Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the sunrise end of the lake, in a bay paved with small round stones, laid close together and beaten firmly down by the waves.  There, and along the shores below, at the mouth of a little river that foamed in over a ledge of granite, and in the shadow of cliffs of limestone and feldspar, we trolled and took many fish:  pike of enormous size, fresh-water sharks, devourers of nobler game, fit only to kill and throw away; huge old trout of six or seven pounds, with broad tails and hooked jaws, fine fighters and poor food; stupid, wide-mouthed chub—­ouitouche, the Indians call them—­biting at hooks that were not baited for them; and best of all, high-bred onananiche, pleasant to capture and delicate to eat.

Our second camp was on a sandy point at the sunset end of the lake—­a fine place for bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows and blueberry patches, where Damon went to hunt for bears.  He did not find any; but once he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he thought was a bear; and he declared that he got quite as much excitement out of it as if it had had four legs and a mouthful of teeth.

He brought back from one of his expeditions an Indian letter, which he had found in a cleft stick by the river.  It was a sheet of birch-bark with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; five Indians in a canoe paddling up the river, and one in another canoe pointing in another direction; we read it as a message left by a hunting party, telling their companions not to go on up the river, because it was already occupied, but to turn off on a side stream.

There was a sign of a different kind nailed to an old stump behind our camp.  It was the top of a soap-box, with an inscription after this fashion: 

A.D.  Meyer & B. LEVIT
Soap Mfrs.  N. Y.
Camped here July 18—­
1 trout 17 12 pounds.  II ouan
ANISHES 18 12 pounds.  One
pike 147 12 lbs.

There was a combination of piscatorial pride and mercantile enterprise in this quaint device, that took our fancy.  It suggested also a curious question of psychology in regard to the inhibitory influence of horses and fish upon the human nerve of veracity.  We named the place “Point Ananias.”

And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely spot, and not even the Hebrew inscription could spoil the sense of solitude that surrounded us when the night came, and the storm howled across the take, and the darkness encircled us with a wall that only seemed the more dense and impenetrable as the firelight blazed and leaped within the black ring.

“How far away is the nearest house, Johnny?”

“I don’t know; fifty miles, I suppose.”

“And what would you do if the canoes were burned, or if a tree fell and smashed them?”

“Well, I’d say a Pater noster, and take bread and bacon enough for four days, and an axe, and plenty of matches, and make a straight line through the woods.  But it wouldn’t be a joke, M’sieu’, I can tell you.”