24 
lake, a frog had buried himself for the winter. 
Suppose again that a big hungry pike—for pike 
do not hibernate—was rooting around in the 
mud and uncovered the frog. We will have to 
suppose again that even though sluggish the 
frog, to save himself from furnishing a supper 
for Mr. Pike, shot upward through the water 
and happened to have the good luck, or bad 
luck, to strike an air hole or an open spring-hole 
at the top. He could climb out on the ice and 
make a few hops before the cold got him.” 
John agreed that this might be possible, but he 
evidently preferred to hang to the theory that 
the whole thing was a miracle. At any rate, he 
had seen the frog. 
A year or so after, I was out in company with 
Pete, a very capable and efficient half-breed 
Indian citizen of the Dominion, and I put to 
him the new fact in natural history concerning 
the beaver, first expounded by John. 
Pete was impressed with the story but, even 
imbued as he was with the taciturnity of his 
race, Pete indulged himself in the luxury of a 
laugh. 
"John sell 'urn razor, mebbe?” he queried. 
Pete and I then tried to thresh out the matter. 
“You know, Pete,” I said, "or at least you be¬ 
lieve you know because you have opened beaver 
houses, that beaver sleep on a platform, and I 
have heard you say that they leave their tails 
hanging in the water for the purpose, as you 
imagine, of knowing when the water in the dam 
falls and so they can get out at once and make 
repairs.” 
Yes, said Pete, “that’s right.” 
“Now,” I went on, trying to state the case like 
a lawyer for the defense, “if they sleep on a 
round platform with their tails in the water they 
must sleep with their noses pretty well to¬ 
gether ?” 
Pete did not offer any objection to this and 
the rest of the defense was forthcoming. 
If, Pete, I said, “they have their heads pret¬ 
ty well together, is it not natural that, like nine¬ 
ty-nine animals in every hundred, there would 
be more or less ‘nuzzling’ and biting in play or 
otherwise and pulling out of whiskers?” 
Pete as a jury was not convinced, for he had 
not noticed the thing particularly, so the case 
will have to be decided on appeal to better 
authority. 
Speaking of Pete, it is strange how environ¬ 
ment ohanges the character of a man. More 
than once as I had looked at Pete, sitting pa¬ 
tiently in the wetter end of a wet canoe, on a 
wet day, I had experienced something of a pang 
of conscience to observe his rather insufficient 
clothing and lack of protection against the ele¬ 
ments. True, everything he wore bore marks of 
the painstaking and even pathetic industry of 
Mrs. Pete, to make her husband look presenta¬ 
ble while out with M’sieu, but there were lots of 
little Petes to provide for and pork and other 
things were going up and work was not always 
to be had. So I had regarded Pete as rather 
albjeet. How he regarded me I cannot say, but 
perhaps from his point of view the taking of 
superfluous trout from a wet lake on a wet day 
just to bring the fish to the canoe and turn them 
loose again, must have seemed rather foolish, 
particularly when one could have been more 
comfortable and better occupied in a dry tent 
with a brisk fire burning in front and a soft 
FOREST AND STREAM 
balsam bed and plenty of warm blankets to lie 
on, not to mention the little but important tasks 
to be attended to, and a splendid library in the 
shape of a battered cook-book to read. 
If I have described Pete in the rain, it is due 
him to tell of the change that came over him 
when he came into his own, so to speak. Pete 
and I were headed through the Tomasine coun¬ 
try toward the Barriere Post in upper Quebec. 
I had noticed that we were swinging in a circle 
rather than going in a straight direction but as 
Pete was choosing the way, I said nothing. On 
our return some days later, Pete looked at me 
one morning and said a little hesitatingly: 
“If I take you straight and save a day, you 
say nothing where you go through?”—in other 
words, Pete had taken me around his own trap¬ 
ping district and now that we were a little bet¬ 
ter acquainted, he proposed going through it but 
did not want me to talk too much about it to 
others. It was an intensely interesting trip. For 
the first time I came in actual contact with colo¬ 
nies of Deaver that had been carefully protected 
and conservatively trapped. Pete was no longer 
albjeet. He was boss here. Very proud he was 
of his own particular country and he showed me 
more about the beaver in two days than I had 
learned in all my life before. 
The promise to Pete still holds and the loca¬ 
tion of his colony will not be disclosed although, 
to tell the truth, not much harm would come ot 
it now, for others invaded Pete’s trapping dis¬ 
trict and took more than their toll; worse yet, 
Pete in a desperate effort to reap the harvest he 
had watched and saved from marauders, went to 
the length of buying for himself an evil-coun¬ 
tenanced mongrel dog with an uncanny knack 
of being able to scent beaver under the ice and 
even following them to shore where, as a rule, 
they met destruction at Pete’s hands. 
It was going around a little lake in this local 
ity that I suddenly broke through the subterra¬ 
nean home of a “bank” beaver— that is, a bea¬ 
ver which holes instead of building a house. As 
I climbed out, expressing sundry observations to 
Pe.e, that stolid specimen got even with me on 
the John theory of whiskered beaver. After 
looking at me wringing water and scraping mud 
off myself, he asked without a smile, 
When you go down you see ’um beaver with 
barbe, mebbe?” 
I noticed another thing while on this trip that 
may in part explain some of the peculiar contro¬ 
versies that break out once in a while on the 
question of nature faking. 
Pete sincerely believed, as did all his friends 
and acquaintances that I ever talked to, that 
some huge animal or monster had, not so many 
years ago, gone through that portion of the 
country, leaving a path of destruction in its 
wake. What it was no one could say, but Pete 
solemnly assured me one day that if I would go 
over a mountain with him he would show me 
the swath left through the forest by the mys¬ 
terious beast. I believe that the story was sim¬ 
ply one of the numerous Nenebojo legends of 
the Ojibways, but the strange part of it was that 
it had probably been told first as a legend by a 
past and gone generation to white trappers, and 
then retold by them and accepted as a white man’s 
story by the younger Indians as an occurrence Of 
recent date, or at least within the memory of 
living man, for as the Indians forsook their tribal 
ways and drifted under the influence of white 
people and fur traders, they lost much of their 
own mythology. 
A curious illustration of this acceptance of 
modern dates for incredible events happened after 
I had regaled Pete one night before the camp-fire 
with an account of the Greek myth of Theseus 
and Adriadne and the slaying of the Minotaur. 
The story had been brought out to match some¬ 
thing that Pete had been telling me. Probably 
you remember, even some of you older readers 
who have been out of school for a long time, the 
stately rhythm of the poetry, although 
none of us ever translated it so perfectly 
Gnarled, swinging his arms, like some cone-tmrt'hened 
pine tree. 
Oozing the life from his bark, that, riven to heart by 
the whirlwind, 
Wholly uprooted from earth, falls prone with extrava¬ 
gant ruin. 
Perishes, dealing doom with precipitate rush of "its 
branches. 
So was the Cretan brute by Theseus done to destruction 
E’en iso, tossing in vain his horns to the vacuous 
breezes. 
and so forth and so forth. I did not tell it to 
Pete in that language, but nevertheless he was 
impressed, for I heard him some time later get¬ 
ting it off very eloquently and impressively be¬ 
fore a listening group of bis friends. In answer 
to their queries as to when all this had been, Pete 
said he did not know, but “he think it was year 
before las’ but he would ask M’sieu.” 
Perhaps in another issue of Forest and Stream 
1 may be able to tell, using Pete’s own language, 
the new version of this Greek fable. It will sure¬ 
ly astonish the ordinary reader. If Homer nod¬ 
ded, Pete didn’t. 
Now the point to all this is: a story that is a 
legend becomes to people like Pete, an incident 
of fact. Their own legends have had a powerful 
impress on their daily life. Animals to them are 
not the ordinary creatures as we see them, but 
there is a tinge of connection between persons 
and wild life. The curtain that divides creation 
is to the Indian very thin. Why, for instance 
will he when away from civilization, but well ac¬ 
quainted with it, carefully take the bones of the 
beaver and sink them in water or put them where 
dogs cannot get at them, and why will he leave 
some portion of the bear he has killed, not to 
mark the locality, but as some act to propitiate 
the spirit of Bruin? 
When the superficial white man gets among 
the scenes of a life and incidents he little un¬ 
derstands, he is apt to put things together wrong¬ 
ly and when he returns to civilization, is still 
more apt to give us some of those interesting 
stories that lead the scientific world to denounce 
him as a high-toned but nevertheless accomplish¬ 
ed liar. The trouble is that he does not know 
how or when to differentiate between truth and 
fiction. 
As well might we have denounced the gentle 
author of the Uncle Remus’ Brer Rabbit stories 
for toying with natural history, or sling asper¬ 
sions at the long forgotten Ayran originator of 
the Red Riding Hood story so dear to every 
child, for perverting the mind of the young on 
natural history. 
But here I have wandered along telling pretty 
much everything and yet not much of anything 
that I started to write about. That will have to 
go into a future number of Forest and Stream. 
OLD CAMPER. 
