A few years ago a sportsman's club in Quebec induced the legislature to pass a law entirely prohibiting the killing of beaver until the year 1900. Two hundred years ago, when the Iroquois made raids on the Ottawa country, and prevented the annual catch of beaver skins from coming down to Montreal and Quebec, hard times fell upon Canada. Precisely the same condition has confronted the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company recently. It is almost as bad a situation as it would be in Illinois if the farmers were forbidden by law to kill hogs. The Hudson's Bay Company's agents at Grand Lake Victoria and the Barriere lake have not dared to buy the skins. The Indians have had no other reliable way to pay for their supplies. Ruin for the traders and starvation for the Indians would inevitably follow the continued enforcement of the law. Some relief has been afforded by the fact that the post at Abittibi ships all its furs by way of Hudson's Bay, so they cannot be seized by the Quebec authorities; and thousands of skins, worth $10 apiece, were diverted to that market last year. The Indians have been very much disturbed over the matter, for they find the law of necessity more urgent than a statute whose logic they cannot understand. "Some families up here starve to death last winter," interpreted Joe, after listening for awhile to Jonas, our new guide. "I t'ink I no starve, w'en de beaver build his house close by my water-hole."
Our newly acquired pilot had no idea of losing any business opportunities. His canoe was ahead of the one in which Joe, Billy, and I travelled, and he had his muzzle-loading, cylinder-bore double shot-gun, a handy little weapon, lying in front of him, both hammers at full cock, hour after hour as he paddled, the muzzle pointing squarely at the back of his boy in the bow. It was trying to unaccustomed nerves, but the boy seemed to be used to the idea of sudden death. Jonas had a curious habit of holding a bullet in his mouth, ready to drop it in an instant down the gun-barrel, on top of the shot. The utility of keeping his decks cleared for action appeared when, toward evening, he cleverly snapped up a reckless mink which darted along the bank, where the stream was narrow and crooked. The report startled a caribou, which crashed out of the alders, not fifty feet away. Jonas spat his bullet down the left barrel and fired again, neatly missing both his boy's head and the reindeer. Joe derided Jonas in choice Algonquin, and said to me, confidentially, "I t'ink we better go in front in de mornin'." All the same, the Indian's idea of a gun which will do for partridges one minute and moose the next is a sound one, in a country where one's breakfast flies or runs away.
At noon the next day, we reached the head of that branch of the Ottawa rising in the Barriere lake. Long ago forgotten Gatineau timber-cutters built a dam, to divert this water to the Jean de Terre, but now the dam has fallen into disuse, and the stream seeks its ancient bed. Just beyond the dam is the Hudson's Bay post, a branch of the one on the Grand Lake Victoria. Mr. Edwards, the agent, was delighted to see strangers, especially when I produced a letter which Mr. Christopherson had sent by me, enclosing his three months' salary. Mrs. Edwards soon discovered that our Billy was her nephew, and that much-related young person was at once honored with a seat at the family dinner-table with the twelve little Edwardses, fraternizing with them in the three-ply language which is the natural speech of these mixed races. Mr. Edwards told me he had that season refused hundreds of beaver-skins from Indians, every one of whom was on his books for a year's supplies, and now he did not quite see what the post was going to do, with beavers demonetized.
Jonas, our most recent guide, did not wish to linger, being haunted by the fear of coming frost which the warm air belied. So that same afternoon we hastened on, regretfully declining Mr. Edwards's invitation to go on a caribou hunt. These reindeer abound in the Barrière lake country.
We camped perhaps fifteen miles from the post that night, and the next morning, soon after starting up the lake, came to a narrow place where the water, instead of coming toward us as it had been doing all the time for days, formed a little rapid, running the same way we were going. The day before we had seen the water pouring into the Ottawa through the lumbermen's worn-out dam, and here, twenty-four hours afterward, continuing up the same lake, we found the current was with us instead of against us, down instead of up, and we were drifting out toward the Gatineau, in the other direction. If we had not known about the two outlets to the lake we should have thought the water was bewitched.
All that day we ran through Lake Kakebonga, which the Hudson's Bay people consider the most bewildering sheet of water in the Gatineau Valley. There are dozens of deep bays, which look about alike, and if you start into the wrong one, you get wholly astray. Once during the day it became a little foggy, and Jonas at once went ashore and waited for the veil to lift, as he said no one could find his way there in thick weather. These large lakes are all long and narrow, and very crooked. Like Kippewa and Victoria, Lake Kakebonga is nowhere wide, but its shore-line is very long, and the canoe route often cuts across a portage to save miles of travelling.
East of Lake Kakebonga there is a very rough bit of country which we crossed by what are locally known as the Sixteen Portages, or "the Sixteen," where we clambered into and out of the canoe on an average about once in half a mile. At last we came to a long, wide path over a level plain. "I know dis portage so well I know my own house," said Joe. "I was up here from de Gatineau fourteen year ago." And there our forest friends turned back, and left Joe and Billy and me to make our way by the smooth current of the Jean de Terre out to the Gatineau. I suppose we ran twenty miles after three o'clock that afternoon. Then, when it was so dark we could see no longer, we camped on a dry sand-bar, cooked our supper by a little fire, turned the canoe on edge, spread our blankets, threw the tent over all, and were lost in dreamless oblivion.
"De wolf was howl pretty good las' night, wasn't he?" commented Joe, as he waked Billy and me in the smoky dawn. "I tink I hear em close by onetime." And in the sand, about one hundred feet from our resting-place, were plenty of tracks, where the deer-killing brutes had prowled around while we slept; perfectly harmless creatures, but unable to resist the temptation to come near the fat and juicy Billy.
Of all northern wilderness streams, the most interesting I have ever seen is the Gatineau, into which we were soon carried by the current of the Jean de Terre. The descent which the devious Ottawa makes in seven hundred miles or so, is accomplished by the Gatineau in its straight course of less than two hundred, and there are few places where you cannot hear the roar of the next rapid. In the spring every bend is a maelstrom. On the banks and overhanging cedars we could see the marks made by the spring freshets, fifteen feet above the fall level of the water. And even then, as we approached a rapid, it was necessary to know on which side the portage was, because generally the opposite bank was a vertical wall, and once in the sweep of the current, there could be no return.
"You see dat rapid?" said Joe, after an early camp on the portage, as we went down to look at the boiling cauldron below, "I tink I always remember him. One time I work in a shanty back on dat leetle stream we pass dis afternoon. De shanty was mos' ready to break up, and good many de men was go down on de drive. Dere was only one foreman for all de gangs, 'cause so many men been laid off. Dat mornin' de foreman tell dis man 'I want you for do dis,' an' dose men 'I want you for do dat,' sen' dis man here and dat man dere, an' he pick six men an' he say 'I want you for take de batteau—dat's de big row-boat—'wid forty-five chains, to de gang for fix de boom in de pond down below,' and he say 'Dat rapid dere, don' none you dam fools try for run him. I tell you dat batteau ain't like de canoe, an' de chains won't help you swim; so I want you for portage de whole t'ing.' So de men take de batteau, and de foreman say, 'You, Joe, you an' your chum an' Big Jule, you take de big canoe, an' you go down for help on de boom.'