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Updated: June 15, 2025
When our people were gathering the wild rice, they always watched for another plant that grows in the muddy bottom of lakes and ponds. It is a white bulb about the size of an ordinary onion. This is stored away by the muskrats in their houses by the waterside, and there is often a bushel or more of the psinchinchah to be found within.
"Uncle," said I, "you had better think less of harvesting your rice, and more of catching the muskrats," meaning the British. Here, darting at me an eye of inexpressible astonishment and rage, he exclaimed "Why, certainly the d -l is in the young man! catch the British?
Occasionally Oo-koo-hoo would imitate the call of the muskrats; sometimes to arrest their attention, but more often to entice them within easy range of his arrows. If he killed them outright while they were swimming, they sank like stones; but when only wounded, they usually swam round on the surface for a while.
As they sat and talked, filled with the happiness of being alone, their eyes now on the sea and now looking into each other's, Meg, who had amused himself by barking at the swooping gulls, chasing the sand-snipe and digging holes in the sand for imaginary muskrats, lifted his head and gave a short yelp.
A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe.
The snares had strangled three hares; the steel traps had caught five muskrats, which are very good eating in spite of their appearance; the net had intercepted a number of pickerel, suckers, and river whitefish. This, with the meat of the caribou, shot by Three Fingers the day before, and the supplies brought from the Post, made ample provision.
Philosophers twain we might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman without tools? And never a goggle had we. But the trappers of muskrats had become our fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our loads over the brambly league. This was kindly.
On Sundays, after or before chores and sermons and Bible-lessons, we drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily time, getting finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes, and muskrats. In particular we took Christ's advice and devoutly "considered the lilies" how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime mud, and ride gloriously among the breezy sun-spangles.
There was a wonderful supply of foxes a year ago, though nothing to the muskrats which swarmed down south last fall. But failure of food further north may have had more to do with those irruptions than any outburst of unusual fecundity. Caribou apparently remain much as they have been lately.
If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn't ever have anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged and wept on thirty-two hours in the twenty-four. They would be tired out and as wet as muskrats all the time. What would heaven be, to THEM? It would be a mighty good place to get out of you know that, yourself.
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