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We passed by herds of hippopotami, some with young ones on their backs, and although they sank as we approached, they soon came to the surface to breathe. On the trees overhead were numbers of iguanas, which, on seeing us, splashed into the water. The chief canoeman carried a light javelin, with which he speared a couple, the flesh proving to be tender and gelatinous.
Poor Pasche was ignominiously discharged by the despotic governor of the Hudson Bay Company, as being unfit for the laborious work of a canoeman in one of those large canoes.
Perhaps it was the heartier because of the relief the boys experienced in the discovery that the lone canoeman was not, after all, the wraith of Long John, but was their friend Indian Jake in flesh and blood. When his packs had been removed, Indian Jake lifted his canoe from the water, turned it upon its side and followed the boys to the fire, where Doctor Joe awaited him.
Again I felt with a creepiness, that set all my flesh quaking, felt, rather than saw, those maddening, tiger eyes of the dark foliage watching me. Looking up, I found my morose canoeman on the other side of the fire, leaning so close to a tree, he was barely visible in the shadows.
Among the voyageurs of both companies there was not a more expert canoeman than this treacherous, thievish Iroquois. As steersman, he could take a crew safely through knife-edge rocks with the swift certainty of arrow flight.
Bright-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a racking cough that reddened the gauze handkerchief the doctor had given him, he sat bolstered up in his cot and looked out through the open door with glad and hopeful gaze. Weyman had arrived only half an hour before. Outside was the Indian canoeman who had helped to bring him up.
"Tra-la, old tombstone! Good-by, my mausoleum! Au revoir, old death's-head! Adieu, grave skull!" With an absurdly elaborate bow, he reeled back among the dancers. "Get up, comrade," I urged, rushing into the tent, where the old trader I had questioned about my canoeman was now snoring. "Get up, man," and I shook him. "There's a Hudson's Bay spy!"
I have now to instance two whose development can be traced to the other fact that he is a nomad. I refer to his skill with the bark canoe and his ability to carry. I was once introduced to a man at a little way station of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the following words: "Shake hands with Munson; he's as good a canoeman as an Indian." A little later one of the bystanders remarked to me:
Having completed these ceremonies, he placed the nogock and harpoon crosswise on the deck in front of him and bent again to his paddle. Rob himself, no bad canoeman, had meantime been paddling as though he quite understood what was expected of him.
There was no more expert canoeman than Tayoga in the whole northern wilderness. A single sweep of his paddle would send the canoe to any point he wished, and apparently it was made without effort. There was no shortening of the breath nor any sudden and violent movement of his figure. It was all as smooth and easy as the flowing of the water itself.
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