THE INCONNU WHAT IT IS NOT 



of fish which left me helpless with amazement. This 

 was on the reefs at the edge of Great Slave Lake, 

 near the mouth of Hay River. The boy, with whom 

 I had been unable to establish any sort of lingual 

 understanding, began to pull out suckers, whitefish, 

 and jackfish which we call pike until our leaky 

 skiff looked as though it were getting ready to sink 

 at any moment. 



I heard him thumping at something in the net 

 and he casually hauled over the gunwale a twenty- 

 five-pound lake trout, repeating the act an instant 

 later with yet another and larger one. Also he un- 

 coiled several whitefish that would be worth, at city 

 retail prices, about fifteen dollars each. Still he was 

 not content. 



After a time he flung behind him into the boat a 

 long, silverish-looking fish which I saw at once was 

 a whitefish and later saw was nothing of the sort. 

 It was not a salmon or a sucker or a whitefish or a 

 pike-perch, or like any one of them, but a good 

 deal like all of them. 



In short, it was an inconnu! All the specimens 

 of inconnu we took from these nets I have often 

 wondered whose nets we really were running were 

 stiff and dead, with their mouths wide open, though 

 none of the other fish taken in the gill-net were dead. 

 My attention being thus called to the mouth of the 



