in the
muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars--trading Sam
Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been
storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he
was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat
for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game,
while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and
clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven
hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther
north--more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then
in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and
be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the
morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling
away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free
tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar.
Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and
care-free than you are--peace to his aged bones!

Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had
left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two
hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun,
only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the
amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any
current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main
muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow
the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake
seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the
long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble
when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the
width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a
canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all
three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe.
Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.

Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder
and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a
back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the
Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we
had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; an