The photograph introduced the episode of this story, so it is fitting to begin with it. The three of us, Walter, Bob, and I, old comrades in the woods, had left that centre of civilization, our log camp on Lac Lumière, for three days in tents early in September. We hoped for caribou or moose, or both. All day we travelled a lonely stream, the Rivière à la Poêle, or Frying-pan River, paddling up sunny, still reaches between rocky shores, or through gold-green rustling water grass; then, as rocks thickened and the rapids came crashing in hoarse sweetness, we disembarked into a portage opening like a door into black forest; we followed the trail up the hurrying water, seeing through the trees the tumbling foam or the brown, white-speckled whirlpools; hearing it above the leaves’ whispering. All day we followed the stream.
We came to a lake, Lac à la Poêle, at three in the afternoon—a lake which perhaps twelve white people have seen. The guides, with expert shifting and fitting, wedged six hundred pounds’ weight, alive and dead, pacquetons and people, into each sixty-pound canoe, and we floated au large to the liquid dip of four paddles.
Into Lac à la Poêle at the farther end, three miles away, flowed its largest inlet, where we meant to camp. Its course near the lake was all rapids; at the head of these rapids we should put up the tents, leaving the boats at the lake end of the portage; there we should be far enough away from the big pond not to disturb the hunting. Lac à la Poêle was game country, and the marshes about it were cut into trodden runways. Moreover, the falling water would drown the sound of the chopping; we had been here last year, and studied the ground.
But it was fated to be one of those well-laid plans which “gang agley,” and nobody to blame but beavers. A beaver seems close to humanity sometimes, yet a human being gets no satisfaction in being angry at a wild, shy, black mass to be seen only in sections, as a glittering head above the water, or as a broad tail descending thunderingly on the water’s surface. One might as well be angry at a centaur or a winged horse as at a spirit of the forest such as a beaver.
We came, about five o’clock, with heavy loads and aching muscles, to the spot for our camp, and found two large, brand-new beaver dams built since last year, and the entire shore-line changed. Woods were flooded ten feet in, running water turned to a pond, everything spoiled for camping. We could have cried, so we laughed—one transposes in that way in the woods.
We plodded on, foot-heavy in our high, wet hunting-boots, perspiring and fly-bitten—but yet with a laugh at the beaver. It is wisdom in many conditions to be good-tempered, but in the woods it is necessity—good temper and salt pork you must have in a camp. We plunged into a few more holes, fell over a few more rocks, and around a turn we came on our reward—a prettier camping-ground than we had imagined.
Above the two dams a grove of spruces with a copper floor of needles reached into the water, and about two sides of it the stream flowed. A silver birch gleamed through the evergreens, and we could see the light tops of more on the hillside; there was good fire-wood near by; late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the tree tops, and slid in patterns over the pink-brown of the spruce needles; the river persistently chanted something cheerful about making a joke of rough places and laughing over the rocks and going on steadily in any case, and so we set to work.
A dead log knocked out with the blunt of an axe, a few bushes levelled, and the ground was ready for the tents—mine facing Walter’s and Bob’s, in the centre of the woodland; that of the guides back a hundred and fifty feet somewhere, burrowing in the mountain.
Gold sunset leaked wet through black spruces, and drowned itself in bright spots in the river; the guides chopped long poles for the tents, short stakes for pegging them out; the tents rose flopping, grew taut, and stood snowy and trim—our homes.
I got birch bark and sticks for a fire, and soon it crackled between my house and Walter’s, licking aromatic air with orange tongues. The guides’ axes rang hollow as another fire—to cook supper—shot up on the shore; a crotched stick with a swinging kettle hung over it; Blanc had started the hot water. We fell to at getting balsam for the beds; we unpacked blankets and belongings, and then we dressed for dinner. Clean hands and brushed hair change a costume.