canoe. When
the winter comes and the lake and rivers harden beneath the icy breath
of the north wind, the canoe is put carefully away; covered with
branches and with snow, it lies through the long dreary winter until the
wild swan and the wavey, passing northward to the polar seas, call it
again from its long icy sleep.

Such is the life of the canoe, and such the river along which it rushes
like an arrow.

The days that now commenced to pass were filled from dawn to dark with
moments of keenest enjoyment, everything was new and strange, and each
hour brought with it some fresh surprise of Indian skill or Indian
scenery.

The sun would be just tipping the western shores with his first rays
when the canoe would be lifted from its ledge of rock and laid gently on
the water; then the blankets and kettles, the provisions and the guns,
would be placed in it, and four Indians would take their seats, while
one remained on the shore to steady the bark upon the water and keep its
sides from contact with the rock; then when I had taken my place in the
centre, the outside man would spring gently in, and we would glide away
from the rocky resting-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 seven-thirty; 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
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, one hundred and sixty miles, makes a descent of
three hundred and sixty 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