ting-place. To tell the mere work of each day is no
difficult matter: start at five o'clock a.m., halt for breakfast at seven
o'clock, off again at eight, halt at one o'clock for dinner, away at two
o'clock, paddle until sunset at 7:30; that was the work of each day. But
how shall I attempt to fill in the details of scene and circumstance
between these rough outlines of time and toil, for almost at every hour
of the long summer day the great Winnipeg revealed some new phase of
beauty and of peril, some changing scene of lonely grandeur? I have
already stated that the river in its course from the Lake of the Woods to
Lake Winnipeg, 160 miles, makes a descent of 360 feet. This descent is
effected not by a continuous decline, but by a series of terraces at
various distances from each other; in other words, the river forms
innumerable lakes and wide expanding reaches bound together by rapids and
perpendicular falls of varying altitude, thus when the voyageur has
lifted his canoe from the foot of the Silver Falls and launched it again
above the head of that rapid, he will have surmounted two-and-twenty feet
of the ascent; again, the dreaded Seven Portages will give him a total
rise of sixty feet in a distance of three miles. (How cold does the bare
narration of these facts appear beside their actual realization in a
small canoe manned by Indians!) Let us see if we can picture one of these
many scenes. There sounds ahead a roar of falling water, and we see, upon
rounding some pine-clad island or ledge of rock, a tumbling mass of foam
and spray studded with projecting rocks and flanked by dark wooded
shores; above we can see nothing, but below the waters, maddened by their
wild rush amidst the rocks, surge and leap in angry whirlpools. It is as
wild a scene of crag and wood and water as the eye can gaze upon, but we
look upon it not for its beauty, because there is no time for that, but
because it is an enemy that must be conquered. Now mark how these Indians
steal upon this enemy before he is aware of it. The immense volume of
water, escaping from the eddies and whirlpools at the foot of the fall,
rushes on in a majestic sweep into calmer water; this rush produces
along the shores of the river a counter or back-current which flows up
sometimes close to the foot of the fall, along this back-water the canoe
is carefully steered, being often not six feet from the opposing rush in
the central river, but the back-current in turn ends