Hunting in the Selkirks 157 



in the forest. From between the trunks of two 

 gnarled, wind-beaten trees, a pine and a cotton- 

 wood, we looked out across the lake. The little bay 

 in our front, in which we bathed and swam, was 

 sometimes glassily calm; and again heavy wind 

 squalls arose, and the surf beat strongly on the 

 beach where our boat was drawn up. Now and 

 then great checker-back loons drifted buoyantly by, 

 stopping with bold curiosity to peer at the white tent 

 gleaming between the tree trunks, and at the smoke 

 curling above their tops; and they called to one 

 another, both at dawn and in the daytime, with 

 shrieks of unearthly laughter. Troops of noisy, 

 party-colored Clark s crows circled over the tree-tops 

 or hung from among the pine cones; jays and 

 chickadees came round the camp, and woodpeckers 

 hammered lustily in the dead timber. Two or three 

 times parties of Indians passed down the lake, in 

 strangely shaped bark canoes, with peaked, project 

 ing prows and sterns ; craft utterly unlike the grace 

 ful, feather-floating birches so beloved by both the 

 red and the white woodsmen of the Northeast. 

 Once a couple of white men, in a dugout or pirogue 

 made out of a cottonwood log, stopped to get lunch. 

 They were mining prospectors, French Canadians 

 by birth, but beaten into the usual frontier-mining 

 stamp; doomed to wander their lives long, ever 

 hoping, in the quest for metal wealth. 



With these exceptions there was nothing to break 



