Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

Leaving this little waterside village of neglected fishermen's huts, for the season was late and the tourists that usually fill them had all gone, he went down the beautiful stream to the more than beautiful Virgin Falls. Here he met his outfit, thirty-eight Indian guides, all of them experts in camp life and cunning in the secrets of stream and wood.

In the care of these high priests of sport, he left civilization, in the shape of the launch, behind him, and in a canoe fished down stream until the lovely reaches of Split-rock were attained; here, on the banks of the stream, amid the thick ranks of spruce, the camp was pitched.

At first it had been the intention to push on after a day's sport to other camping-places, but the situation and the comfort of this camp was so satisfactory that the Prince decided to stay, and made it his headquarters during the week-end.

It was no camp of amateur sportsmen playing at the game. It was not, perhaps, "roughing" it as the woodsman knows it, for he lies hard in a floorless tent (if he has one), as well as lives laboriously, but it was certainly a rough and ready life, as near that of the woodsman as possible.

The Prince slept in a tent, rose early, bathed in the river and shaved in the open in exactly the same manner as every one else in the party. He took his place in the "grub queue," carrying his plate to the cook-house and demanding his particular choice in bacon and eggs, broiled trout, flapjacks, or the wonderful white flatbread, which the cook, an Indian, Jimmy Bouchard, celebrated for open-fire cooking, knew how to prepare.

Sometimes before breakfast the Prince indulged his passion for running; always after breakfast he set out on foot, or in canoe for the day's fishing, returning late at night hungry and tired with the healthy weariness of hard exertion to the camp meal. There were spells round the big camp fire burning vividly amid the trees, and then sleep in the tent.

The fishing was usually done from the bass canoe, two Indian guides being always the ship's company. And fishing was not the only attraction of the stream and lake. There is always the thrilling, placid beauty of the scenery, the deep forests, the lake valleys, and the austere, forest-clad hills that rise abruptly from the enigmatic pools. And there is the active beauty of the many rapids, those piled-up and rushing masses of angry water, tossing and foaming in pent-up force through rock gates and over rocks.

He tried the adventure of these rapids, shooting through the tortured waters that look so beautiful from the shore and so terrible from the frail structure of a canoe, until it seemed to him as though not even the skill of his guides could steer through safely. He got through safely, but only after an experience which he described as the most exciting in his life.

The fishing itself proved disappointing. The famous speckled trout of Nipigon did not rise to the occasion, and the sport was fair, but not extraordinary. The best day brought in twenty-seven fish, the largest being three and a half pounds, not a good specimen of the lake's trout, which go to six and eight pounds in the ordinary course of things.

And the disappointment had an irony of its own. The man who caught the most fish was the man who couldn't fish at all. The official photographer, who had gone solely to take snapshots, also took the maximum of fish out of the river. Indeed, he was so much of an amateur that the first fish he caught placed him in such a predicament that he did not play it, but landed it with so vigorous a jerk that it flew over his head and caught high in a fir. An Indian guide had to climb the tree to "land" it.