Strangely enough, though his woodcraft naturally was not
inconsiderable, it did not hold his paramount interest. He knew
something about animals and their ways and their methods of capture,
but the chase did not appeal strongly to him, nor apparently did he
possess much skill along that line. He liked the actual physical
labour, the walking, the paddling, the tump-line, the camp-making, the
new country, the companionship of the wild life, the wilderness as a
whole rather than in any one of its single aspects as Fish Pond, Game
Preserve, Picture Gallery. In this he showed the true spirit of the
_voyageur_. I should confidently look to meet him in another ten
years--if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long--girdled
with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the
portage load, trolling _Isabeau_ to the silent land somewhere
under the Arctic Circle. The French of the North have never been great
fighters nor great hunters, in the terms of the Anglo-Saxon
frontiersmen, but they have laughed in farther places.
XII.
THE RIVER.
At a certain spot on the North Shore--I am not going to tell you
where--you board one of the two or three fishing-steamers that collect
from the different stations the big ice-boxes of Lake Superior
whitefish. After a certain number of hours--I am not going to tell you
how many--your craft will turn in toward a semicircle of bold,
beautiful hills, that seem at first to be many less miles distant than
the reality, and at the last to be many more miles remote than is the
fact.
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