A HUNT IN THE LAURENTIDES 



instantly sank down in the bushes, its spine shattered above 

 the shoulders. We paddled the canoe to the edge of the barren, 

 and I finished the struggling caribou with a shot at close range. 

 The head carried one of those V-shaped sets of antlers found 

 among the caribou of eastern North America, and their length 

 was thirty-three and a half inches and thirty-four inches; the 

 spread, twenty-two inches; number of points, twenty-three. 

 While skinning this bull, in addition to several ancient bullet 

 wounds, we discovered eight buckshot, evidently fired from 

 the muzzle of some Indian's musket, lodged in the face of the 

 animal. 



During that day a very old Indian trapper in a diminutive 

 birch -bark canoe and accompanied by a small yellow dog, 

 arrived at the island, and pitched his shelter-tent within a few 

 yards of where we were camped. In spite of the fact that this 

 Indian was a feeble old man, and followed his vocation during 

 the whole winter, he informed us that he never slept under 

 blankets. He certainly did not while he was camped in our 

 vicinity, and the weather was anything but balmy. He set 

 his lines of muskrat and beaver traps along the various streams 

 covering a radius of many miles, and spent his time in paddling 

 to and from them, and stretching and drying skins in front of 

 his tiny fire. He persuaded us to eat some beaver tail, which 

 is considered quite a delicacy in the North. We dined upon it 

 too copiously, with the result that, being rich and oily meat, it 

 made us feel uncomfortable for some time. 



Several days of continuous canoeing through the streams 

 and lakes of the country brought us simply a distant view of 

 two deer walking along the opposite shore of one of the larger 

 lakes. One morning we ate the usual breakfast by the light 

 of the camp-fire, and as the sky commenced to lighten in the 

 east the two canoes glided away in different directions into a 

 thick white mist which hung over the surface of the lake. For 

 four miles Stanislaus and I paddled the canoe up the winding 



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