Fortunately the writer of the message had signed his initials in script, which Bruce recognized as Jack Dutton’s signature. But one thing Jack had forgotten; the message bore no date. Ganawa said the blaze on the tree had been made last spring, before the trees stopped growing for the season, and he added: “If your friends were foolish enough to go to the big island Michipicoten and to the small island of the Yellow Sands, they would not go before the Moon of Strawberries, because before that time the Big Lake is too rough. Only [[239]]foolish white men paddle out on the Big Lake in a canoe.”
After this discovery there was no holding the boys in camp any longer. Within a few days they had carried everything to the nearest point on the Michipicoten River, and with Ganawa in the stern they glided down the swift stream, in which the water was running so high that most of the dangerous rocks and rapids were covered with a swift gliding current. So rapidly did they travel that they reached their old camp above the big falls in less than a day.
After the camp had been set up, they walked down to the falls, which roared much louder than they had done at the time of low water in autumn, because the river was now high from the melting snow, of which much was still left on north-facing slopes.
Ray could not resist pushing a stranded log into the current and see it go through the chute and over the falls. The big white log shot like an arrow over the first two drops, then it turned on end and was hurled [[240]]almost clear of the third and fourth steps, and when it arrived in the big pool it was broken in two and one part followed the other in the mad whirl of the pool, as if the spirit of the tree were still alive in the battered and broken logs.
Another day brought the travellers to the mouth of the river, to the camp of the Ininiwac people, whom they had last seen in the autumn before. Of these people they learned one thing of much interest to all of them.
Hamogeesik had also gone up the Michipicoten last autumn, but he had soon returned without his canoe and his gun. He had told that a storm had set his canoe adrift down the falls. The canoe had been broken and he had not been able to find his gun. He had then bought an old gun of one of the Indians and had promised to return in the spring and pay for the gun with furs. Thus far he had not returned and the Indians did not know where he had made his winter camp. [[241]]
Bruce and Ray had been fully determined that they would follow Jack Dutton to the islands in Lake Superior, but when they saw the immense white waves break on the rocky shore and then looked at their little frail bark canoe, both of them lost heart.
As Ray looked at the sad face of Bruce he felt like crying, but he swallowed hard and only said: “I guess we can’t make it, Bruce. She is too big, just like an ocean. If we only had some boards and tools so we could build a big boat. I know, Bruce, that you could sail her.”
“Yes, brother, I could sail her,” Bruce replied sadly, “but we have only an ax, no nails, no auger; I don’t see how we could build a boat.”
That night the boys went to bed early to sleep off their grief, but Ganawa visited with the Indians and sat long at the camp-fire talking to them and letting them talk to him.