132 The Wilderness Hunter. 



Close to such a brook, from which we drew strings of 

 large silver trout, our tent was pitched, just within the 

 forest. From between the trunks of two gnarled, wind- 

 beaten trees, a pine and a cottonwood, 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, parti-colored Clark's crows circled over 

 the tree-tops or hung from among the pine cones ; jays 

 and chickadees came round camp, and woodpeckers ham- 

 mered lustily in the dead timber. Two or three times 

 parties of Indians passed down the lake, in strangely shaped 

 bark canoes, with peaked, projecting prows and sterns; 

 craft utterly unlike the graceful, 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 the 

 silent loneliness of the great lake. Shrouded as we were 

 in the dense forest, and at the foot of the first steep hills, 



