io6 In the Canadian Forests v 



gray and black from forest fires, but even then 

 brightened up at this time of year by the flaming 

 scarlets and yellows of the undergrowth ; in part, 

 green and gray, the spruces planted closely together, 

 tall, lithe, and graceful, and decked with pendant 

 reindeer moss, — reindeer moss, however, only if the 

 snow is too deep to permit of the caribou scraping 

 it away from his favourite lichens. Penetrate this 

 vast forest in almost any direction, and you will 

 come across lakes of every size and description, with 

 the forest primeval growing to the water's edge so 

 closely as to prevent the fisherman getting a cast 

 for miles, though the water is alive with fish.^ Trails 

 there are, here and there, but it requires a cautious 

 and trained eye to follow them ; lose them, and you 

 are at once in the midst of trees so serried in their 

 ranks as to render the forcing of a way through 



1 « Pre-Adamite Fishes 



' What, geologically speaking, is our oldest English fresh -water fish ? 

 I think, with Master Shallow, that the "luce is an old coat," and 

 that possibly Esox luciiis may have existed long before we had a roach 

 or a perch. And I will tell you why. Once fishing in that paradise, 

 Thunder Bay, Lake Superior, for Salmo Ramaycush, for food, not for 

 sport — for they have no more fight in them than an out-of-conditioned 

 cod — I caught now and again what the Americans, in their passion for 

 the misuse of proper names, persist in calling a "pickerel," a fish so 

 like our own jack or immature pike, that GUnther himself would be 

 puzzled to tell the difference. 



' Happening to take a smallish fish up by the wrong end, and 

 glancing down him from tail to snout, I was struck by the evident 

 regularity of the sweep of the white spots common to him and our own 

 fish — round and round the body — in an evident but disconnected 

 spiral. It struck me at the moment that these spots might be the 



