The man nodded. “What you give?”
Hugh flushed with chagrin, remembering that all his money was gone. Blaise came to the rescue by offering to trade some ammunition for the boat. The man shook his head. Blaise added to his offer a small quantity of food supplies, but still the fellow refused. “Too little,” he grumbled, then added something in his curious mixture of Scotch-English and Ojibwa. He was a Scotch half-breed and Hugh found his dialect difficult to understand.
Blaise shrugged, walked over to the boat and examined it. He turned towards the man and spoke in rapid Ojibwa. The fellow answered in the same tongue, pointing to the lad’s gun.
“What does he say?” asked Hugh.
“I told him his bateau needs mending,” Blaise answered in French, “but he will not trade for anything but my gun, which is better than his. I will not give him the gun. Our father gave it to me.”
Hugh understood his half-brother’s feeling, but he was eager to secure the boat. “He may have my gun,” he whispered. He knew that the tall fellow understood some French. “Tell him if he will include the sail—he had one, you know—I’ll give him my gun and some ammunition. Mine doesn’t shoot as accurately as yours, but it looks newer.”
Blaise made the offer in Ojibwa, Hugh repeated it in English, and after an unsuccessful attempt to get more, the man agreed. He put into the boat the mast and canvas, which he had been using as a shelter, and Hugh handed over the gun and ammunition.
The rest of the day was spent in making a few necessary repairs to the bateau, and the following morning, before a light southwest breeze, the lads set sail. Blaise knew nothing of this sort of water travel, but Hugh had handled a sailboat before, though never one quite so clumsy as this crude, heavy bateau. The boat was pointed at both ends, flat bottomed and built of thick, hand-hewn boards. It carried a small, square sail on a stubby mast. With axe and knife Hugh had made a crude rudder and had lashed it to the stern in the place of the paddle the trappers had been content to steer with. Blaise quickly learned to handle the rudder, leaving Hugh free to manage the sail. It was a satisfaction to the older boy to find something in which he excelled his younger brother and could take the lead. It restored his self-respect as the elder. Blaise, on the other hand, obeyed orders instantly and proved himself as reliable a subordinate as he had been leader. The breeze holding steady, the bateau made fairly good speed. They might possibly have made better time in a canoe, but the new mode of travel was a pleasant change from the constant labor of plying the blades.
Had the lads but known it, their wisest course would have been to cross directly from the Grand Portage to the southwestern end of Isle Royale and then skirt the island to its northeast tip. But they had no map to tell them this. Indeed in those days the position of Isle Royale was but imperfectly understood. It had been visited by scarcely any white men and was avoided by the Indians. During the boys’ detention at the Grand Portage, rain and fog had rendered the island, some eighteen or twenty miles away, invisible. The day they set sail the sky was blue overhead, but there was still haze enough on the water to obscure the distance. It was not strange that they believed Isle Royale farther off than it really was. From its northeastern end the Otter had sailed to the Kaministikwia, and Hugh took for granted that the shortest way to reach the island must be from some point on Thunder Bay. He was aware of the deep curve made by the shore to form the great bay, and realized that to follow clear around that curve would be a loss of time. Instead of turning north to follow the shore, he held on to the northeast, along the inner side of a long line of narrow, rocky islands and reefs, rising from the water like the summits of a mountain chain and forming a breakwater for the protection of the bay.
It was from one of those islands, now called McKellar Island, south about two miles from the towering heights of the Isle du Paté and at least fifteen miles by water from the southern mouth of the Kaministikwia, that the adventurers finally set out for Isle Royale. Before they dared attempt the perilous sail across the long stretch of the open lake, they remained in camp a day to let the southwest wind, which had risen to half a gale, blow itself out. Wind they needed for their venture, but not too much wind.