A HUNTER'S CAMP-FIRES 



night. We had to dispense with fire and tobacco smoke, and 

 had neither food nor blankets, and so passed anything but a 

 comfortable night. Not a sound broke the frosty silence of 

 the lake, and when the stars faded at the approach of dawn, 

 two cold, cramped, and hungry hunters paddled down the 

 river. Ten o'clock found us gliding rapidly over the mirrored 

 surface of Lac Louis Gill toward camp, where the sounds of 

 voices and chopping were wafted across to us, and a thin 

 column of blue smoke curled lazily above the yellow tops of 

 the birches. 



As we had come out into the lake we had noticed a light- 

 colored object on the shores of a small island adjoining the 

 one on which we were camped. Supposing that this was 

 Nicholas, in the soiled excuse for a white shirt which he wore, 

 attending to some of his muskrat traps, we had paid no further 

 attention until, when within two hundred yards, we both realized 

 that it was a bull caribou. Standing knee-deep in the shallow 

 water, the bull raised a branching head of antlers as it gazed 

 suspiciously in the direction of the sounds from the invisible 

 camp, a hundred yards distant. Then, suddenly whirling, it 

 splashed toward the shore and disappeared at a trot over a 

 birch-covered knoll. Having previously discovered that a 

 barren extended back from this island to a thick spruce swamp 

 beyond, we put all our energy into our paddles in order to 

 intercept the caribou while it was still in the open country. As 

 the canoe glided around the next point the first sight that met 

 my gaze was this animal one hundred and twenty-five yards 

 distant, slowly picking its way across the marsh. I proceeded 

 to startle my unsuspecting companions around the point by 

 five rapidly fired shots from the carbine. The first shot struck 

 the animal too far back from the shoulders to be instantly 

 fatal, but reduced the gait of the caribou to a stumbling walk. 

 The following three shots struck it in more or less vulnerable 

 spots, but did not stop it. At the fifth shot the wounded bull 



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