The snow had come that year before the ground froze, and under the bank of the stream they found clay and flat stones, of which they built a fireplace, and the chimney of sticks of wood and clay.
“There’s no end to wants,” said Uncle Isaac; “now I want some birch-bark dishes.”
“You’ll have to give that up,” said John, “for the bark won’t run.”
“Won’t it? I’ll make it run.”
He warmed a birch tree with hot water, and made the bark run as well as in the spring.
“Now get me some spruce roots, Charlie, and in evenings and rainy days we’ll make the dishes.”
As they expected to hunt and trap over a large extent of ground, they travelled about ten miles farther on, and built a rough shanty in among several ponds and small streams, where they expected to find beavers, and placed in it some provisions; then they took the back track, seven or eight miles from the permanent camp, and built another on the bank of the river, where they expected to find otter and mink. They dignified the middle one with the name of the home camp; that among the lakes they called the shanty, and the other the river camp.
“We ought to have come up and done all this before snow came,” said Uncle Isaac; “but now we must do the best we can; perhaps we shall blunder into good luck; people do sometimes. There would have been a hundred beavers where there is one, if it had not been for the French and English.”
“Why so?” asked Joe.
“Because, when the French held Canada, they put the Indians up to breaking the dams and destroying the beaver, to spite the English; and now the English have got Canada, they do the same, to spite us. An Indian, of his own accord, won’t destroy game, any more than a farmer would destroy his seed-corn: when they break into a beaver house, they always throw back the young ones, and part of the old, to breed; but a white man takes the whole, because he’s afraid, if he don’t, the next white trapper will.”