On Canada's Frontier Part 3

At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who is always at a traveller's elbow with a fund of alarming information, cleared his throat as he sat opposite us, and inquired whether he had overheard that we did not know much about snow-shoes. An interesting fact concerning them, he said, was that they seemed easy to walk with at first, but if the learner fell down with them on it usually needed a considerable portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on his feet. Beginners only fell down, however, in attempting to cross a log or stump, but the forest where we were going was literally floored with such obstructions.

The first day's effort to navigate with snow-shoes, he remarked, is usually accompanied by a terrible malady called _mal de raquette_, in which the cords of one's legs become knotted in great and excruciatingly painful bunches. The cure for this is to "walk it off the next day, when the agony is yet more intense than at first." As the stranger had reached his destination, he had little more than time to remark that the moose is an exceedingly vicious animal, invariably attacking all hunters who fail to kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped upon the car platform he let fall a simple but touching eulogy upon a dear friend who had recently lost his life by being literally cut in two, lengthwise, by a moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly stiffened fore-legs. The artist protested that the stranger was a sensationalist, unsupported by either the camp-fire gossip or the literature of hunters. Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying.

In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had in the United States: woollens thick as boards, hosiery that wards off the cold as armor resists missiles, gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps and coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and rich alike, blanket suits that are more picturesque than any other masculine garment worn north of the city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed, so many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little of (though many of us need them) that at a glance we say the Montrealers are foreigners.

Montreal is the gayest city on this continent, and I have often thought that the clothing there is largely responsible for that condition.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "GIVE ME A LIGHT"]

A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid-winter finds the place inhospitably cold, and wonders how, as well as why, any one lives there.

I well remember standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, with my teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly congealing, when my attention was called to the fact that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, laughing girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. I asked a Canadian lady how that could be possible, and she answered with a list of the princ.i.p.al garments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs of stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings over their shoes, with moccasins over them. They had so many woollen skirts that an American girl would not believe me if I gave the number. They wore heavy dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket suits over all this. They had mittens over their gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed the cold; indeed, it occurred to me that their bravery amid the terrors of tobogganing was no bravery at all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a ma.s.s of woollens could scarcely expect damage if she fell from a steeple. When next I appeared out-of-doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel in a box of plash, and from that time out Montreal seemed, what it really is, the merriest of American capitals. And there I had come again, and was filling my trunk with this wonderful armor of civilization, while the artist sought advice as to which point to enter the wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most quickly.

Mr. W. C. Van Horne, the President of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, proved a friend in need. He dictated a few telegrams that agitated the people of a vast section of country between Ottawa and the Great Lakes.

And in the afternoon the answers came flying back. These were from various points where Hudson Bay posts are situated. At one or two the Indian trappers and hunters were all away on their winter expeditions; from another a famous white hunter had just departed with a party of gentlemen. At Mattawa, in Ontario, moose were close at hand and plentiful, and two skilled Indian hunters were just in from a trapping expedition; but the post factor, Mr. Rankin, was sick in bed, and the Indians were on a spree. To Mattawa we decided to go. It is a twelve-hour journey from New York to Montreal, and an eleven-hour journey from Montreal to the heart of this hunters' paradise; so that, had we known at just what point to enter the forest, we could have taken the trail in twenty-four hours from the metropolis, as the artist had predicted.

Our first taste of the frontier, at Peter O'Farrall's Ottawa Hotel, in Mattawa, was delicious in the extreme. O'Farrall used to be game-keeper to the Marquis of Waterford, and thus got "a taste of the quality" that prompted him to a.s.sume the position he has chosen as the most lordly hotel-keeper in Canada. We do not know what sort of men own our great New York and Chicago and San Francisco hotels, but certainly they cannot lead more leisurely, complacent lives than Mr. O'Farrall. He has a bartender to look after the male visitors and the bar, and a matronly relative to see to the women and the kitchen, so that the landlord arises when he likes to enjoy each succeeding day of ease and prosperity. He has been known to exert himself, as when he chased a man who spoke slightingly of his liquor. And he was momentarily ruffled at the trying conduct of the artist on this hunting trip. The artist could not find his overcoat, and had the temerity to refer the matter to Mr.

O'Farrall.

"Sir," said the artist, "what do you suppose has become of my overcoat?

I cannot find it anywhere."

"I don't know anything about your botheration overcoat," said Mr.

O'Farrall. "Sure, I've throuble enough kaping thrack of me own."

The reader may be sure that O'Farrall's was rightly recommended to us, and that it is a well-managed and popular place, with good beds and excellent fare, and with no extra charge for the delightful addition of the host himself, who is very tall and dignified and humourous, and who is the oddest and yet most picturesque-looking public character in the Dominion. Such an oddity is certain to attract queer characters to his side, and Mr. O'Farrall is no exception to the rule. One of the waiter-girls in the dining-room was found never by any chance to know anything that she was asked about. For instance, she had never heard of Mr. Rankin, the chief man of the place. To every question she made answer, "Sure, there does be a great dale goin' on here and I know nothin' of it." Of her the artist ventured the theory that "she could not know everything on a waiter-girl's salary." John, the bartender, was a delightful study. No matter what a visitor laid down in the smoking-room, John picked it up and carried it behind the bar. Every one was continually losing something and searching for it, always to observe that John was able to produce it with a smile and the wise remark that he had taken the lost article and put it away "for fear some one would pick it up." Finally, there was Mr. O'Farrall's dog--a ragged, time-worn, petulant terrier, no bigger than a pint-pot. Mr. O'Farrall nevertheless called him "Fairy," and said he kept him "to protect the village children against wild bears."

I shall never be able to think of Mattawa as it is--a plain little lumbering town on the Ottawa River, with the wreck and ruin of once grand scenery hemming it in on all sides in the form of ragged mountains literally ravaged by fire and the axe. Hints of it come back to me in dismembered bits that prove it to have been interesting: vignettes of little school-boys in blanket suits and moccasins, of great-spirited horses forever racing ahead of fur-laden sleighs, and of troops of olive-skinned French-Canadian girls, bundled up from their feet to those mischievous features which shot roguish glances at the artist--the biggest man, the people said, who had ever been seen in Mattawa. But the place will ever yield back to my mind the impression I got of the wonderful preparations that were made for our adventure--preparations that seemed to busy or to interest nearly every one in the village. Our Indians had come in from the Indian village three miles away, and had said they had had enough drink. Mr. John De Sousa, accountant at the post, took charge of them and of us, and the work of loading a great portage sleigh went on apace. The men of sporting tastes came out and lounged in front of the post, and gave helpful advice; the Indians and clerks went to and from the sleigh laden with bags of necessaries; the harness-maker made for us belts such as the lumbermen use to preclude the possibility of incurable strains in the rough life in the wilderness. The help at O'Farrall's a.s.sisted in repacking what we needed so that our trunks and town clothing could be stored. Mr. De Sousa sent messengers. .h.i.ther and thither for essentials not in stock at the post.

Some women, even, were set at work to make "neaps" for us, a neap being a sort of slipper or unlaced shoe made of heavy blanketing and worn outside one's stockings to give added warmth to the feet.

"You see, this is no casual rabbit-hunt," said the artist. The remark will live in Mattawa many a year.

The Hudson Bay Company's posts differ. In the wilderness they are forts surrounded by stockades, but within the boundaries of civilization they are stores. That at Winnipeg is a splendid emporium, while that at Mattawa is like a village store in the United States, except that the top story is laden with guns, traps, snow-shoes, and the skins of wild beasts; while an outbuilding in the rear is the repository of scores of birch-bark canoes--the carriages of British America. Mr. Rankin, the factor there, lay in a bed of suffering and could not see us. Yet it seemed difficult to believe that we could be made the recipients of greater or more kindly attentions than were lavished upon us by his accountant, Mr. De Sousa. He ordered our tobacco ground for us ready for our pipes; selected the finest from among those extraordinary blankets that have been made exclusively for this company for hundreds of years; picked out the largest snow-shoes in his stock; bade us lay aside the gloves we had brought, and take mittens such as he produced, and for which we thanked him in our hearts many times afterwards; planned our outfit of food with the wisdom of an old campaigner; bethought himself to send for baker's bread; ordered high legs sewed on our moccasins--in a word, he made it possible for us to say afterwards that absolutely nothing had been overlooked or slighted in fitting out our expedition.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANTOINE, FROM LIFE]

As I sat in the sleigh, tucked in under heavy skins and leaning at royal ease against other furs that covered a bale of hay, it seemed to me that I had become part of one of such pictures as we all have seen, portraying historic expeditions in Russia or Siberia. We carried fifteen hundred pounds of traps and provisions for camping, stabling, and food for men and beasts. We were five in all--two hunters, two Indians, and a teamster. We set out with the two huge mettlesome horses ahead, the driver on a high seat formed of a second bale of hay, ourselves lolling back under our furs, and the two Indians striding along over the resonant cold snow behind us. It was beginning to be evident that a great deal of effort and machinery was needed to "make a hunter" of a city man, and that it was going to be done thoroughly--two thoughts of a highly flattering nature.

We were now clad for arctic weather, and perhaps nothing except a mummy was ever "so dressed up" as we were. We each wore two pairs of the heaviest woollen stockings I ever saw, and over them ribbed bicycle stockings that came to our knees. Over these in turn were our "neaps,"

and then our moccasins, laced tightly around our ankles. We had on two suits of flannels of extra thickness, flannel s.h.i.+rts, reefing jackets, and "capeaux," as they call their long-hooded blanket coats, longer than snow-shoe coats. On our heads we had knitted tuques, and on our hands mittens and gloves. We were bound for Antoine's moose-yard, near Crooked Lake.

The explanation of the term "moose-yard" made moose-hunting appear a simple operation (once we were started), for a moose-yard is the feeding-ground of a herd of moose, and our head Indian, Alexandre Antoine, knew where there was one. Each herd or family of these great wild cattle has two such feeding-grounds, and they are said to go alternately from one to the other, never herding in one place two years in succession. In this region of Canada they weigh between 600 and 1200 pounds, and the reader will help his comprehension of those figures by recalling the fact that a 1200-pound horse is a very large one. Whether they desert a yard for twelve months because of the damage they do to the supply of food it offers to them, or whether it is instinctive caution that directs their movements, no one can more than conjecture.

Their yards are always where soft wood is plentiful and water is near, and during a winter they will feed over a region from half a mile to a mile square. The prospect of going directly to the fixed home of a herd of moose almost robbed the trip of that speculative element that gives the greatest zest to hunting. But we knew not what the future held for us. Not even the artist, with all his experience, conjectured what was in store for us. And what was to come began coming almost immediately.

The journey began upon a good highway, over which we slid along as comfortably as any ladies in their carriages, and with the sleigh-bells flinging their cheery music out over a desolate valley, with a leaden river at the bottom, and with small mountains rolling all about. The timber was cut off them, except here and there a few red or white pines that reared their green, brush-like tops against the general blanket of snow. The dull sky hung sullenly above, and now and then a raven flew by, croaking hoa.r.s.e disapproval of our intrusion. To warn us of what we were to expect, Antoine had made a shy Indian joke, one of the few I ever heard: "In small little while," said he, "we come to all sorts of a road. Me call it that 'cause you get every sort riding, then you sure be suited."

At five miles out we came to this remarkable highway. It can no more be adequately described here than could the experiences of a man who goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The reader must try to imagine the most primitive sort of a highway conceivable--one that has been made by merely felling trees through a forest in a path wide enough for a team and wagon. All the tree stumps were left in their places, and every here and there were rocks; some no larger than a bale of cotton, and some as small as a bushel basket. To add to the other alluring qualities of the road, there were tree trunks now and then directly across it, and, as a further inducement to traffic, the highway was frequently interrupted by "pitch holes." Some of these would be called pitch holes anywhere. They were at points where a rill crossed the road, or the road crossed the corner of a marsh. But there were other pitch holes that any intelligent New Yorker would call ravines or gullies. These were at points where one hill ran down to the water-level and another immediately rose precipitately, there being a watercourse between the two. In all such places there was deep black mud and broken ice. However, these were mere features of the character of this road--a character too profound for me to hope to portray it. When the road was not inclined either straight down or straight up, it coursed along the slanting side of a steep hill, so that a vehicle could keep to it only by falling against the forest at the under side and carroming along from tree to tree.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PORTAGE SLEIGH ON A LUMBER ROAD]

Such was the road. The manner of travelling it was quite as astounding.

For nothing short of what Alphonse, the teamster, did would I destroy a man's character; but Alphonse was the next thing to an idiot. He made that dreadful journey at a gallop! The first time he upset the sleigh and threw me with one leg thigh-deep between a stone and a tree trunk, besides sending the artist flying over my head like a shot from a sling, he reseated himself and remarked: "That makes tree time I upset in dat place. Hi, there! Get up!" It never occurred to him to stop because a giant tree had fallen across the trail. "Look out! Hold tight!" he would call out, and then he would take the obstruction at a jump. The horses were mammoth beasts, in the best fettle, and the sleigh was of the solidest, strongest pattern. There were places where even Alphonse was anxious to drive with caution. Such were the ravines and unbridged waterways. But one of the horses had cut himself badly in such a place a year before, and both now made it a rule to take all such places flying.

Fancy the result! The leap in air, and then the crash of the sled as it landed, the snap of the harness chains, the snorts of the winded beasts, the yells of the driver, the anxiety and nervousness of the pa.s.sengers!

At one point we had an exciting adventure of a far different sort. There was a moderately good stretch of road ahead, and we invited the Indians to jump in and ride a while. We noticed that they took occasional draughts from a bottle. They finished a full pint, and presently Alexandre produced another and larger phial. Every one knows what a drunken Indian is, and so did we. We ordered the sleigh stopped and all hands out for "a talk." Firmly, but with both power and reason on our side; we demanded a promise that not another drink should be taken, or that the horses be turned towards Mattawa at once. The promise was freely given.

"But what is that stuff? Let me see it," one of the hunters asked.

"It is de 'igh wine," said Alexandre.

"High wine? Alcohol?" exclaimed the hunter, and, impulse being quicker than reason sometimes, flung the bottle high in air into the bush. It was an injudicious action, but both of us at once prepared to defend and re-enforce it, of course. As it happened, the Indians saw that no unkindness or unfairness was intended, and neither sulked nor made trouble afterwards.

We were now deep in the bush. Occasionally we pa.s.sed "a brule," or tract denuded of trees, and littered with trunks and tops of trunks rejected by the lumbermen. But every mile took us nearer to the undisturbed primeval forest, where the trees shoot up forty feet before the branches begin. There were no houses, teams, or men. In a week in the bush we saw no other sign of civilization than what we brought or made. All around us rose the motionless regiments of the forest, with the snow beneath them, and their branches and twigs printing lacework on the sky. The signs of game were numerous, and varied to an extent that I never heard of before. There were few s.p.a.ces of the length of twenty-five feet in which the track of some wild beast or bird did not cross the road. The Indians read this writing in the snow, so that the forest was to them as a book would be to us. "What is that?" "And that?" "And that?" I kept inquiring. The answers told more eloquently than any man can describe it the story of the abundance of game in that easily accessible wilderness.

"Dat red deer," Antoine replied. "Him fox." "Dat bear track; dat squirrel; dat rabbit." "Dat moose track; pa.s.s las' week." "Dat pa'tridge; dat wolf." Or perhaps it was the trail of a marten, or a beaver, or a weasel, or a fisher, mink, lynx, or otter that he pointed out, for all these "signs" were there, and nearly all were repeated again and again. Of the birds that are plentiful there the princ.i.p.al kinds are partridge, woodc.o.c.k, crane, geese, duck, gull, loon, and owl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TRACK IN THE WINTER FOREST]

When the sun set we prepared to camp, selecting a spot near a tiny rill.

The horses were tethered to a tree, with their harness still on, and blankets thrown over them. We cleared a little s.p.a.ce by the road-side, using our snow-shoes for shovels. The Indians, with their axes, turned up the moss and leaves, and levelled the small shoots and brushwood.

Then one went off to cut balsam boughs for bedding, while the other set up two crotched sticks, with a pole upon them resting in the crotches, and throwing the canvas of an "A" tent over the frame, he looped the bottom of the tent to small pegs, and banked snow lightly all around it.

The little aromatic branches of balsam were laid evenly upon the ground, a fur robe was thrown upon the leaves, our enormous blankets were spread half open side by side, and two coats were rolled up and thrown down for pillows. Pierre, the second Indian, made tiny slivers of some soft wood, and tried to start a fire. He failed. Then Alexandre Antoine brought two handfuls of bark, and lighting a small piece with a match, proceeded to build a fire in the most painstaking manner, and with an ingenuity that was most interesting. First he made a fire that could have been started in a teacup; then he built above and around it a skeleton tent of bits of soft wood, six to nine inches in length. This gave him a fire of the dimensions of a high hat. Next, he threw down two great bits of timber, one on either side of the fire, and a still larger back log, and upon these he heaped split soft wood. While this was being done, Pierre a.s.sailed one great tree after another, and brought them cras.h.i.+ng down with noises that startled the forest quiet. Alphonse had opened the provision bags, and presently two tin pails filled with water swung from saplings over the fire, and a pan of fat salt pork was frizzling upon the blazing wood. The darkness grew dead black, and the dancing flames peopled the near forest with dodging shadows. Almost in the time it has taken me to write it, we were squatting on our heels around the fire, each with a ma.s.sive cutting of bread, a slice of fried pork in a tin plate, and half a pint of tea, precisely as hot as molten lead, in a tin cup. Supper was a necessity, not a luxury, and was hurried out of the way accordingly. Then the men built their camp beside ours in front of the fire, and followed that by felling three or more monarchs of the bush. Nothing surprised me so much as the amount of wood consumed in these open-air fires. In five days at our permanent camp we made a great hole in the forest.

But that first night in the open air, abed with nature, with British America for a bedroom! Only I can tell of it, for the others slept. The stillness was intense. There was no wind and not an animal or bird uttered a cry. The logs cracked and sputtered and popped, the horses shook their chains, the men all snored--white and red alike. The horses pounded the hollow earth; the logs broke and fell upon the cinders; one of the men talked in his sleep. But over and through it all the stillness grew. Then the fire sank low, the cold became intense, the light was lost, and the darkness swallowed everything. Some one got up awkwardly, with muttering, and flung wood upon the red ashes, and presently all that had pa.s.sed was re-experienced.

The ride next day was more exciting than the first stage. It was like the journey of a gun-carriage across country in a hot retreat. The sled was actually upset only once, but to prevent that happening fifty times the Indians kept springing at the uppermost side of the flying vehicle, and hanging to the side poles to pull the toppling construction down upon both runners. Often we were advised to leap out for safety's sake; at other times we wished we had leaped out. For seven hours we were flung about like cotton spools that are being polished in a revolving cylinder. And yet we were obliged to run long distances after the hurtling sleigh--long enough to tire us. The artist, who had spent years in rude scenes among rough men, said nothing at the time. What was the use? But afterwards, in New York, he remarked that this was the roughest travelling he had ever experienced.

The signs of game increased. Deer and bear and wolf and fox and moose were evidently numerous around us. Once we stopped, and the Indians became excited. What they had taken for old moose tracks were the week-old footprints of a man. It seems strange, but they felt obliged to know what a man had gone into the bush for a week ago. They followed the signs, and came back smiling. He had gone in to cut hemlock boughs; we would find traces of a camp near by. We did. In a country where men are so few, they busy themselves about one another. Four or five days later, while we were hunting, these Indians came to the road and stopped suddenly, as horses do when la.s.soed. With a glance they read that two teams had pa.s.sed during the night, going towards our camp. When we returned to camp the teams had been there, and our teamster had talked with the drivers. Therefore that load was lifted from the minds of our Indians. But their knowledge of the bush was marvellous. One point in the woods was precisely like another to us, yet the Indians would leap off the sleigh now and then and dive into the forest to return with a trap hidden there months before, or to find a great iron kettle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PIERRE, FROM LIFE]

"Do you never get lost?" I asked Alexandre.

"Me get los'? No, no get los'."

"But how do you find your way?"

"Me fin' way easy. Me know way me come, or me follow my tracks, or me know by de sun. If no sun, me look at trees. Trees grow more branches on side toward sun, and got rough bark on north side. At night me know by see de stars."

We camped in a log-hut Alexandre had built for a hunting camp. It was very picturesque and substantial, built of huge logs, and caulked with moss. It had a great earthen bank in the middle for a fireplace, with an equally large opening in the roof, boarded several feet high at the sides to form a chimney. At one corner of the fire bank was an ingenious crane, capable of being raised and lowered, and projecting from a pivoted post, so that the long arm could be swung over or away from the fire. At one end of the single apartment were two roomy bunks built against the wall. With extraordinary skill and quickness the Indians whittled a spade out of a board, performing the task with an axe, an implement they can use as white men use a penknife, an implement they value more highly than a gun. They made a broom of balsam boughs, and dug and swept the dirt off the floor and walls, speedily making the cabin neat and clean. Two new bunks were put up for us, and bedded with balsam boughs and skins. Shelves were already up, and spread with pails and bottles, tin cups and plates, knives and forks, canned goods, etc.

On them and on the floor were our stores.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANTOINE'S CABIN]

We had a week's outfit, and we needed it, because for five days we could not hunt on account of the crust on the snow, which made such a noise when a human foot broke through it that we could not have approached any wild animal within half a mile. On the third day it rained, but without melting the crust. On the fourth day it snowed furiously, burying the crust under two inches of snow. On the fifth day we got our moose.

In the mean time the log-cabin was our home. Alexandre and Pierre cut down trees every day for the fire, and Pierre disappeared for hours every now and then to look after traps set for otter, beaver, and marten. Alphonse attended his horses and served as cook. He could produce hotter tea than any other man in the world. I took mine for a walk in the arctic cold three times a day, the artist learned to pour his from one cup to another with amazing dexterity, and the Indians (who drank a quart each of green tea at each meal because it was stronger than our black tea) lifted their pans and threw the liquid fire down throats that had been inured to high wines. Whenever the fire was low, the cold was intense. Whenever it was heaped with logs, all the heat flew directly through the roof, and spiral blasts of cold air were sucked through every crack between logs in the cabin walls. Whenever the door opened, the cabin filled with smoke. Smoke clung to all we ate or wore. At night the fire kept burning out, and we arose with chattering teeth to build it anew. The Indians were then to be seen with their blankets pushed down to their knees, asleep in their s.h.i.+rts and trousers. At meal-times we had bacon or pork, speckled or lake trout, bread-and-b.u.t.ter, stewed tomatoes, and tea. There were two stools for the five men, but they only complicated the discomfort of those who got them; for it was found that if we put our tin plates on our knees, they fell off; if we held them in one hand, we could not cut the pork and hold the bread with the other hand; while if we put the plates on the floor beside the tea, we could not reach them. In a month we might have solved the problem. Life in that log shanty was precisely the life of the early settlers of this country. It was bound to produce great characters or early death. There could be no middle course with such an existence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAMP AT NIGHT]

Partridge fed in the brush impudently before us. Rabbits bobbed about in the clearing before the door. Squirrels sat upon the logs near by and gormandized and chattered. Great saucy birds, like mouse-colored robins, and known to the Indians as "meat-birds," stole our provender if we left it out-of-doors half an hour, and one day we saw a red deer jump in the bush a hundred yards away. Yet we got no game, because we knew there was a moose-yard within two miles on one side and within three miles on the other, and we dared not shoot our rifles lest we frighten the moose.

Moose was all we were after. There was a lake near by, and the trout in those lakes up there attain remarkable size and numbers. We heard of 35-pound specked trout, of lake trout twice as large, and of enormous muskallonge. The most reliable persons told of lakes farther in the wilderness where the trout are thick as salmon in the British Columbia streams--so thick as to seem to fill the water. We were near a lake that was supposed to have been fished out by lumbermen a year before, yet it was no sport at all to fish there. With a short stick and two yards of line and a ba.s.s hook baited with pork, we brought up four-pound and five-pound beauties faster than we wanted them for food. Truly we were in a splendid hunting country, like the Adirondacks eighty years ago, but thousands of times as extensive.