Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/175

Rh some of them quite large, and is the source of as many more that flow from it. Its central position on the continent makes it, as it were, a grand junction for routes to the Atlantic and the Pacific. Every bend in a stream, every widening or contracting of the channel, every bay of a lake, every swamp, hillock, grove, or barren spot, had a name kept in use by successive voyagers. When the gatherings of furs or game, or other spoils of the woods, exceeded the capacity of the canoe, the surplus would be committed to a cache, carefully prepared in the rocks or the earth, secured from the beasts, and so skilfully indicated in its exact locality for the eye of the owner that he was never at fault to find it on his return way, or to direct another to the depositary. Where there was no fear of an enemy, the voyager would bring his canoe to land at night, draw it upon beach or shore, turn it over him for a roof in foul weather, prepare his evening meal generally from extemporized resources, and start afresh in the early hours of the morrow. Though for many purposes of hunting and trapping partnership was desirable, many an Indian in his solitary way would be absent for months from his lodge on his private business. What pure poetry or stern prose, of adventure or peril as we may view it, invested the life of the Indian in his converse with Nature, as he threaded these watercourses, — having for his guiding compass, sure and unerring for his way, his own wilderness instinct! Whole stretches of the native forest offered scarce any obstruction as he threaded his course alone, — or in companies marched, as we say, in Indian file over the crispy or velvet moss. But he would have to climb at times over the prostrate giant trunks, in which he would sink gently up to the waist in the red mould of sweet decay. Where storms and tempests had swept over the scene, two or three score trees might have fallen to each survivor that rose in majesty over them. And then what delicious ministrations there were to a creature so largely organized for simple