The far end of the long swamp the stream emerged, now much larger, and
the trappers kept on with their work. When night fell they had completed
fifty traps, all told, and again they camped without shelter overhead.
Next day Skookum was so much worse that they began to fear for his life.
He had eaten nothing since the sad encounter. He could drink a little,
so Rolf made a pot of soup, and when it was cool the poor doggie managed
to swallow some of the liquid after half an hour's patient endeavour.
They were now on the home line; from a hill top they got a distant view
of their lake, though it was at least five miles away. Down the creek
they went, still making their deadfalls at likely places and still
seeing game tracks at the muddy spots. The creek came at length to an
extensive, open, hardwood bush, and here it was joined by another stream
that came from the south, the two making a small river. From then on
they seemed in a land of game; trails of deer were seen on the ground
everywhere, and every few minutes they started one or two deer. The
shady oak wood itself was flanked and varied with dense cedar swamps
such as the deer love to winter in, and after they had tramped through
two miles of it, the Indian said, “Good! now we know where to come in
winter when we need meat.”
At a broad, muddy ford they passed an amazing number of tracks, mostly
deer, but a few of panther, lynx, fisher, wolf, otter, and mink.
In the afternoon they reached the lake. The stream, quite a broad one
here, emptied in about four miles south of the camp. Leaving a deadfall
near its mouth they followed the shore and made a log trap every quarter
mile just above the high water mark.
When they reached the place of Rolf's first deer they turned aside to
see it. The gray jays had picked a good deal of the loose meat. No large
animal had troubled it, and yet in the neighbourhood they found the
tracks of both wolves and foxes.
“Ugh,” said Quonab, “they smell it and come near, but they know that a
man has been here; they are not very hungry, so keep away. This is good
for trap.”
So they made two deadfalls with the carrion half way between them. Then
one or two more traps and they reached home, arriving at the camp just
as darkness and a heavy rainfall began.
“Good,” said Quonab, “our deadfalls are ready; we have done all the work
our fingers could not do when the weather is very cold, and the ground
too hard for stakes to be driven. Now the traps can get weathered before
we go round and set them. Yet we need some strong medicine, some trapper
charm.”
Next morning he went forth with fish-line and fish-spear; he soon
returned with a pickerel. He filled a bottle with cut-up shreds of this,
corked it up, and hung it on the warm, sunny side of the shanty. “That
will make a charm that every bear will come to,” he said, and left it
to the action of the sun.