in advance, and these he sends to the disdainful
lady as a peace-offering. She takes the money,
but vouchsafes no word of thanks for it.

The waters are high. We must land before
reaching the foot of the rapids, and cut a way
for ourselves, and our packs and canoes, through
a mile of close wood, before reaching the usual
landing-place for portage by the banks of the
strong torrent. This is the Grand Portage, with
undescribed country beyond it. Summer rain
turns suddenly, with a wind from the north, to
frost. It is wonderful to think what a refrigerator
the north wind can be, when one is near
the Polar laboratory of cold weather. Mr.
Gaudet, the surveyor, remembers sleeping in an
open tent near the dividing ridge between
Lakes Superior and Winnipeg, in the winter of
1858-9, going to bed rolled in four stout blankets,
with the cold a few degrees below zero.
In the night he and his whole company awoke
in the same minute with the touch of an icy
north wind, under which the tested and accurate
spirit thermometer from the observatory of
Toronto showed a sudden drop of temperature
to forty-six below zero.

All along this portage, at distances of from a
hundred to three hundred yards apart, are marten
traps. The line of marten traps, or marten road,
extends for thirty miles, and was the work last
winter of an Abenakis Indian, who built his
lodge midway, and made it a week's round to
visit them. He began late, and his winter's
labour produced him only twenty-two martens.
Had he begun early, and been fortunate, he
might have had fifty or sixty. For each
marten's skin he would get five dollars. He
was plagued, too, with a carcajou or wolverine
that once followed him unobserved along the
whole fifteen miles on one side of his lodge when
he baited the traps, and ate up the bait after
him. On his way back, he found every trap
empty. Such a beast puts in his paw and pulls
out his plum without at all minding the rap on
the knuckles caused by the fall of the trap while
he is thieving. The carcajou is clever, too, at
finding and opening a cache, or getting at the
pack of the poor Indian hunter's food or store
of furs. It is not enough to hang the pack to a
tree-branch. The wolverine will climb and
spring down on it; but if a couple of the
dogsleigh bells be hung lightly to the bundle, at the
alarm of their tinkling off he scuds. The
carcajou thief is a four-legged magpie, who steals
for the sake of stealing. A hunter and his
family once went from home, leaving their lodge
unguarded. When they came back, it was
robbed to the bare walls; blankets, guns,
kettles, axes, cans, knives, all were gone, and the
tracks showed who had been the robber. The
family went on the traces of the carcajou, and
got nearly everything back.

Besides the martens, there are lynxes (known
as cats), bears, musk-rats, otters, and foxes, but
the marten's skin is worth them all. A man had
his comrade and cousin killed, when after a lynx.
The two men were both on its track, and, when
they were separated, one, coming upon the beast,
shot and wounded it; but at the same time he
himself slipped into a narrow cleft of rock under
the snow, breaking one of his legs. The lynx,
fastened upon him, and tore off part of his scalp.
He killed the wild beast with his knife, but
because of the broken leg he could not get out
of the cleft, neither could he reach the gun that
had fallen away from him when he stumbled in;
so he lay there all night in the frost, unable
to signal his companion. In the morning, when
he was found, he was on the point of death.
His brother hunter added his dead body to the
load on the dog-sledge, and dragged it home for
burial. A woman of these tribes finding her
son shot dead by the accidental discharge of his
gun as she leaped out of his canoe, carried the
body in her arms a three weeks' winter journey
over rock and mountain, that she might lay him
in the grave of his dead father.

These ways are difficult even when down hill
to the sea: so it is certainly no easy work to
carry at the portages the baggage and canoes up
the steep hills and rocks of this rough country,
besides having one's road to cut through a dense
forest now and then. The river flows often
between high hills and precipices over which
hang sometimes, stupendous sheets of ice.
It is a native highway, and the animals on
it are scarce. Once, the interior was more
populous than it is now. The Indians found
it not too easy to kill or take the reindeer.
They could kill, and they cared to kill, only what
was sufficient for their food. But trappers gave
them guns, and taught them to kill deer for
their skins. That tended to some such famine
as they felt about 1790, in what is now one of
the oldest and best settled parts of Canada,
because in two consecutive hard winters the
reindeer had fallen a prey to the wolves. Again,
the wasting of large tracts of country by fires
spreading in the dry moss that fasten also on
the woods, destroys the food of the reindeer;
and these fires have become far more common
than they were, when there were no lucifer
matches or other substitutes for the old method
of rubbing pieces of wood together.

In Labrador, on a hot day, the traveller who
believes himself most careful, lights a cooking
fire on the portage; it may spread into the dry
reindeer or caribou moss, and then uprises the
flame and runs before the wind that increases
as the fire spreads. Out of the blinding smoke
the traveller and all his party must then rush,
hastily snatching up packs and canoes, and
without stopping to shift the burden on an
aching shoulder—without staying a moment to
fetch breath—may have to run with the fire at
their heels, spreading over the light moss at a
pace as quick as theirs, until they get to the
end of the portage and can dash their canoes
into the water, or take refuge on a sandbank at
the river's edge. Then they may crouch to let
the hot smoke and ashes pass over, and may rise
ten minutes afterwards to see clear air above, and
the fire roaring and hissing on before them to
spread on and around till it is stopped by rain,
by lakes, by river-courses, or by the wet moss of