lumette Island
where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the
land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two
canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brule, his interpreter. In order to
hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada,
Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five
hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It
was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations
of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like
wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on
the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from
a chance war party.

Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where
the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the
west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river
amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa.
Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining
flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the
pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became
weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from
voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over
rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53}
on a low-lying, clay-colored lake--the country of the Nipissings, with
whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon
lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.

In a few sleeps--they tell him--he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The
news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and
launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake--French
River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the
bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going
_with_ rapids than _against_ them; for the hastening current is
sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before
the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren
of game.

As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the
raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is
dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met,--three hundred of
them,--the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their
headdress tipp