Wherever the rivers widen to lakes as at Lake Francis and Lake of the Woods, the canoes swing abreast, lash gun’els together by thwarting paddles, hoist sails and drift lazily forward on the forest-shadowed, placid waters, crews smoking, or singing with weird cadences amid the loneliness of these silent places. In this part of the voyage, while all the brigades were still together, there were often as many as five hundred canoes spread out on the lakes like birds on wing. Faces now bronzed almost to the shade of woodland creatures, splashes of color here and there where the voyageurs’ silk scarf has not faded, blue sky above with a fleece of clouds, blue sky below with a fleece of clouds and all that marked where sky began and reflection ended the margin of the painted shores etched amber in the brown waters--the picture was one that will never again be witnessed in wilderness life. Sometimes as the canoes cut a silver trail across the lakes, leather tepee tops would emerge from the morning mists telling of some Cree hunters waiting with their furs, and one of the partners would go ashore to trade, the crew camping for a day. Every such halt was the chance for repairing canoes. Camp fires sprang up as if by magic. Canoes lay keel up and tar was applied to all sprung seams, while the other boatmen got lines out and laid up supplies of fresh fish. That night the lake would twinkle with a hundred fires and an army of voyageurs lie listening to the wind in the pines. The next day, a pace would be set to make up for lost time. Lake of the Woods empties into Winnipeg River through a granite gap of cataract. The brigades skirted the falls across the Portage of the Rat (modern Rat Portage) and launched down the swift current of Winnipeg River that descends northward to Lake Winnipeg in such a series of leaps and waterfalls it was long known among the voyageurs as White or Foaming River. Where the river entered the southeast end of Lake Winnipeg, were three trading posts--the ruins of the old French fort, Maurepas, the Nor’ Westers’ fort known as Bas de la Riviere, and the Hudson’s Bay Post, now called Fort Alexander--some three miles from the lake. This was the lake which Kelsey, and perhaps Radisson and Hendry and Cocking, had visited from Hudson Bay. It was forty days straight west from Albany, three weeks from York on the Hayes.