p your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran.
Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds,
brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down
from the forests of the Rocky Mountains--such a tangle as I have never
seen in any swamp of the South--the skeleton of a moose, come to its
death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big
game; and presently the river was lost--not in a lake--but in a swamp.
A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air,
looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile,
evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on
the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each
side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple
of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which
the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie.
We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three
openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike
canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed
rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of
Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant
waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We
were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path
teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to
swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it--leg it" plain as a quack could
speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run,
the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length
ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped
broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be
caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady
dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.

"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than
mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop
that lying."

Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more
than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her
hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in
for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by
the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose gr