The lads were disappointed at not being shown at once the rich stores of copper that Nangotook had led them to believe were to be found in this place, but food was always a necessity. When the canoe had been overturned in the surf, they had saved the gun and one bow, but they had no ammunition and no arrows. So they went to fishing cheerfully enough. By the time the Indian returned from setting his snares, they had caught two small lake trout. They cleaned and cooked their catch, but to their surprise Nangotook refused to touch the food. He did not want anything to eat, he said.
After the meal, the three took to the canoe and went on up the bay. It proved to be a long and narrow cove, which cut at an angle through alternating wooded ridges and valleys. The long bays they had visited before had lain between ridges, that stretched parallel with the waters, but this one occupied a break in the hills, as if it had been cut through them. Landing on the west side, the Indian led the boys up a thickly forested ridge. As they neared the top, Jean caught sight of something that aroused his interest. He turned from Nangotook’s trail, and began pushing through a thicket. Suddenly he gave a sharp cry and disappeared. Ronald, who was only a few paces ahead of his friend, turned back at once. Making his way through the underbrush more cautiously than Jean had done, Ronald found himself balancing on the very edge of a deep hole. At the bottom Jean was just picking himself up, more surprised than hurt.
“Tonnerre,” he exclaimed indignantly, “who would have looked for such a pit on the side of a hill? I was going along all right, and then, all of a sudden, I was down here.”
“You are in too much haste to dig for the red metal, little brother,” Nangotook called to him. The Indian had reached the edge of the hole almost as quickly as Ronald, and stood grinning down on Jean.
“What do you mean by that, Etienne?” the lad answered, as he began to climb up the steep and ragged slope. “What has digging for copper to do with my falling into this pit?”
The Ojibwa made no answer until Jean had reached the top. Then with a gesture that embraced the hole and its sides, he asked abruptly: “What think my brothers of this place?”
Puzzled by his question, the boys glanced around. The pit was roughly oval in shape, and perhaps thirty feet deep. Its steep sides were of rock, bare in some places, in others clothed with bushes and moss. In the bottom grew a clump of good sized birch trees, that partly concealed the opposite side of the depression.
“’Tis a queer looking hole to be found on the side of a hill as Jean says,” Ronald remarked, as his eyes took in the details. “It looks almost as if it had been dug by the hand of man.”
“And so it was,” Nangotook replied, “by the hand of man or manito, I know not which. This is one of the pits where, many winters ago, my people took out the red metal that the white man calls copper.”
“Do you mean this is a savage mine?” cried Jean excitedly. “Surely no one has worked it for years. See how the trees and bushes have covered it.”