“Of two difficulties regularly met with, the first is of rapids and portages for these abound in every river throughout these regions. When a person approaches such cataracts, or rapids, he has to step ashore and carry on his back through forests or over high, vexatious rocks not only his baggage, but also the canoe. This is not accomplished without much labour, for there are portages of one, two, and three leagues, each of them requiring several journeys if one has ever so small a number of packages. At some places where the rapids are not less swift than at the portages, but of easier access, the Indians, plunging into the water, drag their canoes and conduct them with their hands with utmost difficulty and danger for sometimes they are up to their necks in the current, so that they have to let go their hold upon their canoes and save themselves as best they can from the rapidity of the water that snatches the canoe out of their hands and carries it off. I have computed the number of portages and find that we carried thirty-five times and dragged at least fifty times. The second ordinary difficulty is that of food. A person is often obliged to fast, especially if he happens to lose the places where he stored away provisions on his down-river course. (Note.—The familiar word to this day for such a hidden store is ‘cache.’) Even when he finds them his appetite remains none the less keen for having regaled himself with their contents, for the usual repast is only a little corn broken between two stones, and sometimes simply taken in fresh water, which is insipid food. Sometimes he has fish, but this is mere chance unless he happens to pass some tribe from whom he can buy it. Add to this that a person must sleep upon the bare ground, perhaps on a hard rock.” Such was the experience of the missionary, new and hard and very real to him, whom the voyageurs carried on his apostolic way. But the coureurs and the voyageurs were traders and explorers and, as one might infer, they were always young men and in the prime of life, because of the hardship they had to endure in making their long hazardous journeys through trackless forests. Father Tailhan gives a graphic description of their life. He says: