United States or Uganda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I was sitting very still, some distance to one side, and he did not see me. Near old Noel's deadfall he paused an instant with raised head, in the curious snake-like attitude that all the weasels take when watching. Then he glided round the end of the trap, and disappeared down the portage. When he was gone I stole out to examine his tracks.
Then we let down the boats, for twenty-five or thirty yards, by walking along the shelf, landing them again in the mouth of a side cañon. Just below this there is another pile of boulders, over which we make another portage. From the foot of these rocks we can climb to another shelf, forty or fifty feet above the water. On this beach we camp for the night.
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.
The great cedar-boughs above the river bent beneath their load, and the scanty light was dimmed by sliding snow, when Seaforth and his comrade stood panting and white all over by the last portage. Okanagan by dint of laborious searching had found the canoe jammed between two boulders with her side crushed in, and had spent a day repairing her with a flattened out meat-can and strips of deerskin.
Again, on the fourth of June following, he writes to La Barre, from the Chicago portage, complaining that some of his colonists, going to Montreal for necessary supplies, have been detained by his enemies, and begging that they may be allowed to return, that his enterprise may not be ruined. "The Iroquois," he pursues, "are again invading the country.
So we left the water, and there was now a portage of two miles over a level stretch of forest, at the end of which we would strike the Churchill River at a point twenty miles above Fort Royal. We started off rapidly, Baptiste and the three other voyageurs leading the way with the canoe on their shoulders. The paddles and a part of the load were inside, and Gummidge and I carried the rest.
The Menomonie, or Wild-rice Indians, one of the western branches of the Algonquin family, wished to dissuade them from going further. The voyagers thanked them and pushed on, up Fox River and across Lake Winnebago. At the approach to the lake are the Winnebago Rapids, which necessitate a portage, or "carry." Our voyagers do not mention having any trouble here.
On and on along the road it sped, until at length it disappeared over the hill leading to the other end of the portage, where the barrels of powder and bales of goods were now piled.
From a hill near this bay, where we killed the deer, on the eastern side of the lake, we discovered a trail leading off toward a string of lakes to the eastward. This is undoubtedly the portage trail which the Indians follow in their journeys to the Post at Davis Inlet. Toma had told me we might see it here, and that, not far in, on one of these lakes was another Indian camp.
For that, they were well provided for since he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much, but enough to bring both of them to the marriage age. And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the trust, Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting at Grand Portage.