlike threads of bast, they remain very strong while they are dry. An awl and some needles Ganawa had brought with him so that he could make and repair moccasins. “A long time ago,” he told the lads, “my people used awls and needles made of bone or thorns, but with the needles of the white traders we can work very much faster.”
A few days later the campers secured four more large beavers, and the skins of these were used to make a sleeping-robe for [[189]]Ganawa, while they cured the meat as they had done with the first lot of beavers.
While the last beaver skins were drying, the lads cut a lot of wood for winter. Dry spruce, balsam, and mountain-ash and moose-maple, but also much green birch, which they split and piled up to dry in the sun near the camp-fire. All the dry wood was piled up in the bark-house, where the smoked beaver and some smoked fish were also hung up, so that the inside of it looked and smelled like a farmer’s smoke-house at Christmas time.
The campers had now made the most necessary preparations for winter, and they decided that some other work could wait until they had explored Lake Anjigami and its neighborhood. The nights were growing frosty, birches and poplars had turned a golden yellow, and a strange silence pervaded the autumn woods. The gay-colored warblers, the merry wrens, and even the white-throats had all left.
“We must explore the lake before ice begins [[190]]to form,” said Ganawa. “To explore this country by walking over it is very hard work.”
Bruce steered the canoe and Ganawa occupied the bow, as they began skirting the eastern shore of the lake, while Ray and Tawny took things easy sitting in the bottom. Ray had not been willing to stay in camp with his dog, and Ganawa had looked at Bruce and said, “My little son should come along; some evil might come to him if we leave him in camp.”
Lake Anjigami is about eight miles long, running southwest and northeast, and they paddled slowly to the extreme southern end, where Ray caught a fine mess of small brook trout, but of any recent white man’s camp they found not a trace. They were, however, not satisfied with merely exploring the shore. They walked up a small stream till they came to a beaver pond, where they carefully examined the dam, two houses and the high land, where trappers or hunters might camp, but the pond had not been [[191]]visited by either white men or Indians for years.
They even picked their way laboriously to the top of the highest ridge on the east side, some three hundred feet above the lake. From this point they scouted carefully for tepees and bark-houses and for the smoke of a camp-fire, but they saw no sign of any human being on the lake except their own tepees and bark-house, which, at the distance of two miles, looked quite small.
On the following day they skirted the north and west shore. They were about to pull for camp with the same result when Ray examined with a little more care a low rocky knoll near the outlet. “Oh, Father, oh, Bruce,” he called, “come here and look! Somebody has camped here! I know they were white men, too!”
Here indeed was a white man’s camping-place. “There were two white men,” Ganawa told the lads. “They had a big ax and cut much wood. They made a lean-to and slept here several nights.” [[192]]