Of course the chief, the girl's father, objected to the attentions of this enemy lover, as also did other and rival admirers of her own tribe.
On a mid-summer night the lovers parted, he to go on a mission to Montreal, which then involved a long, difficult and dangerous tramp through the wilderness. Both were pledged to meet again at the falls at midnight of the harvest-moon. As the shadow of the September moon fell upon the midnight mark on the big rock, the Indian maid arrived in her canoe, but the lover came not. Instead, appeared one of the rival warriors of her own tribe, who told of an ambush, of a poisoned arrow and of a dead lover.
Buttermilk Falls
The heart-broken maid then drifted out into midstream and with her canoe passed over the falls and was killed on the rocks below. Tradition goes on to relate how, at midnight of every harvest moon since that tragic event, the ghost of the beautiful Indian maiden appears in her birch bark canoe and sails over Buttermilk Falls, disappearing in the foaming waters at their foot.
For many years I have tried to persuade Bige to join me in keeping the date with this ghost, but up to the present writing it has never been convenient.
Sitting, one day, at the foot of the falls, I was studying the high-water marks on the adjacent rocks, indicating the immense volume of waters that pass over the falls and down the rapids during the freshets caused by melting snows and spring rains, trying to imagine how it might look on such occasions, when a million logs, the cut of the lumbermen during the previous winter, were let loose and came crowding, climbing, jamming, tumbling over one another down through the ravine and over the brink with the mighty rushing waters.
The ground about where I sat was strewn with rocks, boulders and smaller stones, all worn by the ceaseless action of the waters, many of them smooth, others seamed with strata of quartz, granite or sandstone, some curiously marked and grotesque in shape.
As I sat thus, meditating, one of these curiously marked stones, about the size and shape of one of those steel trench hats worn by the "doughboys" in the late war, which had been lying close to the edge of the water and partly in it, suddenly jumped up and appeared to stand on four legs about six inches higher than it had been lying. The legs seemed to be stiff and the movement was like the rising of a disappearing cannon behind the walls of a fort. Instantly there appeared a fifth leg or brace at the back which pushed the rear edge of the trench hat upward and tilted it toward the water, when a telescopic gun shot out from under this curious fighting machine and plunged into the water. An instant later this telescopic gun lifted a small trout out of the water, bit it in half, and with two snaps swallowed it. The telescope then collapsed, the gun-carriage slowly settled back, the tail brace curled up under the rear, the head was drawn under the front of the shell, and the turtle's eyes closed to a narrow slit. Again he looked like the stones among which he lay, but his trap was set for another fish.