One channel but opened on another.  Even the limestone ridges had vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color intoxications.  There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky—­a far honk—­then stillness.  Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among the reeds.  Suddenly there lifted against the lonely red sunset sky—­a lob stick—­a dark evergreen stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or sacred memory.  We steered for it.  A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba’tiste Buck—­eighty years old he was—­squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperor—­the first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs.  We camped together that night on the sandbars—­trading Sam Ba’tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks.  He had been storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days.  Do you think he was to be pitied?  Don’t!  Three days’ hunting will lay up enough meat for Sam for the winter.  In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader.  Each of Sam’s sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—­more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands.  Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts.  When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank.  He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter’s free tobacco.  In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar.  Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and care-free than you are—­peace to his aged bones!

Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves.  We had left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun, only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks.  If there was any current, it was reversed by the wind.  We should have thwarted the main muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow the main river by taking the broadest opening.  It led us into a lake seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid’s hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one’s hand, and the fact that you can’t offer the gun’l of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave.  We scattered our dunnage and all three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe.  Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.