Feb. 4, 1911.] 
169 
altogether. We put in a day of scrambling 
through and over all sorts of obstructions, Pascal 
in the shafts, and I pushing, holding back, liber¬ 
ating or righting the constantly caught or over¬ 
turned sleigh. 
When we reached the main river, more trouble 
awaited us. The ice had completely disappeared 
and the open water of the river had risen as 
high as during the spring freshets. We tented 
for the night at this point, for our highway was 
destroyed, and the character of the country for¬ 
bade our attempting to get out with the loaded 
sleigh. On the following morning we made a 
cache cA all our meat and most of our goods; 
these I sent for later in the winter. Next we 
made packs, Pascal taking the tent, the stove and 
a few cooking utensils, and I some provisions 
and the two green caribou hides, which last we 
were anxious to get out to the village to use in 
making new snowshoes. 
Late in the afternoon after another day of 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
down with his back to us in order to watch the 
unaccustomed and to him incomprehensible 
antics of his mate. While we were picking up 
the two dead, a third lynx appeared from under 
a fallen tree some thirty feet awav and made 
off at a tremendously fast trot. I had no time 
to fire at him. Trotting was the only gait I 
saw these animals employ. This remarkable ex¬ 
perience with the three lynx represents the only 
time in a period covering years, during which 
I have ever seen any of the species except in a 
trap. In order to appreciate the significance of 
this statement, it must be borne in mind that the 
territory in question abounds with lynx. 
That night we used a tenting place which we 
had made on the up trip. The poles and pickets 
were already placed and the balsam only needed 
a shaking, so we were ready for the night in 
an unusually short time. On getting settled in 
the tent we found that we were full of fleas 
from the lynx, which we had hung around our 
cal at once, it took me some time to get from 
sleep to a full realization of what had happened. 
We put the fire out at the expense of scorched 
hands, then built a bonfire and sat down to con¬ 
template the wreckage. Only a miserable frag¬ 
ment of the tent remained, consisting of the back 
and a strip of the sides about three feet in width, 
but nothing else appeared to have been materially 
damaged. We figured out that the canvas, which 
was already scorched around the stove pipe hole, 
had caught either from a spark or from Pascal’s 
terrific fire and had smouldered till the pipe had 
fallen against the tent. Falling bits of blazing 
cotton must have set the fairly dry balsam going 
as well, and owing to the fact that we were so 
fatigued from all our adventures, it had taken 
a' lot to wake us up. 
Whatever the cause, the damage was done, 
and with sad hearts and weary muscles we 
started out into the night for more birch bark 
and more torches, to enable us to find and chop 
TRAVELING ON THE EDGE OF A RAPID. 
TENTING IN THE SNOW. 
scrambling through the woods along the river, 
we struck an old portage cut some twenty years 
before, but still fairly clear of underbrush in 
many places. Here an incident occurred which 
enlivened us greatly and made us forget annoy¬ 
ance and fatigue. In a very straight place in the 
portage, where we could see a long distance 
ahead, a lynx suddenly trotted into view, his 
nose to the ground. I hastily got my rifle ready 
and waited, for he had not seen us. In a moment 
back he came into the portage with his nose still 
to the ground, and as I saw he was about to 
leave the road, I fired. He stopped, facing away 
from us, then sat down on his haunches with his 
back to us and appeared to be watching some¬ 
thing in front of him. He was a good distance 
away, and when I fired again I missed, but he 
did not move or look around. The next shot 
crumpled him up like a wet rag. On arriving 
to pick him up we were utterly confounded to 
see another lynx in the underbrush some ten 
feet away, going through his convulsive death 
struggles. I had inadvertently hit this unseen 
l>nx with the first ball, and his consequent con¬ 
tortions were what had attracted 'the attention 
of his fellow at which I had fired and which I 
had missed. It was evident that he had sat 
necks to carry, but these fleas evidently did not 
find us sufficiently nutritious, for they left us 
the next day. 
And now came the crown to our misfortunes, 
the culminating insult of fate. We were very 
tired and sleepy that night, and Pascal stuffed 
the stove full of hardwood chunks and closed 
the draft just before we turned in. A fire of 
this kind usually takes a long time to burn, but 
occasionally if it really gets started, it takes a 
notion to do things in the way of heating, and 
then someone has to get up and open the tent 
door to avoid suffocation. 
We had been asleep two hours, as I afterward 
found from the watch, when I began to be dis¬ 
turbed by bad dreams concerning the French 
revolution. These were attributable to a little 
pocket copy of Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” 
which I had with me, and which I had been 
reading in odd moments through the trip and 
during much of the day we were held up by 
rain. After numerous guillotinings, and amid 
general bloodshed, ending with a tremendous 
conflagration of all Paris, I awoke to find crack¬ 
ling balsam under me, sparks falling around me, 
a burning tent overhead and smoke in clouds. 
It was a weird sensation, and while I woke Pas- 
sufficient dry wood for an all night bonfire to 
replace the now useless stove. For the rest of 
the night we scorched on one side and froze on 
the other under the ragged remnant of the tent, 
catching snatches of uncomfortable sleep from 
time to time when not replenishing or poking 
the fire. But with it all the humor of the situa¬ 
tion was uppermost, and we had a hearty laugh 
over all our troubles. 
I was anxious to find out what effect the soft 
weather had had on the lumbering operations, 
so instead of continuing down the river on which 
we were at daybreak, we struck off at a tangent 
to visit some of the lumber camps which we 
could reach before night. One of these camps 
I had not yet seen. It was that of a jobber, who 
had his wife along with him, and as the under¬ 
standing with him was for logs at a price per 
thousand feet delivered, we had taken no in¬ 
terest in what sort of a shack he put up or how 
he lived so long as he filled his contract for 
logs. 
Pascal had been along with this jobber early 
in the winter to show him where to build his 
camp and allot him a piece of territory, and as 
a visit to the place would not take us much out 
of our way. T told Pascal to head for the shack 
