Above the brook were the lodges of an Indian camp,--
stacks of poles covered with birch-bark. They belonged to an Algonquin
horde, called Montagnais, denizens of surrounding wilds, and gatherers
of their only harvest,--skins of the moose, caribou, and bear; fur of
the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild-cat, and lynx. Nor was this all,
for there were intermediate traders betwixt the French and the shivering
bands who roamed the weary stretch of stunted forest between the
head-waters of the Saguenay and Hudson's Bay. Indefatigable canoe-men,
in their birchen vessels, light as eggshells, they threaded the devious
tracks of countless rippling streams, shady by-ways of the forest, where
the wild duck scarcely finds depth to swim; then descended to their mart
along those scenes of picturesque yet dreary grandeur which steam has
made familiar to modern tourists. With slowly moving paddles they glided
beneath the cliff whose shaggy brows frown across the zenith, and whose
base the deep waves wash with a hoarse and hollow cadence; and they
passed the sepulchral Bay of the Trinity, dark as the tide of Acheron,--
a sanctuary of solitude and silence: depths which, as the fable runs, no
sounding line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling
eagle seems a speck.
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