908 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[JUNE 9, 1906. 

caught, and they splintered out of the water in‘ 
glinting slivers at sundown. 
The pike-perch rose readily to almost any fly, 
and I caught some of them on a light rod, but 
they are not heroes when hooked, and we picked 
up most of them with the troll, as we were al- 
ways in the hurry that possesses men who have 
nothing to do especially. The lake trout were a 
bit disappointing, as they seemed to lack delicacy 
of flavor, and they do not grow to a large size. 
The largest one that we caught weighed 12 
pounds, and the local Indians told us that they 
seldom saw much larger ones. I felt quite put 
out about the lake trout, as I have made some- 
thing of a study of ways for catching the sock- 
dolagers among them, and had promised Wake to 
show him methods of cooking them that would 
make him stop and spend the rest of his days 
right on the spot where they could be caught. 
The ling in this lake were, on the other hand, 
the best fresh-water codfish that I have eaten, 
and we enjoyed them very much. They spent the 
day in deep water, but at evening rose to the 
surface, and would then take the fly. We took 
large ember mullets in the collecting nets, but 
they were insipid, and we made only one meal of 
these pincushions. Broods of young ruffed 
grouse- were found in the poplar woods, and one 
was likely to see a red deer or a moose at any 
time when rounding a point quietly. We found 
caribou tracks in the sand, but caribou spend the 
summer days in the marshes, ahd we did not 
happen to see a single one during the whole trip, 
although they are common enough everywhere in 
the region. The great-horned owls hooted at us 
at night, loons were always calling to us, and a 
colony of herring gulls apparently had nests or 
young on some of the bushy islands in thickets 
of sweet gale, where we could not penetrate 
easily. 
From some local Indians we learned that we 
were not far from the Hudson’s Bay ‘Company’s 
post of Flying Post, and congratulated ourselves 
on having made the connection on time, by a 
route that was unfamiliar to our Indians, and 
that had not been described to us as leading to 
Lake Matagaming anyway. During the previous 
winter we had sent word in to the Post, and had 
received word that we could have an Indian to 
go through with us to Hudson Bay, to find port- 
ages, and give warning about dangerous waters. 
After making things snug in camp we ran down 
to Flying Post and made the acquaintance of the 
big jolly and genial factor, Mr. McLeod. He 
told us that we were expected but that the In- 
dian who was to go with us had gone off some- 
where, and left word that he would be around in 
a few days. This was interesting to men who 
were fresh from a region of half-minute connec- 
tions, and who had no time to spare, but we knew 
the ways of Indians, and there was nothing to do 
but to go back and wait in camp. It was a great 
pleasure to see Mr. McLeod’s neat garden, Gar- 
dens are my weak point, and when in New York 
my greatest joy is in running out to the farm at 
Stamford. Farming is a little more expensive 
than yachting—I have tried both—but it is more 
fun. It is also more exciting than big game 
hunting in the chase after scale and blight, bor- 
ers and aphides, and the hundred and one things 
that come up from seeds that you did not buy. 
Here deep in the wilderness, in the midst of big 
game, was 2 thrifty garden full of vegetables 
growing almost without attention, and demon- 
strating the law of compensation once more. Big 
game; no bugs. Bugs; no big game. 
We went back to camp to wait for our Indian, 
and at the end of six days he returned to the 
Post, but decided that he would not go on the 
trip. That is another Indian trait. They are 
superstitious; and if an Indian steps on two 
toadstools at once, or gets some other definite. 
sign that he must not go on a certain journey, 
nothing can persuade him. After much parley 
we managed to get an old Indian, Nat, to go 
with us. Nat proved to be a jewel, and we got 
to be very fond of him before the end of the 
trip. 
During our long wait on my lake we had ex- 
plored the country round about, and discovered 
among other things a narrow little lake, not 
more than half a mile long that was very 
peculiar. The bottom was of soft, white clay, 


STURGEON. 
and whenever the wind made currents in the 
water it evidently stirred up the bottom so that 
the clay settled all over the water plants and left 
them oddly white. The settling clay also took 
all coloring matter down as a precipitate, and 
left the water as clear as I have seen it in chalk 
streams in England, so that one could hardly 
realize that his canoe was floating upon any- 
thing more than a basin full of north wind. It 
seemed as though one ought to be able to see 
every fish in the lake, but we saw none until they 
were caught. The lake was alive with fish, and 
of such remarkable fatness as I have never be- 
fore seen in any waters in nearly half a hundred 
years of fishing experience. The whitefish, pike 
perch, and yellow perch particularly were so 
squat and pudgy with fat that they could not 
wiggle their tails respectably. The jackfish as 
elsewhere adapted their coloration to the en- 
vironment, and in this lake were of translucent 
light steel blue in ground coloring. We did not 
have time to determine the character of food 
that had the effect of producing abnormally fat 
fish, but Mr. McLeod knows about the lake, and 
if any one with more time at his disposal can 
discover the secret, it will be worth recording. 
STOPPING FOR LUNCHEON. 

Mr. McLeod told me that he had taken white- 
fish of 12 pounds weight in the little lake, and 
that is almost an unheard of weight for the 
Labrador whitefish. The largest one that we 
caught weighed 6 pounds, and was so plump that 
it looked like a white Pekin pig ready for the 
county fair. 
With Nat and Frank in the baggage canoe, 
and Aleck and Sol at the stern in the other 
canoes, we left Flying Post on the beautiful 
summer morning of July 12, and started down 
the Kokateesh (Ground Hog) River. It was a 
day of running rapids, gliding through still 
waters, and portaging along a few short trails. 
We camped at 4 o’clock near the foot of a roar- 
ing fall that Nat said marked the upper limit 
of the range of the sturgeon, Our reason for 
camping so early was because we wanted to 
catch sturgeon as soon as possible, and _ be- 
cause of the wild beauty of the spot. The 
Indians needed no persuasion to stop and camp 
at any and all times. We named the place Flat 
Cedar Falls, because of the peculiar develop- 
ment of the trunk of an arbor vite that stood 
out of a cleft in the rocks like a broad, flat 
board, near the water. 
Flat Cedar Falls is about twenty miles below 
Flying Post, and from that point all of the way 
to Hudson Bay and back again, sturgeon made 
our piece de résistance at almost every meal. 
We never tired of them. Such delicious 
sturgeon we had never before eaten, although 
in the intervals between meals Wake argued that 
the sterlets that we get in Russia on the Volga 
were the crowning point of all known food. 
When at dinner under the spruces a pot of boiled 
sturgeon was set before us, with musquash and 
young goslings, mushrooms and strawberries 
for side dishes, nothing was ever said about 
sterlets. It was the small lake sturgeon that we 
caught (4. rubicundus) and we got none above 
16 pounds in weight, averaging about like the 
jackfish. The sturgeon ran into our collecting 
nets at night, and they took bait on set lines. 
One even took a small trolling spoon on the 
salmon rod one day at noon, and made a long 
and praiseworthy fight. Sometimes we found 
beaver mice in their stomachs, and I argued 
from that that the sturgeon would probably take 
a large fly, as the beaver mice are always swim- 
ming about on the surface in reedy places. We 
ate sturgeon boiled, broiled, fried, roasted, and 
“picked up.” The food upon which any one 
sturgeon was feeding seemed to make a dii- 
ference in the flavor, for he is a specialist when 
feeding, and we usually found one sort of food 
exclusively or predominating at any one place 
along our course. Sturgeon that were feeding 
upon crawfish were the best; next came those 
that choose the little clams (Spherium), while 
the least desirable were feeding upon the larger 
snails (Cardium, Lymnea and Planorbis). 
[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK. ] 
Carrying Trout to South Africa. 
Trout have been successfully acclimated in 
South Africa, where good sport is now to be ob- 
tained by the angler on a number of streams, and 
an attempt has been made to introduce trout to 
the rivers and streams connected with the Zam- 
besi in British Central Africa. For this purpose 
15,000 trout eggs were taken out from England 
by Sir Alfred Sharp, His Majesty’s commissioner 
in Zomba, The eggs withstood the voyage well, 
but owing to the great heat inland it was found 
on arrival at Zomba (the Government station of 
the British Central Africa protectorate) that 
nearly all were dead and decomposed. The few 
eggs alive were placed on the gravel beds, and 
it is hoped they have hatched out successfully. 
At one period of the journey the trout eggs, 
which were in a specially constructed box pro- 
vided with freezing apparatus, had to be carried 
by the natives night and day overland through 
the mountains for about seventy miles. Sir Alfred 
Sharpe thinks that if ova can be brought out in 
the month of June, when the temperature. on the 
Zambesi and Shire rivers does not exceed sixty 
or seventy degrees, and provided that a large 
block of solid ice could be prepared on the ocean 
steamer and carried up with the ova box, the ex- 
periment might succeed—Dundee Advertiser. 
