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One God, love, kindness, charity, honesty, right living, may thrive as well in the wigwam as in a foursquare house provided you let them wear moccasins and a capote wherewith to keep themselves warm and vital. Tawabinisay must have had his religious training at the hands of a good man.
Tawabinisay uses two short poles, one in either hand, kneels amidships, and snakes that little old canoe of his upstream so fast that you would swear the rapids an easy matter until you tried them yourself. We were once trailed up a river by an old Woods Indian and his interesting family.
Tawabinisay wandered through the forest, his hands in his pockets, humming a little Indian hymn. And we were breaking madly along behind him with the crashing of many timbers. Of your discoveries probably one of the most impressive will be that in the bright lexicon of woodscraft the word "mile" has been entirely left out. To count by miles is a useless and ornamental elegance of civilization.
In the thicket a little road had been cleared, and the brush had been piled on either side. To an unaccustomed eye it seemed the work of two days at least. Yet Tawabinisay had picked out his route, cleared and marked it thus, skirted the shores of the lakes we were able to traverse in the canoe, and had returned to the River in less time than we consumed in merely reaching the Lake itself!
In fact, as we laid the new and the old side by side, we could not have selected, from any evidence of the workmanship, which had been made by machine and which by hand. Tawabinisay then burned out the wood from the axe, retempered the steel, set the new helve, and wedged it neatly with ironwood wedges. The whole affair, including the cutting of the timber, consumed perhaps half an hour.
We won't take anybody else up there." The Indian probably did not comprehend the words, but he liked Doc. "A'-right," he pronounced laboriously. Buckshot explained to us his plans. "Tawabinisay tell me," said he, "he don' been to Kawagama seven year. To-morrow he go blaze trail. Nex' day we go." "How would it be if one or two of us went with him to-morrow to see how he does it?" asked Jim.
We timed the Indians secretly, and found they varied by hardly a minute from absolute fidelity to this schedule. We had at first, of course, to gain the higher level of the hills, but Tawabinisay had the day before picked out a route that mounted as easily as the country would allow, and through a hardwood forest free of underbrush.
What would happen to a poacher no one knows, simply because the necessity for finding out has not arisen. Tawabinisay controls from Batchawanung to Agawa. There old Waboos takes charge. And so on. But in the Far North the control is more often disputed, and there the blood-law still holds. An illegal trapper baits his snares with his life. If discovered, he is summarily shot.
Certain individuals gain a remarkable reputation and an equally remarkable respect for wisdom, or hunting skill, or power of woodcraft, or travel. These men are the so-called "old men" often mentioned in Indian manifestoes, though age has nothing to do with the deference accorded them. Tawabinisay is not more than thirty-five years old; Peter, our Hudson Bay Indian, is hardly more than a boy.
He had lost none of his aboriginal virtue and skill, as may be gathered from what I have before said of him, and had gained in addition certain of the gentle qualities. I have never been able to gauge exactly the extent of his religious understanding, for Tawabinisay is a silent individual, and possesses very little English; but I do know that his religious feeling was deep and reverent.
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