946 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[JUNE 16, 1906. 

To Hudson Bay ee Canoe. 
BY ROBERT T. MORRIS. 
(Concluded from page 08.) 
DuriNnG the earlier part of the trip we had 
seen remarkably few attractive flowers, but we 
now began to find the columbines, white water 
lilies, polygalas and pogonias, The fire weed 
(Epilobium) flamed in the burned grounds, and 
pink and white wild roses were in full bloom. 
We experimented with various lichens for the 
table, but found that the only desirable one was 
the tripe de roche of the early voyageurs. This 
lichen made brown and gray ears over most of 
the exposed rocks, and we had no difficulty in 
getting a mess. Boiling for an hour reduced 
it to the form of a gelatinous potage, and if we 
added bacon, wild leeks, salt and pepper, the re- 
sulting compound made a nutritious starchy re- 
past, but one that was not remarkable for char- 
acter, and we had so many better things at al- 
most every meal that we left the lichens for 
others. As we journeyed down river, flowers 
became more and more abundant, and we real- 
ized that it was because of the advancing season, 

GYPSUM CAVERNS. 
rather than from paucity of species at the first 
part of the trip. There were pink and green 
habenarias, golden rod, St. John’s wort, lupin, 
iron weed, self heal, meadow sweet, and a large 
white ranunculus. Sweet gale made thick 
fringes in the marshes and tall grasses, Calama- 
grostis, Stipa, Panicum, Bromus and a number 
of other genera grew luxuriantly along the 
river banks. We added three small fish to our 
list; sticklebacks, horned dace and star gazers. 
Smaller animals that we observed were red 
mice, big-eared mice, and beaver mice. The 
latter were very abundant, swimming about in 
shallow water and becoming the frequent prey 
of jackfish and pike perch. In some places al- 
most every pike perch that we caught had from 
one to five beaver mice in its stomach. 
Signs of beaver were found at the mouths of 
small streams, but we did not stop to look for 
houses and dams. Every now and then a mink 
or an ermine would run along the bank, and we 
found signs of the marten. Nat told us that 
martens and fishers were fairly abundant. Lynx 
tracks were seen in many places. Woodchucks 
were found all of the way to the bay, and, in fact, 
J have seen them as far north as Sandwich Bay 
in Labrador. I wonder if they come out on 
Candelmas Day in these latitudes, and become 
responsible for six weeks of weather. 
On July 19 we came upon a party of starving 
surveyors who had come in by way of Biscotas- 
ing, and had made their way down part of the 
Kokateesh River with disaster. We  photo- 
graphed some of their smashed canoes that were 
strewn along the rapids. Fine fellows many of 
them were, and gentlemen, but not quite husky 
enough for a trip of this character. A Govern- 
ment position had tempted them, and political in- 
fluence had done the rest. They believed that a 
transport canoe was being rushed down to them 
with provisions, rifles, fishing tackle, instruments, 
tools and other necessities to replace their stock 
which was strewn along the bottom of various 
rapids. On our return trip we took a photo- 
graph of the emergency canoe. Both ends of the 
canoe pointed down stream, and the middle of the 
canoe buckled up stream, hung on the very last 
rock at the foot of a sixteen mile rapid. We 
gave the men some of our supplies, and shot a 
moose for meat. Although we had the explorer’s 
privilege of killing game for food, we had let all 
game alone, and this moose that I shot near the 
surveyor’s camp was the only animal that I tried 
to shoot, with the exception of a plump bear that 
was basking in the water near a blueberry patch 
on the up trip. We were getting a bit short of 
provisions at that time on account of rapid trav- 
eling, so I shot the bear and we carried all of the 
meat with us. On July 20 we entered the Matta- 
gami River, with its noisy, shallow rapids and 
long stretches of stillwater. Great collections of 
driftwood were caught upon the rocky islands in 
the river, and along the banks we saw many of 
the landslides that are so common in clay regions. 
Whole hillsides had slipped into the river, carry- 
ing with them a confusion of trees. In the clay 
region we found innumerable springs trickling 
over the river bank, and whenever we were 
thirsty from long paddling in the sun it was only 
necessary to run the canoes near the bank in 
order to quickly find a draught of sweet, cold 
water. On July 26 we came to the only very long 
portage that was encountered. It is about eight 
miles long, and I believe that at this time of the 
year we could have run most of the rapids and 
avoided making the long portage, in spite of the 
fact that the river was more than a half mile 
wide, and the channels rather difficult to choose 
on the half second. Nat, however, had the con- 
servatism of old age, and thought that we had 
better take the portage. We have run much more 
dangerous waters successfully in other lands, but 
we were a long way from relief in case of acci- 
dent, and thought best to take Nat’s advice. One 
does not mind getting killed in a country where 
the obituary notice will more than compensate for 
all loss, but if we disappeared here our friends 
would think that we were simply neglecting busi- 
ness for a year or two, and they would not count 
it as anything unusual. The portage winds up 
over a magnificent bluff, from which we looked 
over the rapids—a mile wide at one point—and 
forming a most impressive spectacle. The silvery 
bushes of the buffalo berry grew in profusion 
upon the banks, and made the most beautiful foli- 
age with which I am familiar among the shrubs. 
In some places the buffalo berry shrubs grew in 
such masses that the ground appeared to be cov- 
ered with silvery snow drifts. The gray willow 
began to make much display along the river 
banks, and we were losing the grand forest of 
aspen poplars that had stood in majesty along the 
middle part of our journey. This was the first 
really majestic poplar forest that I had ever seen. 
The straight, white, round trunks stood in stately 
columns, surmounted by small heads of bluish 
green. Some of the poplars were more than one 
hundred feet in height, and the black spruces 
growing in full vigor among them barely 
reached to the lower ‘limbs of the poplars. It is 
always a delight to enter a region in which any 
one species of plant or animal reaches its highest 
type of development, and the aspen forest of the 
Mattagami River is one to be remembered. The 
forest is in places so open that one might drive a 
carriage through it, although it would be essential 
to have a few expletives close at hand for emer- 
gency use. 
The eight mile portage gave an opportunity to 
note a number of things which we might have 
passed by water. Bluebells and butterfly weed 
(Asclepias) were beautifying the slopes. Blue- 
berries, whortleberries and sugar pears were be- 
ginning to show what we might expect to add to 
the table on the return trip, and theré were many 
species of vetches along the sandy trail. We tried 
some of the vetches for soup, but found that the 
quality of the soup depended largely upon the 
number of good things that we put into the kettle 
along with the vetch, and that the latter might 
as well be left out. Our Indians tied up many. 
of the loose bundles for the portage with long 
roots, and these were found to be the roots of a 
sarsaparilla, growing superficially in the humus, 
so that one could easily get a “rope” ten feet in 
length and very strong. The long portage lay 
almost through a burned jack pine forest, but this 
was the limit of jack pine apparently, for we saw 
none below along the river. Redstarts were not- 
ably abundant along the trail, and we saw sev- 
eral other warblers which could not be identified 
well at a distance. The only pine grosbeak seen 
during the summer was a female in the burned 
woods. A family of long-eared owls, and a pair 
of goshawks, were very much interested in our 
movements and followed along at a safe distance 
for awhile. 
At the foot of the eight mile portage the river 
thunders over the last reef of trap rock, and 
sends whirling, seething eddies into two wide 

NAT AND THE NEBOGATIS. 
bays. Here the geology changes again, and we 
entered a Devonian area extending the rest of 
the way to Hudson Bay. At the foot of the last 
trap dyke we found an outcropping of iron ore, 
a brown hematite, and further down the river a 
wide vein of hematite reaching from shore to 
shore, and forming the bed of the river. Limestone 
cliffs appeared abruptly, and we found some beau- 
tiful white cliffs of gypsum, with eerie caves and 
fantastic pillars and columns. Our Indians were 
superstitious about entering the caves, but when 
Wake and I circled around in one of them for 
about one hundred feet and actually came out 
alive at a window, the Indians followed, stepping 
very gingerly and expressing their emotions with 
many grunts. In the Devonian area we found 
lignite abundant, and of good quality, but none 
of the seams were much more than two feet in 
thickness. We pried out about fifty pounds of 
coal one day for the camp fire, but made the mis- 
take of piling it up in too large chunks, so that, 
instead of getting a good dinner quickly, we 
were simply given an impressionist view of Pitts- 
burgh, and had to finish the cooking over a wood 
fire. The coal fire was at its best on the follow- . 
ing morning after burning all night, and we man- 
aged to cook some flap jacks over it for breakfast. 
Fossils were extremely abundant, consisting 
mostly of corals of what we took to be the Lower 
Silurian group. In many places the fossils con- 
stituted nearly the whole stony bed and banks of 
