opulation.
The hunter must draw his sustenance from a very wide range of
territory, and the life of toil and privation to which the Indian was
exposed was fatal to all but the strongest and most hardy.

One of the most striking Indian characteristics is the keenness of
perception by which they are enabled to track their game or find their
way through pathless forests without the aid of chart or compass. The
Indian captive, Gyles, relates the following incident which may be
mentioned in this connection:

"I was once travelling a little way behind several Indians and,
hearing them laugh merrily, when I came up I asked them the cause of
their laughter. They showed me the track of a moose, and how a
wolverene had climbed a tree, and where he had jumped off upon the
moose. It so happened that after the moose had taken several large
leaps it came under the branch of a tree, which, striking the
wolverene, broke his hold and tore him off; and by his tracks in the
snow it appeared he went off another way with short steps, as if he
had been stunned by the blow that had broken his hold. The Indians
were wonderfully pleased that the moose had thus outwitted the
mischievous wolverene."

The early French writers all notice the skill and ingenuity of the
savages, in adapting their mode of life to their environment. Nicholas
Denys, who came to Acadia in 1632, gives a very entertaining and
detailed account of their ways of life and of their skillful
handicraft. The snowshoe and the Indian bark canoe aroused his special
admiration. He says they also made dishes of bark, both large and
small, sewing them so nicely with slender rootlets of fir that they
retained water. They used in their sewing a pointed bodkin of bone,
and they sometimes adorned their handiwork with porcupine quills and
pigments. Their kettles used to be of wood before the French supplied
them with those of metal. In cooking, the water was readily heated to
the boiling point by the use of red-hot stones which they put in and
took out of their wooden kettle.

Until the arrival of Europeans the natives were obliged to clothe
themselves with skins of the beaver and other animals. The women made
all the garments, but Champlain did not consider them very good
tailoresses.

Like most savage races the Indians were vain and consequential. Biard
relates that a certain sagamore on hearing that the young King of
France was unmarried, observed: "Perhaps I may let him marry my