MUCH WORK AND A CLUE
Next day the lads learned still more about the work of an Indian
hunter. There were five more beavers to be skinned, and of all
fur-bearing animals the beaver is the hardest to skin. The skin will
not peel off like that of a rabbit, but almost every inch of it has to
be cut and great care is needed not to cut into the fur. It took Ray
and Bruce as long to skin one beaver as it took Ganawa to skin three.
When this work was done, Bruce built a scaffold to cure and smoke the
meat. “We cannot let so much good meat go to waste,” said Ganawa, “and
the weather is still too warm to keep it without smoking.” Each beaver
furnished from fifteen to twenty pounds of meat, and all of them were
fat, as beavers nearly always are, although they are strict
vegetarians, living on bark, brush, and aquatic plants.
Ray helped Ganawa to stretch the skins in hoops of willow. A beaver
skin, when thus stretched by thongs inside of a hoop, is set aside to
dry, but before it is dried all adhering flesh and fat must be
carefully scraped off, otherwise the skin will spoil.
“I don’t think I want to be a beaver-trapper,” remarked Ray, when he
saw how much work it took to prepare a skin for use or for the market.
A large beaver skin, when thus stretched and dried, is oval in shape
about three feet long by two and a half wide. It took about a week to
dry the skins, and then the lads found that there was still much work
to be done before they could enjoy a warm beaver robe. As there was no
time to tan the skins, Ganawa and the lads softened the dry skins by
other processes as much as possible. They worked them with their hands
and feet and beat them with sticks until they were quite soft and
pliable, although not as soft as tanned skins. Then Ganawa laid the six
skins flat on the ground and with a charred stick he marked them for
cutting. “The Chippewa women can do this much better,” he remarked
laughing, “but in this camp we have to be our own women.”
The lads wondered still more at the skill of an Indian when Ganawa,
after cutting the skin with his sharp hunting-knife, showed to the boys
the fine white threads he had made of the tendons of the moose. These
threads had to be moistened before they were used, but unlike threads
of bast, they remain very strong while they are dry. An awl and some
needles Ganawa had brought with him so that he could make and repair
moccasins. “A long time ago,” he told the lads, “my people used awls
and needles made of bone or thorns, but with the needles of the white
traders we can work very much faster.”
A few days later the campers secured four more large beavers, and the
skins of these were used to make a sleeping-robe for Ganawa, while they
cured the meat as they had done with the first lot of beavers.
While the last beaver skins were drying, the lads cut a lot of wood for
winter. Dry spruce, balsam, and mountain-ash and moose-maple, but also
much green birch, which they split and piled up to dry in the sun near
the camp-fire. All the dry wood was piled up in the bark-house, where
the smoked beaver and some smoked fish were also hung up, so that the
inside of it looked and smelled like a farmer’s smoke-house at
Christmas time.
The campers had now made the most necessary preparations for winter,
and they decided that some other work could wait until they had
explored Lake Anjigami and its neighborhood. The nights were growing
frosty, birches and poplars had turned a golden yellow, and a strange
silence pervaded the autumn woods. The gay-colored warblers, the merry
wrens, and even the white-throats had all left.
“We must explore the lake before ice begins to form,” said Ganawa. “To
explore this country by walking over it is very hard work.”
Bruce steered the canoe and Ganawa occupied the bow, as they began
skirting the eastern shore of the lake, while Ray and Tawny took things
easy sitting in the bottom. Ray had not been willing to stay in camp
with his dog, and Ganawa had looked at Bruce and said, “My little son
should come along; some evil might come to him if we leave him in
camp.”
Lake Anjigami is about eight miles long, running southwest and
northeast, and they paddled slowly to the extreme southern end, where
Ray caught a fine mess of small brook trout, but of any recent white
man’s camp they found not a trace. They were, however, not satisfied
with merely exploring the shore. They walked up a small stream till
they came to a beaver pond, where they carefully examined the dam, two
houses and the high land, where trappers or hunters might camp, but the
pond had not been visited by either white men or Indians for years.
They even picked their way laboriously to the top of the highest ridge
on the east side, some three hundred feet above the lake. From this
point they scouted carefully for tepees and bark-houses and for the
smoke of a camp-fire, but they saw no sign of any human being on the
lake except their own tepees and bark-house, which, at the distance of
two miles, looked quite small.
On the following day they skirted the north and west shore. They were
about to pull for camp with the same result when Ray examined with a
little more care a low rocky knoll near the outlet. “Oh, Father, oh,
Bruce,” he called, “come here and look! Somebody has camped here! I
know they were white men, too!”
Here indeed was a white man’s camping-place. “There were two white
men,” Ganawa told the lads. “They had a big ax and cut much wood. They
made a lean-to and slept here several nights.”
“My father,” asked Bruce, “how long ago did the white men sleep here?”
“They slept here about twelve moons ago,” replied Ganawa after he had
closely examined a few chips and ax-cuts near the fire.
Then the lads took up the dried balsam boughs of the campers’ bed; they
examined every inch of ground near the camp, but they found no further
clue as to the purpose or identity of the men who had made the camp.