Before it was light the next morning the Indian’s canoe was far away on the lake for an examination of the traps; he soon returned with four immense beavers, whose aggregate weight fell not short of two hundred pounds.
“Me footed two more,” said the guide, exhibiting the webbed feet of the animals in corroboration of the fact; “but they very quick—they get away. I see dam we cut last night, and it now just good as new.”
“Good as new!” we echoed. “Impossible.”
“True as me stand here,” said Nichols, at the same time glancing anxiously into the stew pan, to see if we had left him any beaver meat for breakfast. “Beaver, they fell tree in night ten inch thick, gnaw it in lengths three feet long, plant them at cut, and heap with much bark, mud and sticks. Build dam up in one night. No think it myself, if not see it with own eyes. You go see, too.”
Astonishing as it may seem, the Indian was perfectly correct in his statement.
After our toil on Osgood Carry and the stream below, we rested over a week on these Mansungun Lakes. The third Mansungun Lake, on which we first camped, is five miles long and two wide. This is connected by a narrow outlet with the second Mansungun Lake, which is about the same size as the other, while the first or lower lake is the smallest body of water, being about two miles long and one wide. I fished and hunted in short excursions from camp, and, with Tourograph over my shoulder, I was constantly in search of the picturesque. Nichols had discovered a brook (the name of which we afterwards learned was Chase,) tumbling down the side of a mountain near our camp, and as falls were a rarity on the route I spent half a day in this gorge.
CHASE BROOK.
About this region we had rare success in our hunting and trapping, and with many skins stretched on the drying hoops about camp, and fresh animals coming in to add to the stock, our quarters gradually assumed the appearance of a Hudson Bay trading-post.
