xii A PRELIMINARY CAST 



the work of prominent correspondents of the current 

 sporting publications. None of these are further from 

 the facts than the story that the ouananiche is a land- 

 locked salmon, prevented from returning to salt water 

 by some upheaval of nature that has raised an impassable 

 barrier at Chicoutimi a fall of some sixty or seventy feet 

 in height ! To support this absurd theory it became 

 necessary to insist upon one of the hugest blunders com- 

 mitted in the whole realm of natural history ; namely, 

 that the ouananiche one of the most universally dis- 

 tributed of the finny inhabitants of Labrador waters 

 was peculiar to Lake St. John and its feeders and out- 

 let ; for it could scarcely be pretended that the fish of the 

 rivers that flow into Ungava Bay, Hamilton Inlet, and 

 the Gulf of St. Lawrence were prevented by a fall at 

 Chicoutimi, on the Saguenay, from running down to the 

 sea. Yet ouananiche are found in all the waters above 

 mentioned, as shown by the notes kindly furnished the 

 author by Mr. A. P. Low, B.Ap.Sc., the chief of the Do- 

 minion government exploratory survey that traversed the 

 interior of Labrador in 1893-94 in two different direc- 

 tions. 



Not only the surprising details of the extent of the 

 geographical distribution of the ouananiche, but other 

 results and discoveries of the Low-Eaton expedition, will 

 first reach the public through the medium of the follow- 

 ing pages. So will much of the information contained in 

 the chapter upon the Montagnais Indians and their folk- 

 lore. The superstitions, legends, and language of this 

 interesting people have engaged the attention of the au- 

 thor for many years past, and he is fortunate in possess- 

 ing the friendship and having had the assistance of some 

 of their old missionaries and of officials of the Hud- 

 son Bay Company who have grown gray among them, as 



