with a pony and a small sled,
and some Indians also. We now had to take up all of our steel traps, and
rob all our dead-falls and quit business generally--even then they got
some of our traps before we could get them gathered in. We were now
comparatively idle.

Until these loggers came we did not know exactly where we were situated,
but they told us we were on the Lemonai river, a branch of the
Wisconsin, and that we could get out by going west till we found the
Mississippi river and then home. We hired the shengle man with his pony
to take us to Black River, farther north which we reached in three days,
and found a saw mill there in charge of a keeper. Up the river farther
we found another mill looked after by Sam Ferguson. Both mills were
frozen up. The Indians had been here all winter. They come from Lake
Superior when the swamps froze up there, to hunt deer, till the weather
gets warm, then they returned to the Lake to fish.

Of course the presence of the Indians made game scarce, but the mill men
told us if we would go up farther into the marten country they thought
we would do well. We therefore made us a hand sled, put some provisions
and traps on board, and started up the river on the ice. As we went the
snow grew deeper and we had to cut hemlock boughs for a bed on top of
the snow. It took about a half a cord of wood to last us all night, and
it was a trouble to cut holes in the ice to water, for it was more than
two feet thick. Our fire kindled on the snow, would be two or three feet
below on the ground, by morning. This country was heavily timbered with
cedar, or spruce and apparently very level.

One day we saw two otters coming toward us on the ice. We shot one, but
as the other gun missed fire, the other one escaped, for I could not
overtake it in the woods. We kept on up the river till we began to hear
the Indians' guns, and then we camped and did not fire a gun for two
days, for we were afraid we might be discovered and robbed, and we knew
we could not stay long after our grub was gone. All the game we could
catch was the marten or sable, which the Indians called _Waubusash_. The
males were snuff color and the female much darker. Mink were scarce, and
the beaver, living in the river bank, could not be got at till the ice
went out in the spring.

We now began to make marten traps or dead-falls, and set them for this
small game. There were many cedar and tamarack swamps, indeed that was
the principal