The shores of Lake Kippewa are high hard-wood ridges, and one can see a long way through the trees, as there is not much undergrowth. It is an ideal place to hunt. As late as October 14th it was rather warm for a night fire in front of the tent.
Every red and golden leaf as it fell at our feet bore to us the same message. The Indian summer was upon us, and it was time to be going northward. So we gathered our simple belongings together, and started on our swing around the wilderness circle, to find where the two rivers run from the same lake, to behold the mountain home of the twins.
There is joy in the mere fact of following unmapped water-ways. No matter if you mistake your course, you can, at least, come back by the same way you go. The river will run just as it has run during all the centuries while you were neglecting it, and the lake will stay where it has waited for you these countless years. The land-marks will not fade away. Few, indeed, have been the kings of earth who ever felt as jaunty and independent as the one white man and two half-breeds who left Hunter's Point for the far Upper Ottawa, on the 16th of October, last year. No matter what happened to other people, we were secure; and the farther away we got, the better pleased we were.
Half a day of steady paddling through the Birch Lakes took us past shores where the standing pine has never been disturbed by the lumbermen. There are in these vast forests thousands of miles of country which have never yet been decimated.
Against the Current.
The farther end of Big Birch Lake was the best we could do the first day, and we camped at the foot of a portage as well cleared as a country road, which has been in use by the Indians for a hundred years, and probably much longer. Joe here rebelled against any elaborate tenting arrangements for travellers. He cut three long poles, stuck them in the ground slanting, and threw the tent over them. In truth this did just as well, when the wind did not blow, as anything else.
A half-mile climb the next morning brought us to the top of a long hill; and right at the very top, where a hundred dollars' worth of blasting would let it run down into Birch Lake, stretched away Lake Sissaginega, or "Island Lake," appropriately named, for there are about five hundred islands in it.