During the afternoon there was more wind, and the lake grew rougher.  It was fine to see the way the men managed the canoes.  Sometimes we seemed almost to lose ourselves in the trough of the big waves, but there was not a dipper of water taken in.  There was a head wind and hard paddling for a time, but towards evening it grew calmer, and the lake became very beautiful.  In the distance we saw several large masses of floating ice, and lying far away in the west were many islands.  The sky above was almost covered with big, soft, silver clouds and as the sun sank gradually towards the horizon the lake was like a great field of light.  Once we stopped to listen to the loons calling [Great Northern Divers].  They were somewhere out on the glittering water, and far apart.  We could not see them, but there were four, and one wild call answering another rang out into the great silence.  It was weird and beautiful beyond words; the big, shining lake with its distant blue islands; the sky with its wonderful clouds and colour; two little canoes so deep in the wilderness, and those wild, reverberant voices coming up from invisible beings away in the “long light” which lay across the water.  We listened for a long time, then it ceased.

We camped early that night south of the bay on the farther side of which the hills reached out to the west, narrowing the lake to about seven miles.  The bay was between four and five miles wide, and it was too late to risk crossing it that night.  George said if it were still calm in the morning they would take just a bite and a cup of tea, and start.  We could have breakfast on the other shore.

During the night a north wind sprang up, and though soon calm again the lake was stirred up, and all the rest of the night and the early morning we could hear the waves rolling in on the beach.  From dawn the men were out, now and again, to see if it were fit to start, but it was 10 A.M. before we were on the water.  On one of the islands where we landed during the morning we found the first “bake-apple” berries.  They were as large as the top of my thumb, and reddened a little.  Though still hard they already tasted like apples.  We lunched on an island near the north shore of the bay.  While at our meal the wind changed and was fair for us, so we started, hoping to make the most of it.  Crossing through a shallow which separated what had looked like a long point from the hills, we came out to the narrower part of the lake.  Here the hills on the east shore were seen to recede from the lake, stretching away a little east of north, while between, the country was flat and boggy.  A short distance further on we landed to put up sails.  A ptarmigan and her little family were running about among the bushes, and the men gave chase, coming back shortly afterwards with the mother bird and her little ones.