They were agile, well-proportioned people, who in the summertime went about nearly naked, but in the winter were covered with good furs of elk, otter, beaver, bear, seal, and deer.  The colour of their skin was usually a pale olive, but the women for some reason made themselves much darker-skinned than the men by rubbing their bodies with pigments which turned them to a dark brown.  At times they suffered very much from lack of food, being obliged then to frequent the shore of the river or gulf to obtain shellfish.  When pressed very hard by famine they would eat their dogs (their only domestic animal) and even the leather of the skins with which they clothed themselves.  In the autumn they were much given to fishing for eels, and they dried a good deal of eel flesh, to last them through the winter.  During the height of the winter they hunted the beaver, and later on the elk.  Though they ate wild roots and fruits whenever they could obtain them, they do not seem to have cultivated any grain or vegetables.  In the early spring they were sometimes dying of hunger, and looked so thin and haggard that they were mere walking skeletons.  They were then ready to eat carrion that was putrid, so that it is little wonder that they suffered much from scurvy.

Yet the rivers and the gulf abounded in fish, and as soon as the waters were unlocked by the melting of the ice in April, the surviving Indians rapidly grew fat and well, and of course the late summer and the autumn brought them nuts (hickory and other kinds of walnut, and hazel nuts), wild cherries, wild plums, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, currants,[5] cranberries, and grapes.

[Footnote 5:  The wild currants so often mentioned by the early explorers of Canada are often referred to as red, green, and blue.  The blue currants are really the black currant, now so familiar to our kitchen gardens (Ribes nigrum).  This, together with the red currant (Ribes rubrum), grows throughout North America, Siberia, and eastern Europe.  The unripe fruit may have been the green currants alluded to by Champlain, or these may have been the white variety of our gardens.  The two species of wild strawberry which figure so frequently in the stories of these early explorers are Fragaria vesca and F. virginiana.  From the last-named is derived the cultivated strawberry of Europe.  The wild strawberries of North America were larger than those of Europe.  Champlain does not himself allude to gooseberries (unless they are his groseilles vertes), but later travellers do.  Three or more kinds of gooseberry grow wild in Canada, but they are different from the European species.  The blueberry so often Mentioned by Champlain (bluets or blues) was Vaccinium canadense.]

Champlain observed amongst them for the first time the far-famed Amerindian snowshoes, which he compares very aptly for shape to a racquet used in tennis.