GANAWA IS FRIGHTENED
“Where is Michipicoten Island? Where is the Island of Yellow Sands? How
far is it? Have you ever been there?” These and other questions the
lads asked of Ganawa.
Fortunately the writer of the message had signed his initials in
script, which Bruce recognized as Jack Dutton’s signature. But one
thing Jack had forgotten; the message bore no date. Ganawa said the
blaze on the tree had been made last spring, before the trees stopped
growing for the season, and he added: “If your friends were foolish
enough to go to the big island Michipicoten and to the small island of
the Yellow Sands, they would not go before the Moon of Strawberries,
because before that time the Big Lake is too rough. Only foolish white
men paddle out on the Big Lake in a canoe.”
After this discovery there was no holding the boys in camp any longer.
Within a few days they had carried everything to the nearest point on
the Michipicoten River, and with Ganawa in the stern they glided down
the swift stream, in which the water was running so high that most of
the dangerous rocks and rapids were covered with a swift gliding
current. So rapidly did they travel that they reached their old camp
above the big falls in less than a day.
After the camp had been set up, they walked down to the falls, which
roared much louder than they had done at the time of low water in
autumn, because the river was now high from the melting snow, of which
much was still left on north-facing slopes.
Ray could not resist pushing a stranded log into the current and see it
go through the chute and over the falls. The big white log shot like an
arrow over the first two drops, then it turned on end and was hurled
almost clear of the third and fourth steps, and when it arrived in the
big pool it was broken in two and one part followed the other in the
mad whirl of the pool, as if the spirit of the tree were still alive in
the battered and broken logs.
Another day brought the travellers to the mouth of the river, to the
camp of the Ininiwac people, whom they had last seen in the autumn
before. Of these people they learned one thing of much interest to all
of them.
Hamogeesik had also gone up the Michipicoten last autumn, but he had
soon returned without his canoe and his gun. He had told that a storm
had set his canoe adrift down the falls. The canoe had been broken and
he had not been able to find his gun. He had then bought an old gun of
one of the Indians and had promised to return in the spring and pay for
the gun with furs. Thus far he had not returned and the Indians did not
know where he had made his winter camp.
Bruce and Ray had been fully determined that they would follow Jack
Dutton to the islands in Lake Superior, but when they saw the immense
white waves break on the rocky shore and then looked at their little
frail bark canoe, both of them lost heart.
As Ray looked at the sad face of Bruce he felt like crying, but he
swallowed hard and only said: “I guess we can’t make it, Bruce. She is
too big, just like an ocean. If we only had some boards and tools so we
could build a big boat. I know, Bruce, that you could sail her.”
“Yes, brother, I could sail her,” Bruce replied sadly, “but we have
only an ax, no nails, no auger; I don’t see how we could build a boat.”
That night the boys went to bed early to sleep off their grief, but
Ganawa visited with the Indians and sat long at the camp-fire talking
to them and letting them talk to him.
“My sons,” he had told the boys, “Indians are not like white men, who
say a few words quickly. Indians need much time to talk. If you try to
hurry them, they will tell you nothing.”
The old-time Indians were very superstitious, and each tribe and clan
observed a kind of taboo on certain places. A lake where some one had
drowned, a place where somebody had been killed or had met a serious
and strange accident, was likely to be avoided for years or even for
generations.
In his talk with the Ininiwac people, Ganawa had learned that a small
island near shore about three miles east of their camp was one of those
tabooed places. Years ago an Indian in a canoe who had been caught in a
sudden squall had tried to take refuge on this islet, but a wave had
thrown his canoe on shore and dashed him against a sharp rock, injuring
him so severely that he died a few hours after the accident. Since then
no Indian had set foot on the island and they had not even taken away
the canoe of the dead man.
“My sons, would you be afraid to go to this island with me?” Ganawa
asked the boys. The lads assured him they would not be afraid, but they
wondered what might be on the island to attract their guide, but Ganawa
only smiled and said, “Come with me and see!”
The island itself is a beautiful spot, covered with trees and shrubs
and the common northern flowers and small plants. It lies only a few
rods from shore, and the three explorers found hidden under some bushes
of this islet something which they wanted much more than a boat-load of
gold rock. They found a staunch twenty-foot wooden boat on this
uninhabited island.
“Father, how did you know it was here? Who left it?” Ray asked as soon
as he saw it.
“The Ininiwac people told me about it, and it was left here by some
white miners who dug for gold rock on shore. They found no gold rock
and they went back to the white man’s country.”
Bruce was busy examining the boat. If it was seaworthy or could be made
so, there was a solution to the problem of reaching Michipicoten Island
and the Island of Yellow Sands, the latter a small island in the middle
of Lake Superior.
The boat did not look hopeless. It was dried out and showed a number of
big cracks, but it was all sound. As Bruce looked around for oars, he
discovered something which made his heart give a leap. There was a box
with some three dozen nails, a hammer and a cold-chisel, and an old
linsey-woolsey coat. “I can fix that boat! I can fix it!” Bruce
exclaimed when he made this find; for Bruce had built and sailed boats
on Lake Champlain. He caulked the cracks in the boat with strips of
linsey-woolsey. He hewed a keel out of a young pine, and nailed it to
the bottom of the boat. “She will sail safely now,” he said. He made
other needed repairs and then hewed out two pairs of oars, so the islet
looked like a pirate’s shipyard.
Michipicoten Island lies only ten miles from the north shore of Lake
Superior, but the distance from the mouth of the river is fully
thirty-five miles in a southwesterly direction. The island, as seen
from the deck of steamers, stands out boldly as a wooded mountain
rising between eight hundred and a thousand feet above the level of the
lake. Its north side drops steep into the lake without a single cove or
bay to shelter even a rowboat.
Sailors fear a shelterless coast much more than they fear storms and
waves of the open sea. Although Ganawa was afraid to sail over the open
lake for thirty-five miles, Bruce persuaded him that with the wind in
their favor, it would be much safer to sail directly for Quebec Harbor
on the south side of the island rather than creep along the harborless
north shore, then approach the island on the wind and wave-swept north
side and then paddle or sail around to the harbor on the south side. On
such a trip, Bruce convinced Ganawa, they would surely have to travel
against the wind or even in the trough of the waves part of the time.
“Look, Father,” Bruce closed his argument, drawing a figure in the
sand, “we should have to go something like this:
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Let us sail straight with the wind.”
Bruce had put a mast in the boat and made a sail out of a blanket; and
when he showed Ganawa how quickly he could unfurl and reef his sail,
the old hunter was convinced.
“My son,” he said, “a good Indian can paddle a canoe on a mad river and
a good white man can sail a boat over the mad waves of the sea and the
Big Lake. My sons, we shall sail straight to the island over the open
lake.”