Our next day’s journey was long and variegated.  A portage of a mile or two across the Ile d’Alma, with a cart to haul our canoes and stuff, brought us to the Little Discharge, down which we floated for a little way, and then hauled through the village of St. Joseph to the foot of the Carcajou, or Wildcat Falls.  A mile of quick water was soon passed, and we came to the junction of the Little Discharge with the Grand Discharge at the point where the picturesque club-house stands in a grove of birches beside the big Vache Caille Falls.  It is lively work crossing the pool here, when the water is high and the canoes are heavy; but we went through the labouring seas safely, and landed some distance below, at the head of the Rapide Gervais, to eat our lunch.  The water was too rough to run down with loaded boats, so Damon and I had to walk about three miles along the river-bank, while the men went down with the canoes.

On our way beside the rapids, Damon geologised, finding the marks of ancient glaciers, and bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full of infinitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed from the primitive granite; and I fished, picking up a pair of ouananiche in foam-covered nooks among the rocks.  The swift water was almost passed when we embarked again and ran down the last slope into a long deadwater.

The shores, at first bold and rough, covered with dense thickets of second-growth timber, now became smoother and more fertile.  Scattered farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched barns, began to creep over the hills toward the river.  There was a hamlet, called St. Charles, with a rude little church and a campanile of logs.  The cure, robed in decent black and wearing a tall silk hat of the vintage of 1860, sat on the veranda of his trim presbytery, looking down upon us, like an image of propriety smiling at Bohemianism.  Other craft appeared on the river.  A man and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen children packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau, picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads of young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side was in evidence on the river.  We felt quite as if we had been “in the swim” of society, when at length we reached the point where the Riviere des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot ladder of broken black rocks.  There we pitched our tents in a strip of meadow by the water-side, where we could have the sound of the falls for a slumber-song all night and the whole river for a bath at sunrise.