Part 7 (1/2)
It was not apparent where the outlet of the lake was, and while the Indian thought it was in one direction, I thought it was in another. He said, ”I bet you fourpence it is there,” but he still held on in my direction, which proved to be the right one.
As we were approaching the outlet he suddenly exclaimed, ”Moose! moose!”
and told us to be still. He put a cap on his gun, and, standing up in the stern, rapidly pushed the canoe straight toward the sh.o.r.e and the moose. It was a cow moose, about thirty rods off, standing in the water by the side of the outlet, partly behind some fallen timber and bushes, and at that distance she did not look very large. She was flapping her large ears, and from time to time poking off the flies with her nose from some part of her body. She did not appear much alarmed by our neighborhood, only occasionally turned her head and looked straight at us, and then gave her attention to the flies again. As we approached nearer she got out of the water, stood higher, and regarded us more suspiciously.
Polis pushed the canoe steadily forward in the shallow water, but the canoe soon grounded in the mud eight or ten rods distant from the moose, and the Indian seized his gun. After standing still a moment she turned so as to expose her side, and he improved this moment to fire, over our heads. She thereupon moved off eight or ten rods at a moderate pace across a shallow bay to the opposite sh.o.r.e, and she stood still again while the Indian hastily loaded and fired twice at her, without her moving. My companion, who pa.s.sed him his caps and bullets, said that Polis was as excited as a boy of fifteen, that his hand trembled, and he once put his ramrod back upside down.
The Indian now pushed quickly and quietly back, and a long distance round, in order to get into the outlet,--for he had fired over the neck of a peninsula between it and the lake,--till we approached the place where the moose had stood, when he exclaimed, ”She is a goner!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Shooting the Moose_]
There, to be sure, she lay perfectly dead, just where she had stood to receive the last shots. Using a tape, I found that the moose measured six feet from the shoulder to the tip of the hoof, and was eight feet long.
Polis, preparing to skin the moose, asked me to help him find a stone on which to sharpen his large knife. It being flat alluvial ground, covered with red maples, etc., this was no easy matter. We searched far and wide a long time till at length I found a flat kind of slate stone, on which he soon made his knife very sharp.
While he was skinning the moose I proceeded to ascertain what kind of fishes were to be found in the sluggish and muddy outlet. The greatest difficulty was to find a pole. It was almost impossible to find a slender, straight pole ten or twelve feet long in those woods. You might search half an hour in vain. They are commonly spruce, arbor-vitae, fir, etc., short, stout, and branchy, and do not make good fishpoles, even after you have patiently cut off all their tough and scraggy branches.
The fishes were red perch and chivin.
The Indian, having cut off a large piece of sirloin, the upper lip, and the tongue, wrapped them in the hide, and placed them in the bottom of the canoe, observing that there was ”one man,” meaning the weight of one. Our load had previously been reduced some thirty pounds, but a hundred pounds were now added, which made our quarters still more narrow, and considerably increased the danger on the lakes and rapids as well as the labor of the carries. The skin was ours according to custom, since the Indian was in our employ, but we did not think of claiming it.
He being a skillful dresser of moose-hides would make it worth seven or eight dollars to him, as I was told. He said that he sometimes earned fifty or sixty dollars in a day at them; he had killed ten moose in one day, though the skinning and all took two days. This was the way he had got his property.
We continued along the outlet through a swampy region, by a long, winding deadwater, very much choked up by wood, where we were obliged to land sometimes in order to get the canoe over a log. It was hard to find any channel, and we did not know but we should be lost in the swamp. It abounded in ducks, as usual. At length we reached Grand Lake.
We stopped to dine on an interesting rocky island, securing our canoe to the cliffy sh.o.r.e. Here was a good opportunity to dry our dewy blankets on the open sunny rock. Indians had recently camped here, and accidentally burned over the western end of the island. Polis picked up a gun-case of blue broadcloth, and said that he knew the Indian it belonged to and would carry it to him. His tribe is not so large but he may know all its effects. We proceeded to make a fire and cook our dinner amid some pines.
I saw where the Indians had made canoes in a little secluded hollow in the woods, on the top of the rock, where they were out of the wind, and large piles of whittlings remained. This must have been a favorite resort of their ancestors, and, indeed, we found here the point of an arrow-head, such as they have not used for two centuries and now know not how to make. The Indian picked up a yellowish curved bone by the side of our fireplace and asked me to guess what it was. It was one of the upper incisors of a beaver, on which some party had feasted within a year or two. I found also most of the teeth and the skull. We here dined on fried moose meat.
Our blankets being dry, we set out again, the Indian, as usual, having left his gazette on a tree. We paddled southward, keeping near the western sh.o.r.e. The Indian did not know exactly where the outlet was, and he went feeling his way by a middle course between two probable points, from which he could diverge either way at last without losing much distance. In approaching the south sh.o.r.e, as the clouds looked gusty and the waves ran pretty high, we so steered as to get partly under the lee of an island, though at a great distance from it.
I could not distinguish the outlet till we were almost in it, and heard the water falling over the dam there. Here was a considerable fall, and a very substantial dam, but no sign of a cabin or camp.
While we loitered here Polis took occasion to cut with his big knife some of the hair from his moose-hide, and so lightened and prepared it for drying. I noticed at several old Indian camps in the woods the pile of hair which they had cut from their hides.
Having carried over the dam, he darted down the rapids, leaving us to walk for a mile or more, where for the most part there was no path, but very thick and difficult traveling near the stream. He would call to let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the sh.o.r.e was, but he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not Indians. He seemed to be very saving of his breath--yet he would be surprised if we went by, or did not strike the right spot. This was not because he was unaccommodating, but a proof of superior manners. Indians like to get along with the least possible communication and ado. He was really paying us a great compliment all the while, thinking that we preferred a hint to a kick.
At length, climbing over the willows and fallen trees, when this was easier than to go round or under them, we overtook the canoe, and glided down the stream in smooth but swift water for several miles. I here observed, as at Webster Stream, that the river was a smooth and regularly inclined plane down which we coasted.
We decided to camp early that we might have ample time before dark. So we stopped at the first favorable sh.o.r.e, where there was a narrow gravelly beach, some five miles below the outlet of the lake. Two steps from the water on either side, and you come to the abrupt, bushy, and rooty, if not turfy, edge of the bank, four or five feet high, where the interminable forest begins, as if the stream had but just cut its way through it.
It is surprising on stepping ash.o.r.e anywhere into this unbroken wilderness to see so often, at least within a few rods of the river, the marks of the axe, made by lumberers who have either camped here or driven logs past in previous springs. You will see perchance where they have cut large chips from a tall white pine stump for their fire.
While we were pitching the camp and getting supper, the Indian cut the rest of the hair from his moose-hide, and proceeded to extend it vertically on a temporary frame between two small trees, half a dozen feet from the opposite side of the fire, las.h.i.+ng and stretching it with arbor-vitae bark. Asking for a new kind of tea, he made us some pretty good of the checkerberry, which covered the ground, dropping a little bunch of it tied up with cedar bark into the kettle.
After supper he put on the moose tongue and lips to boil. He showed me how to write on the under side of birch bark with a black spruce twig, which is hard and tough and can be brought to a point.
The Indian wandered off into the woods a short distance just before night, and, coming back, said, ”Me found great treasure.”
”What's that?” we asked.