{131} It was October. The forests were leafless, the weather damp, the lake too stormy for the frail canoes. As game was plentiful, the priests decided to winter on a creek near Port Dover. Here log houses were knocked up, and the servants dispersed moose hunting for winter supplies. Then followed the most beautiful season of the year in the peninsula of Ontario, Indian summer, dreamy warm days after the first cold, filling the forest with a shimmer of golden light, the hills with heat haze, while the air was odorous with smells of nuts and dried leaves and grapes hanging thick from wild vines. "It was," writes Galinée, "simply an Earthly Paradise, the most beautiful region that ever I have seen in my life, with open woods and meadows and rivers and game in plenty." In this Earthly Paradise the priests passed the winter, holding services three times a week--"a winter that ought to be worth ten years of any other kind of life" Dollier calculated, counting up masses and vespers and matins. Sometimes when the snow lay deep and the weird voices of the wind hallooed with bugle sound through the lonely forest, the priests listening inside fancied that they heard "the hunting of Arthur,"--unearthly huntsmen coursing the air after unearthly game. March 23 (Sunday), 1670, the company paraded down to Lake Erie from their sheltered quarters, and, erecting a cross, took possession of this land for France. Then they launched their boats to ascend the other Sweet Water Seas. The preceding autumn the priests had lost some of their baggage, and now, in camp near Point Pelee, a sweeping wave carried off the packs in which were all the holy vessels and equipments for the mission chapel. They decided to go back to Montreal by way of Sault Ste. Marie, and ascended to Lake Ste. Claire. Game had been scarce for some days, the weather tempestuous, and now the priests thought they had found the cause. On one of the rocks of Lake Ste. Claire was a stone, to which the Indians offered sacrifices for safe passage on the lakes. To the priests the rude drawing of a face seemed graven images of paganism,--signs of Satan, who had baffled their hunting and caused loss {132} of their packs. "I consecrated one of my axes to break this god of stone, and, having yoked our canoes abreast, we carried the largest pieces to the middle of the river and cast them in. God immediately rewarded us, for we killed a deer." Following the east shore of Lake Huron, the priests came, on May 25, to Sault Ste. Marie, where the Jesuits Dablon and Marquette had a mission. Three days late, they embarked by way of the Ottawa for Montreal, where they arrived on June 18, 1670. Meanwhile, what had become of Jolliet and Peré and La Salle?