The colour of their skin was
usually a pale olive, but the women for some reason made themselves
much darker-skinned than the men by rubbing their bodies with pigments
which turned them to a dark brown. At times they suffered very much
from lack of food, being obliged then to frequent the shore of the
river or gulf to obtain shellfish. When pressed very hard by famine
they would eat their dogs (their only domestic animal) and even the
leather of the skins with which they clothed themselves. In the autumn
they were much given to fishing for eels, and they dried a good deal
of eel flesh, to last them through the winter. During the height of
the winter they hunted the beaver, and later on the elk. Though they
ate wild roots and fruits whenever they could obtain them, they do
not seem to have cultivated any grain or vegetables. In the early
spring they were sometimes dying of hunger, and looked so thin and
haggard that they were mere walking skeletons. They were then ready to
eat carrion that was putrid, so that it is little wonder that they
suffered much from scurvy.

Yet the rivers and the gulf abounded in fish, and as soon as the
waters were unlocked by the melting of the ice in April, the surviving
Indians rapidly grew fat and well, and of course the late summer and
the autumn brought them nuts (hickory and other kinds of walnut, and
hazel nuts), wild cherries, wild plums, raspberries, strawberries,
gooseberries, blackberries, currants,[5] cranberries, and grapes.

[Footnote 5: The wild currants so often mentioned by the early
explorers of Canada are often referred to as red, green, and blue. The
blue currants are really the black currant, now so familiar to our
kitchen gardens (_Ribes nigrum_). This, together with the red currant
(_Ribes rubrum_), grows throughout North America, Siberia, and eastern
Europe. The unripe fruit may have been the green currants alluded to
by Champlain, or these may have been the white variety of our gardens.
The two species of wild strawberry which figure so frequently in the
stories of these early explorers are _Fragaria vesca_ and _F.
virginiana_. From the last-named is derived the cultivated strawberry
of Europe. The wild strawberries of North America were larger than
those of Europe. Champlain does not himself allude to gooseberries
(unless they are his _groseilles vertes_), but later travellers do.
Three or more kinds of gooseberry grow wild in Canada, but they are
different from th