Beaver-house.
Joe produced a couple of short oars from the bottom of the canoe, and nailed a pair of rude rowlocks onto the gunwales. He explained that on the long, wind-swept lakes which we should have to traverse, a pair of oars were superior to two paddles against a head wind. It was a wonderful thing, but during hundreds of miles of lake travel after that we never once had a serious delay from weather. Nearly every morning the wind rose briskly with the sun, blew during the middle of the day, and moderated toward evening; so we pursued the ancient Indian custom of starting very early in the morning, before the wind came up; took a good rest in the middle of the day, and continued as late as we could in the evening. But not once on all our prosperous journey were we really wind-bound, though this is one of the most common of occurrences on these lakes, where the wind often piles the swells up so high that not even a birch-bark can weather them.
The height of the wave which this marvellous little evolution of the ages can stand is not conceivable till you have witnessed it. Running with a heavy, fair wind, the swells rise behind you and seem about to engulf you. But in some way the canoe rises with the wave, and the boiling, foaming mass rushes harmlessly by, while you sit on the dry, clean bottom, and your pride increases with each successive triumph.
A very long lake next north of Sissaginega is Cacaskanan, not shown at all on the maps. On this lake, about eleven o'clock the second day out, while Joe was rowing, and merely casting an occasional perfunctory glance over his left shoulder, he suddenly hissed, "See de moose!" We were at least a mile from shore, and though I have seldom met any one, civilized or savage, who could beat me at seeing game, I took off my hat to Joe from then on. Sure enough, over Joe's left shoulder he had seen a cow moose in the edge of the timber on shore. A projecting point allowed us to get pretty close to the animal. The wind was partly off shore, and all the time we were approaching we could see her watching the shore, starting at every sound made by the wind among the dead tree-trunks, but paying no attention to the water side at all. This enabled us, considering the difficulty of navigating among fallen tree-trunks, to make one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever taken. We got to the very shore, and crept within thirty-five feet of that moose. I made my exposure of the negative before she saw us at all. This photograph will give a better idea than could ever be conveyed in words, of the tremendous difficulty of still-hunting the moose in thick, dry timber, where the crackling of a twig will spoil the best-made stalk.
That photograph was more satisfactory to me than the shooting of fifty moose would have been. The moose does not show to the best advantage in the picture, but that was her fault, and not ours. At the click of the shutter she went to find the rest of her folks.
Late that afternoon we came to a place where Lake Cacaskanan narrows to about one hundred yards wide, and here there were many moose tracks. Just beyond, we met a family of the Indians who had killed two moose that very day, and had more than a hundred musquash freshly skinned. Billy was wonderfully impressed by the dirty, unkempt appearance of the little children, whose shocks of matted hair he unconsciously Kiplingized by referring to them afterward as "haystacks." The Indian who was the head of this family, on being told by Joe where we were going, said that we would walk on the ice before we got back. I fear he was a sluggard, who saw lions or bears in the path of every enterprise. He was burning logs twenty feet long, to save the trouble of cutting them in two, and so he had fire enough for four tents, instead of one.
The Moose-bird.