Our mountain climbing had consumed a good part of an afternoon, and it was evening when finally we reached the western end of the lake and pitched our camp near a creek flowing in. As we paddled we tried our trolls, but were not rewarded with a single strike. When camp was made the net was stretched across the creek’s mouth and we tried our rods in the stream for trout, but our efforts were useless. No fish were caught.
The prospect for game had not improved, in fact was growing steadily worse. We were now in a country that had been desolated by a forest fire within four or five years. The moss under foot had not renewed itself and where any of it remained at all, it was charred and black. The trees were dead and the land harbored almost no life. It seemed to me that even the fish had been scalded out of the water and the streams had never restocked themselves.
A thorough search was made for Indian signs, but there were absolutely none. There was nothing to show that any human being had ever been here before us. Back on Lake Bibiquasin we had lost the trail and now on Lake Desolation we were far and hopelessly astray, with only the compass to guide us.
After supper the men sat around the camp fire, smoking and talking of their friends at home, while I walked alone by the lake shore. It was a wild scene that lay before me—the aurora, with its waves of changing color flashing weirdly as they swept and lighted the sky, the dead trees everywhere like skeletons gray and gaunt, the blazing camp fire in the foreground, with the figures lying about it and the little white tent in the background. Somewhere hidden in the depths of that vast and silent wilderness to the westward lay Michikamau.
There was no mark on the face of the earth to direct us on our road. We must blaze a new trail up that valley and over those ridges that looked so dark and forbidding in the uncertain light of the aurora. We must find Michikamau.
CHAPTER X
“WE SEE MICHIKAMAU”
“It’s no use, Pete. You may as well go back to your blankets.”
It was the morning of the second day after reaching the lake which we named Desolation. We had portaged through a valley and over a low ridge to the shores of a pond, out of which a small stream ran to the southeast. The country was devastated by fire and to the last degree inhospitable. Not a green shrub over two feet in height was to be seen, the trees were dead and blackened; not even the customary moss covered the naked earth, and loose bowlders were scattered everywhere about.