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It was pretty badly spoiled and turning a little green in color, but Pete washed it well several times and we all avoided the lee side of the kettle while it was cooking. It was pronounced "not so bad." Another day was lost on Lake Bibiquasin in an ineffectual hunt for the trail.
A decided change in the features of the country had taken place since leaving Lake Bibiquasin, and the low moss-covered hills had given place to rough mountains of bare rock. To the northward from where we stood nothing but higher mountains of similar formation met our view a great, rolling vista of bare, desolate rocks.
A thorough search was made for Indian signs, but there were absolutely none. There was nothing to show that any human being had ever been here before us. Back on Lake Bibiquasin we had lost the trail and now on Lake Desolation we were far and hopelessly astray, with only the compass to guide us.
The higher hills west of Seal Lake are capped by a much altered gabbro that has undergone considerable weathering. Between the Nascaupee River and a few miles beyond Bibiquasin Lake the rock is quartzite, considerably weathered and covered by drift.
Bowlders of this quartzite were seen along the Nascaupee River long before the first outcrop was reached, showing the general direction of the glacial movement to have been to the southeast. From Bibiquasin Lake to Lake Kasheshebogamog the country is covered with much drift; the only exposures are on the steep hillsides. The rock being a coarse hornblende granite.
The end of the portage is on the high rolling plateau of the interior, timbered by a sparse and stunted second growth of spruce, covered everywhere with white reindeer moss, and strewn with lakes innumerable. The trail which runs N. 50 degrees W. and has not been used for eight years, gradually became more and more indistinct, until on Bibiquasin Lake it disappeared entirely.
Lake Bibiquasin, as we shall call it, was five miles in length and nestled between ridges of low, moss-covered hills. It lay in a southeasterly and northwesterly direction, and rested upon the summit of a sub- sidiary divide that we had been gradually ascending. A creek ran out of its northwesterly end, flowing in that direction.
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