Some one said it was time to “turn in,” and I was brought suddenly to a sense of the present, but a feeling of sadness possessed me when I took my place in the crowded tent, and I lay awake long, thinking of those other days.
Clear and crisp was the morning of June twenty-eighth. The atmosphere was bracing and delightful, the azure of the sky above us shaded to the most delicate tints of blue at the horizon, and, here and there, bits of clouds, like bunches of cotton, flecked the sky. The sun broke grandly over the rugged hills, and the lake, like molten silver, lay before us.
A fringe of ice had formed during the night along the shore. We broke it and bathed our hands and faces in the cool water, then sat down in a circle near our camp fire to renew our attack upon the porcupine, which had been sending out a most delicious odor from the kettle where Pete had it cooking. But alas for our expectations! Our teeth would make no impression upon it, and Easton remarked that “the rubber trust ought to hunt porcupines, for they are a lot tougher than rubber and just as pliable.”
“I don’t know why,” said Pete sadly. “I boil him long time.”
That day we continued our course along the northern shore of the lake until we reached the deep bay which Hubbard and I had failed to enter and explore on the other trip, and which failure had resulted so tragically. This bay is some five miles from the westerly end of Grand Lake, and is really the mouth of the Nascaupee and Crooked Rivers which flow into the upper end of it. There was little or no wind and we had to go slowly to permit Duncan, in his rowboat, to keep pace with us. Darkness was not far off when we reached Duncan’s tilt (a small log hut), three miles up the Nascaupee River, where we stopped for the night.
This is the tilt in which Allen Goudy and Duncan lived at the time they came to my rescue in 1903, and where I spent three days getting strength for my trip down Grand Lake to the Post. It is Duncan’s sup-ply base in the winter months when he hunts along the Nascaupee River, one hundred and twenty miles inland to Seal Lake. On this hunting “path” Duncan has two hundred and fifty marten and forty fox traps, and, in the spring, a few bear traps besides.
The country has been burned here. Just below Duncan’s tilt is a spruce-covered island, but the mainland has a stunted new growth of spruce, with a few white birch, covering the wreck of the primeval forest that was flame swept thirty odd years ago. Over some considerable areas no new growth to speak of has appeared, and the charred remains of the dead trees stand stark and gray, or lie about in confusion upon the ground, giving the country a particularly dreary and desolate appearance.
The morning of June twenty-ninth was overcast and threatened rain, but toward evening the sky cleared.
Progress was slow, for the current in the river here was very strong, and paddling or rowing against it was not easy. We had to stop several times and wait for Duncan to overtake us with his boat. Once he halted to look at a trap where he told us he had caught six black bears. It was nearly sunset when we reached the mouth of the Red River, nineteen miles above Grand Lake, where it flows into the Nascaupee from the west. This is a wide, shallow stream whose red-brown waters were quite in contrast to the clear waters of the Nas-caupee.
Opposite the mouth of the Red River, and on the eastern shore of the Nascaupee, is the point where the old Indian trail was said to begin, and on a knoll some fifty feet above the river we saw the wigwam poles of an old Indian camp, and a solitary grave with a rough fence around it. Here we landed and awaited Duncan, who had stopped at another of his trapping tilts three or four hundred yards below. When he joined us a little later, in answer to my inquiry as to whether this was the beginning of the old trail, he answered, “’Tis where they says the Indians came out, and some of the Indians has told me so. I supposes it’s the place, sir.”