VOL. LXXXVI 
OCTOBER, 1916 
No. 10 
CANOE AND PADDLE ON THE ST. MAURICE 
NEW CRUISING COUNTRY OFFERING BOTH FISH 
AND GAME AVAILABLE TO AMERICAN SPORTSMEN 
By John M. Cooper. 
T HE ringing spiral of the olive-back and the 
mellow whistle of the white-throat greeted 
us as oui train pulled up at Escalana at 
dawn J break of a morning in June. And as we 
assembled and tumped our scattered packs, close 
to our ears sounded the gleeful purr of another 
greeting, more cordial if less disin¬ 
terested, from the fairy surgeon of 
the bush, our old friend and enemy, 
Sir Muskity. We felt at home again 
and welcome. We had come up via 
Quebec to La Tuque where we out¬ 
fitted, thence to Parent on the local, 
and from there to Escalana on the 
twice-a-week avant-courier of civil¬ 
ized life, technically known as the 
“mixed.” Escalana may to-morrow 
be an adult village or an adolescent 
town; to-day it is a platform and an 
Indian trading store, on the newest 
section of the National Transconti¬ 
nental Railway just 284 miles north¬ 
west of Quebec City and 290 miles 
east of Cochrane. Neither my guide, 
Paul Merrier—and one would have 
to go far to find a more congenial 
camp-mate or a better man in the 
bush—nor myself had been over any 
of the country that lay to the north 
of us, but with a compass and the 
very accurate though small-scale 
maps issued by the Commission du 
Regime des Eaux Courantes de Que¬ 
bec the route was easy to follow. 
The first ninety-five or hundred 
miles of it lay through the cluster 
of big lakes that form the head¬ 
waters of the St. Maurice River near 
the Hudson Bay divide at an altitude 
of about 1,300 feet above sea level; 
the last sixty-<five miles carried us 
down the river proper through alternating dead- 
water and very fast current or rapids. 
The country is par excellence a cruising one. 
Portages few and far between, and rarely over 
a quarter mile in length; day-long stretches of 
unbroken paddling over lakes varying from 
about five to twenty miles long by two to five 
miles wide; swift currents calling for only a 
little care in the eddies; numerous deep rapids 
many of which can be run—what more could 
be wished for? 
Much of the country is low, but from almost 
any point you can see in the distance the ame- 
-thyst-veiled hills, while often their massive 
Laurentian slopes, carpeted with delicate emer¬ 
ald and studded with deep olive patches of 
spruce and pine, heave up sheer from the sepia 
water-depths three to six hundred feet against 
the flanks of the cloud-flecked sky. We were 
north of the red and white pine belt, but the 
territory we cruised through is heavily gar¬ 
mented from the topmost ridges down to the 
water edge in canoe birch and aspen and spruce 
and Banksian pine, with here and there a clump 
of tamarack, and farther down the 
river balsam fir and maple. Mile 
after mile of unending virgin forest, 
untouched as yet by the lumberman’s 
axe and saw. The wounds of a fire 
that ravaged the region half a cen¬ 
tury ago have now quite healed, and 
only now and then at long intervals 
a bit of recent brule breaks in upon 
the symphony in green. If we may 
judge from our short two week’s 
reconnaissance, game is not very 
abundant. There are probably no 
deer or caribou, and we saw only one 
moose. Moose are reported in great 
numbers in the La Tuque district, a 
hundred and fifty miles farther down 
the river. Only once too did we hear 
a drummer—-whether a spruce or 
ruffed grouse we could not tell. Of 
feathered fauna we identified some 
thirty or thirty-five species, prob¬ 
ably all nesting. The more common 
were the herring gull, black - duck, 
one of the mergansers, spotted sand¬ 
piper, great horned owl, northern 
flicker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, 
nighthawk, olive-sided and least fly¬ 
catchers, Canada jay, northern raven, 
white-throated and song sparrows, 
red-eyed vireo, tree swallow, yellow, 
myrtle and black-throated green war¬ 
blers, water-thrush, redstart, winter 
wren, olive-backed and hermit 
thrushes. Loons and great blue 
herons were uncommon, and the Nashville war¬ 
bler I heard only once. 
We were out for the cruising rather than for 
the fishing, but the little trolling we did netted 
us plenty of pike and once a dore. We played 
most of the rapids, but without a strike. Trout 
The Tumbling, Roaring Rapids of the Picturesque St. Maurice. 
