This race of animals is almost entirely destroyed in Canada, as are the beavers. We took boat before daybreak to go up a river which issued from the wood in which the wolverine had been seen. There were some thirty of us, both Indians and American and Canadian coureurs: one part of the troop walked alongside of the flotilla with the dogs, and the women carried our provisions. We did not find the wolverine; but we killed lynxes and musk-rats. Formerly the Indians used to go into deep mourning when they had inadvertently killed any of the latter animals; for the female of the musk-rat is, as everybody knows, the mother of the human race. The Chinese, with their finer powers of observation, know to a certainty that the rat changes into a quail, the mole into a loriot.
Our table was abundantly furnished with river-side birds and fish. The dogs are trained to dive; when they are not hunting, they go fishing: they plunge into the streams and seize the fish down at the bottom of the water. The women prepared our meals at a large fire around which we took our places. We had to lie flat down, with our faces against the ground, to protect our eyes from the smoke, the clouds of which floated above our heads and indifferently preserved us from the stings of the mosquitoes.
Seen through the microscope, the various carnivorous insects are formidable animals; they were once perhaps those winged dragons whose skeletons are sometimes found: decreasing in size in proportion as their matter decreased in energy, these hydras, griffins and others would today be reduced to the condition of insects. The antediluvian giants are the little men of our time.
*
M. Violet offered me his credentials for the Onondagas, the remnant of one of the six Iroquois nations. I first came to the Lake of the Onondagas. The Dutchman selected a suitable spot at which to pitch our camp: a river issued from the lake; our gear was set up in the curve of the river. We drove two forked stakes into the ground, at a distance of six feet one from the other; in the forks of these stakes we hung, horizontally, a long pole. Strips of birch bark, one end resting on the ground, the other on the transversal pole, formed the sloping roof of our mansion. Our saddles served as pillows, our cloaks as blankets. We fastened bells to our horses' necks and turned them loose in the woods near our camp: they did not wander far.
Fifteen years later, when I was bivouacking in the sand of the Saba Desert, at a few steps from the Jordan on the banks of the Dead Sea, our horses, those swift sons of Araby, looked as though they were listening to the tales of the sheik and taking part in the story of Antar and of the horse in Job[475].
It was hardly four o'clock in the afternoon when we were hutted. I took my gun and went for a stroll round about There were few birds. A solitary, pair alone fluttered before my eyes, like the birds which I had followed in my paternal woods; by the colour of the male, I recognised the white sparrow, the passer nivalis of the ornithologists. I also heard the osprey, very clearly characterized by its note. The flight of the "screamer" had led me to a dale hemmed in by tall and rocky heights; on a mountain-side stood a poor hut; a lean cow roamed in a field below.
I like small shelters: "A chico pajarillo chico nidillo: a little bird, a little nest." I sat down on the slope facing the hut planted on the hillside opposite. In a few minutes, I heard voices in the valley: three men were driving five or six fat cows; they put them to graze and drove away the lean cow with blows of a switch. An Indian woman came out of the hut, went towards the frightened beast, and called it. The cow ran to her, stretching out its neck with a little low. The planters shook their fists at the Indian woman, who returned to her hut The cow followed her.
The Indian woman.
I got up, climbed down the declivity of the hillside, crossed the glen, and climbing the opposite hill, reached the hut. I uttered the greeting I had been taught: