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Updated: June 23, 2025
It needed just that one touch to finish the picture. We were looking, had we but known it, on a lake no white man had ever visited before. Clement alone had seen Kawagama, so in our ignorance we attained much the same mental attitude. For I may as well let you into the secret; this was not the fabled lake after all. We found that out later from Tawabinisay.
"Do you know anything about the country? Are there any trails?" "Dat countree is belong Tawabinisay. He know heem. I don' know heem. I t'ink he is have many hills, some lak'." "Do you think we can climb those hills with packs?" Billy cast a doubtful glance on Dick. Then his eye lit up. "Tawabinisay is tell me 'bout dat Lak' Kawagama. P'rhaps we fine heem." In so saying Billy decided the attempt.
There seems to me little use in telling you that Kawagama is about four miles long by a mile wide, is shaped like a crescent, and lies in a valley surrounded by high hills; nor that its water is so transparent that the bottom is visible until it fades into the sheer blackness of depth; nor that it is alive with trout; nor that its silence is the silence of a vast solitude, so that always, even at daybreak or at high midday, it seems to be late afternoon.
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.
That would convey little to you. I will inform you quite simply that Kawagama is a very beautiful specimen of the wilderness lake; that it is as the Lord made it; and that we had a good time. Did you ever fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding, silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath.
Billy, Johnnie Challan, and Buckshot squatted in a semi-circle, and drew diagrams in the soft dirt with a stick. Tawabinisay sat on a log and overlooked the proceedings. Finally he spoke. "He called Black Beaver Lake." "Ask him if he'll take us to Kawagama," I requested. Tawabinisay looked very doubtful. "Come on, Tawab," urged Doc, nodding at him vigorously. "Don't be a clam.
We walked perhaps a half-mile more to the westward before we discovered what we wanted, stopping from time to time to discuss the merits of this or that place. Billy and I were feeling pretty good. After such a week Kawagama was a tonic. Finally we agreed. "This'll do," said we. "Thank God!" said Dick unexpectedly, and dropped his pack to the ground with a thud, and sat on it.
Buckshot looked at us strangely. "I don't want to follow him," he replied, with a significant simplicity. "He run like a deer." "Buckshot," said I, pursuing the inevitable linguistics, "what does Kawagama mean?" Buckshot thought for quite two minutes. Then he drew a semicircle. "W'at you call dat?" he asked. "Crescent, like moon? half-circle? horseshoe? bow?" we proposed.
With these were Indians. Buckshot, a little Indian with a good knowledge of English; Johnnie Challan, a half-breed Indian, ugly, furtive, an efficient man about camp; and Tawabinisay himself. This was an honour due to the presence of Doc. Tawabinisay approved of Doc. That was all there was to say about it. After a few days, inevitably the question of Kawagama came up.
There was no abrupt bursting in on Kawagama through screens of leaves; we entered leisurely to her presence by way of an ante-chamber whose spaciousness permitted no vulgar surprises. After a time we launched our canoe from a natural dock afforded by a cedar root, and so stood ready to cross to our permanent camp.
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