Indian who, as we afterwards found, had been despatched to Pondiac with belts from the Shawanese and Delawares; but he would not stop to talk to us. This day I saw made the most extraordinary meal to which I ever was or ever can be witness. Till these last named Indians joined us we had killed nothing but a very large wild cat, called a pichou,[1] which indeed was very good eating: but this day we eat two deer, some wild turkeys, wild geese, and wild ducks, besides a great quantity of Indian corn. Of the wild ducks and Indian corn we made broth; the Indians made spoons of the bark of a tree in a few minutes, and, for the first time, I eat of boiled wild duck. When we marched on after dinner, I could perceive no fragments left. What an Indian can eat is scarcely credible to those who have not seen it. Indeed the Frenchmen, who had been used to savage life, expressed their astonishment at the quantity which had been devoured. The next day (4th) we found plenty of game, having sufficient time to hunt for it, as the canoes were for the greatest part of the day dragged along, there not being water sufficient to float them. The day after (5th) we met an Indian on a handsome white horse, which had been General Braddock's, and had been taken ten years before when that General was killed on his march to Fort du Quesne, afterwards called Fort Pitt, on the Ohio. The following day (6th) we arrived at a rocky shoal, where the water was not more than two or three inches deep, and found a great number of young Indians spearing fish with sticks burnt at the end and sharpened; an art at which they are very dexterous; for the chief, who steered my canoe with a setting-pole (no oars being used the whole way), whenever he saw a fish, used to strike it
- ↑ Pichou is the Canadian name for the loup-cervier, or lynx canadensis.—Ed.
