While accompanying our party on a trading excursion in the beginning of winter, I had a very narrow escape.  We were travelling on the Gatineau, a very rapid stream that joins the Ottawa, a little below Hull.  A young lad, interpreter to the opposition, and I, had one morning gone considerably in advance of the others, walking smartly to keep ourselves warm, when I suddenly broke through the ice.  The current here running strong, I should soon have been swept under the ice, had I not, by extending my arms upon it on either side of me, kept my head above water.  At the hazard of his own life, my companion came to my assistance; but the ice was too weak to admit of his approaching sufficiently near to reach me his hand; he therefore cut a long pole, and tying his belt to it, threw it to me; and laying hold of it, I dragged myself on the sound ice.  But the danger was not yet over; the weather was intensely cold, so that my clothes were soon frozen solid upon me, and having no means of lighting a fire, I ran into the woods; and in order to keep my body from being frozen into the same mass with my clothes, continued running up and down with all my might, till the rest of the party arrived.

I had a still more narrow escape in the month of March ensuing.  I had been on a visit to the post under my own immediate charge, termed head-quarters par excellence; returning to the post alone, I came to a place where our men, in order to avoid a long detour occasioned by a high and steep hill coming close to the river, were accustomed to draw their sledges upon the ice along the edge of a rapid.  About the middle of the rapid, where the torrent is fiercest, the banks of the river are formed of rocks rising almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge; and here they had to pass on a narrow ledge of ice, between the rock on the one side, and the foaming and boiling surge on the other.  The ledge, at no time very broad, was now reduced, by the falling in of the water, to a strip of ice of about eighteen inches, or little more, adhering to the rock.  The ice, however, seemed perfectly solid, and I made no doubt that, with caution, I should succeed in passing safely this formidable strait.

The weather having been very mild in the fore-part of the day, my shoes and socks had been saturated with wet, but were now frozen hard by the cold of the approaching night.  Overlooking this circumstance, I attempted the dangerous passage; and had proceeded about halfway, when my foot slipped, and I suddenly found myself resting with one hip on the border of ice, while the rest of my body overhung the rapid rushing fearfully underneath.  I was now literally in a state of agonizing suspense:  to regain my footing was impossible; even the attempt to move might precipitate me into the rapid.