"When the winter came on," he says, "we went up the river, till the ice came down running thick in the river, when, according to the Indian custom, we laid up our canoes till spring. Then we traveled, sometimes on the ice and sometimes on land, till we came to a river that was open but not fordable, where we made a raft and passed over, bag and baggage. I met with no abuse from them in this winter's hunting, though I was put to great hardships in carrying burdens and for want of food. But they underwent the same difficulty, and would often encourage me by saying in broken English, 'By and by great deal moose!' Yet they could not answer any question I asked them; and knowing very little of their customs and ways of life, I thought it tedious to be constantly moving from place to place, yet it might be in some respects an advantage, for it ran still in my mind that we were traveling to some settlement; and when my burden was over heavy, and the Indians left me behind, and the still evening came on, I fancied I could see thro' the bushes and hear the people of some great town; which hope might be some support to me in the day, though I found not the town at night. "Thus we were hunting three hundred miles from the sea and knew no man within fifty or sixty miles of us. We were eight or ten in number, and had but two guns on which we wholly depended for food. If any disaster had happened we must all have perished. Sometimes we had no manner of sustenance for three or four days; but God wonderfully provides for all creatures. * * * "We moved still farther up the country after the moose when our store gave out; so that by the spring we had got to the northward of the Lady Mountains [near the St. Lawrence]. When the spring came and the rivers broke up we moved back to the head of St. John's river and there made canoes of moose hides, sewing three or four together and pitching the seams with balsam mixed with charcoal. Then we went down the river to a place called Madawescok. There an old man lived and kept a sort of a trading house, where we tarried several days; then we went further down the river till we came to the greatest falls in these parts, called Checanekepeag[16], where we carried a little way over land, and putting off our canoes we went down stream still, and as we passed the mouths of any large branches we saw Indians, but when any dance was proposed I was bought off. [16] The Grand Falls of the St. John river, which the Indians still call Chik-seen-eag-i-beg, meaning "a destroying giant."