in a lake—­but in a swamp.  A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin “grub box.”  Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted “reed like a tree,” sixteen feet high on each side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe.  Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie.  We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed.  MacKenzie, the half-breed rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels.  We were not expected.  An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim.  With a cry that shrieked “Leg it—­leg it” plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle’s length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.

“You old fool,” said our head man, “your wing is no more broken than mine is.  We’re not going to hurt your babies.  Shut up there and stop that lying.”

Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl.  When we drew in for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by the butt of a gun.  Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ashore.  I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader’s wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man’s fist.  Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter.  The cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first birch tree affording a new strip of bark.

Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing “wild goose” among the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters.  In fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian families to prevent lapses to barbarism.