I have not yet made the reader as well acquainted, perhaps, as I should with members of our party, and it may be well to do so now.

Judge Malone is a man with a keen sense of humor and an even disposition not easily ruffled.  He stands six feet three inches in his stockings, and is something of an athlete.   In college, as I have previously mentioned, he was a baseball player, and even yet loves to pitch a game “just to keep himself limbered up.”  He was once the leader of his party in the Connecticut state assembly, but in politics as in athletics he believes in playing the game clean and square, and as he opposed a powerful lobby and certain railroad grabs that were against his conscience, he was not returned to the assembly.  For several years he has been city judge of Bristol, and at present also fills the important office of corporation counsel, besides conducting a private law practice.  The wilderness is his hobby, and he boasts that in the several expeditions to the remote north in which he has taken part he has always done his share of the work of the voyageur.

Gilbert Blake is of short stature, but lithe and sinewy as an Indian.  Like an Indian he has straight black hair and is swarthy of complexion.  Indeed, he so resembles an Indian in appearance and carriage that Judge Malone, upon first seeing him, supposed him to be a mountaineer Indian attached to one of the camps at the post.  He is a trapper by profession, and in the far wilderness of the Nascaupee River valley, spends the long winter months on the fur trails with no other companion than his little Indian hunting dog “Poppy”. 

Murdock McLean and Henry Blake also have the swarthy complexion and straight black hair characteristic of the trappers of the country.  They are about twenty-one years of age, and, like Gilbert, are trappers by profession, spending the long months of winter in the deep wilderness.  These young men usually take up the work of trappers at the age of fifteen and sixteen—frequently younger.  They learn to set traps, indeed, and to shoot almost as soon as they learn to walk on snowshoes.  Murdock is a big, happy-go-lucky, good-natured fellow who laughs at hardships and forgets to-day the sorrows of yesterday, carefree and ever ready for adventure.  Henry has a more serious nature, is even-tempered, and thoroughly reliable.  He has not as yet endured so much of the isolation of the remote wilderness, with the extreme hardships which it often entails, as Murdock.

One other member of our party, and by no means an unimportant member, I have hitherto failed to mention—Gilbert’s little Indian hunting dog “Poppy”.  He is Gilbert’s constant companion on the winter trails, and finds for Gilbert many a good meal of grouse and porcupine.  I never saw a dog satisfied with so little.  He was thoroughly trained as a camp dog and he would touch nothing, no matter how tempting a morsel, until he was invited to do so, and game and fish could be left within his reach with perfect safety and with the assurance that he would not so much as take a sniff.  He wore a coat of long silky hair of white and tawny yellow.

This is the party then that lounged at our campfire in the forest on the Beaver River that Sunday night, Poppy stretched before the blaze dreaming of conquests of the hunt, the others of us enjoying pipes and exchanging stories of the trail.  It was here, I remember, the Judge produced for the first time a tin whistle which he had brought for amusement—and perhaps ours—and struck up “The Campbells are Coming.”   Presently we learned that this was the only tune the Judge had mastered.  When we complained at its frequent repetition, he attempted others, but we were always glad to have him return to “the Campbells are Coming.” 

We sat long before the campfire that night, drinking in the fir-scented atmosphere and reveling in the smell of the burning wood, and exchanging stories of adventure on the trail, for there were none of us but had had his adventures; and when at last we rolled into our blankets on our fragrant bed of boughs, the murmur of the river below came to us as sweet music to lull us to sleep, for we did not know then what it held for us.

Next: Chapter XVII: Murdock's Rapid