1176 
FOREST AND STREAM 
are, however, probably to be 
found in some of the lakes and 
streams off the larger waters. 
For the benefit of those who 
have any morbid interest in the 
painful subject of man-eating in¬ 
sects, we may say that the beasts 
were not as bad as we had ex¬ 
pected nor as vicious as we had 
met on most other Canadian 
cruises, but withal were discreet¬ 
ly plentiful. One sleepy morn¬ 
ing we counted a rough thou¬ 
sand mosquitoes silhouetted on 
our net against a dripping leaden 
sky—but this was happily excep¬ 
tional. The St. Maurice open 
season for mosquitoes and black 
flies does not end, I was told, 
until September. With the ex¬ 
ception of the two Hudson Bay 
Company Posts, one at Lake 
Obidjuan and the other now 
abandoned at Lake Kikendatch, 
there are no clearings through¬ 
out the country. It is uninhab¬ 
ited except by the nomadic Tetes 
de Boule Indians, an Algonquin 
tribe closely related to the Montagnais and Ojib- 
wa. We met them at various points, and in 
numbers at Obidjuan Post, whither they had come 
to trade their furs for flour, pork, sugar, tea, 
tobacco, clothing, etc. In the late summer or 
early fall they will scatter again to their trapping 
grounds. 
Although dressed as the white man and using 
the white man’s artifices—one of them was 
smoking a calabash 1—they live almost the same 
life their fathers lived in pre-Champlain days. 
The band we met do not, with rare exceptions, 
speak any tongue but their own, although they 
can read and write. They have no farms or 
cattle, not even the familiar potato patch, and 
until the last year or two had no shelter but 
their tents. Recently they have acquired a small 
reservation fronting on Lake Obidjuan and a 
few have put up substantial log shacks. Soon 
too a mission chapel now being built by Brother 
Lepointe of the Oblates will crown the little 
bluff on which the village is perched. At the 
time of our visit, the missionary, Father Gurn¬ 
ard, was away looking after the spiritual needs 
of some of his flock at Lake Waswanipi about 
150 miles by canoe to the northwest. 
These natives appeared to be a kindly and 
good-natured people. They are said to be lazy— 
but would the most strenuous among us be over- 
enthusiastic about paddling and portaging 
twenty-foot canvas canoes forty-five miles in a 
day, as' we saw the Tetes de Boule doing and 
as they are wont to do often? Their nomadic 
winter life is a hard one, and many of the weak¬ 
er succumb. The white plague too takes a heavy 
toll; one victim, a young girl, died while we 
were at Obidjuan camp. Day and night until 
her burial, some of her people watched by the 
side of the shrouded body, singing unceasingly 
their death hymns, now in a low murmur scarce¬ 
ly audible at the door of the cabin and again 
at eventide in a fuller chant that could be heard 
throughout the village. 
At one of our camping sites, one evidently 
much frequented by the Indians, we found not 
hidden but in the open a platform about five 
feet high, made of four uprights and some 
cross-sticks, and on it were snowshoes and 
woolen clothing loosely covered with a strip of 
bark and lashed with a light thong. These val¬ 
ued possessions had been cached in the spring; 
their owners would not return for them until 
the fall; perhaps a hundred Indians would camp 
there meanwhile, but the cache is as safe as if 
it were in a bank vault. Such is the common 
custom among the hunting tribes. Diogenes 
would not need his lamp at Obidjuan, and per¬ 
haps we who have progressed much since the 
days of good King Alfred when our ancestors 
could safely hang their gold Walthams on high¬ 
way cherry trees might have something yet to 
learn from these backward children of the 
northern woods. 
The Indians’ dogs are unfortunately as pug¬ 
nacious and thievish as their liege lords are 
peaceable and honest. Gaunt and hungry-eyed 
they sit on their haunches in a 
circle around you at mealtime, 
envying you every mouthful of 
your mouldy bread and greasy 
bacon, and hoping with a pa¬ 
tience wotrhy of a better cause 
that in a moment of distraction 
you may relax your vigilant 
guard over the spread-out eat¬ 
ables. One unprincipled scoun¬ 
drel actually purloined under 
cover of darkness our pails and 
frying pan. But if they are 
adepts at watchful waiting, they 
are not too proud to fight. A 
slight unpleasantness or an old 
grudge in the canine colony 
comes to a head on the average 
about once every two hours, 
night time not excepted. The 
air is rent with a din of yelps 
and barks, small dogs and big 
dogs scurry to the scene from 
four points of the compass, and 
there ensues a general melee— 
only to be ended ignominously 
by a skilfully aimed stick or 
stone from one of the tents. 
One of the dogs, a little fox-like black fellow, 
took quite a fancy to us—or was it to our grub- 
pack? By starlight he kept guard over his new¬ 
found friends and curled up in the warm ashes 
of their fireplace. Mild-mannered, courteous 
and unobtrusive, thankful but never fawning, 
he was one of nature’s Chesterfields—albeit 
patently not of aristocratic lineage. As at last 
our hour for parting came, his low tremulous 
whines told ot his sorrow, and as we got well 
down the lake he was still on the shore looking 
wistfully at his vanishing friends—and their 
bulging brown grub-pack. 
Much of this cruising paradise is destined soon 
counting others over the Height of Land, flowing to Hudson’s Bay. 
