As soon as I was old enough, I accompanied my father when he went
trapping. We had a team of good, strong dogs. I watched how he set the traps
but did not set them myself. My job was to look after the dog team and load
the furs that he caught, the lynx, you know. I would tie them onto the sled
as I came to them. He would move on after checking each snare, beginning
first thing in the morning. Whatever he had killed, he would just put beside
the trail. I came along after him and loaded up the furs. The lynx gave me a
hard time, you know, because some of them were frozen in an awkward position.

Also, the portage was densely overgrown. Sometimes I would have to load six
or seven onto the sleigh. I had to straighten them because of they were
frozen in awkward positions. It was difficult, because the fur could tear,
especially in the arm, which could break. Then one loses that fur, although
it can still be attached by sewing it together, as my mother used to do.
January used to be a very cold month, much colder than it is now. My
father did not check his traps in January because the animals did not move
around then and nothing would be caught anyway. “It is too cold,” he told me,
“for the animals to be active.” For example, the mink went under the rivers
and not one of them even left tracks in January. In fact, all of the furbearing
animals went underground in January. The lynx gathered in one place,
you know. The rabbits stayed put and did not go far. A month later, the
animals all started to disperse. Then we would go to check our traps. We came
home for the cold month. Sometimes it was so cold that we could hear the
trees when we slept. It sounded as if somebody was chopping them. Since then,
I have never seen the temperature drop so low.

It was so cold then that if a dog did not eat for one night he would
starve and freeze to death. A dog had to be well-fed to survive. When we used
dogs, we built them little houses where they stayed. There was a piece of
cloth for a door, and every time they went in, they automatically closed it.
I nailed a piece of cloth around the door like this. A dog could come and go
at will. There was no problem. He would warm himself up in his house when he
slept. I put straw in the dog houses. That is how we treated our dogs. So did
my older brother. He’s the one I went trapping with when I stopped going with
my father. We did the same things I used to do with my father. It was
difficult, really difficult.

The caribou used to come by here, too, and they were plentiful. I don’t
remember exactly when that was, but it was quite a long time ago. There were
a lot of caribou over at Fine Gas, where the winter road passes by, as well
as at Halfway Island and at Duck Lake. They were everywhere, and they were
plentiful. They used to stay here all winter. They would arrive at freeze-up,
and that’s when I used to go with my father. Times were very hard then, but
we were never selfish. Everything was shared. My father always killed a moose
because he was skillful, agile and strong. I only butchered the moose myself,
you know, and took home whatever he killed.

At that time everything was sold cheaply, not like today. Then, you
could buy a lot of groceries for twenty dollars. The canned goods cost less
than a dollar. The ones that cost five dollars now cost only eighty or ninety
cents then. Cans of pork and beans cost only thirty cents, the small ones.
And nowadays everything is so expensive. A hundred pounds of flour used to
cost just four dollars, and two dollars for twenty-five pounds. Things were
quite cheap then. My father used to get his groceries from Cold Lake. He went
by dog team from here. We used to overwinter at Duck Lake and came in only
for Christmas Midnight Mass.

Not many of us lived here then, and it is only in recent years that
people have been moving in here from, for example, Granville Lake. This oldtime
chief was one of them. None of them are still living. They came from
Granville Lake and from Highrock, too. Eventually, our population began to
increase, until finally there are a lot of us today, right? Although there
were not many of us here, we already had a resident priest, the one in the
picture. He was young when he first came here. He was a religious brother,
you know, the one who lived here among us. Eventually, he started to build a
church, the one that was torn down [in 1995]. It is the one that was built at
that time, quite a long time ago.

This brother raised dogs, too. He used them to travel around before
Christmas. He visited the people who gathered at Midnight Mass. They lived
all over the place, for example, at Granville Lake, Loon Lake and Russell
Lake. He went by dog team to Russell Lake, and to Sandy Bay, as well as to
that place close to here called Scattered Birch River. He travelled
everywhere, even to Highrock.

This was our priest. He was a strong person. He was very strong while
he was still in good health, you know, and he was very fast. At one time, he
kept good dogs, and he had so many of them. One time he had good dogs that he
had raised himself. He took five puppies from one bitch and raised them. He
had really good dogs. At one time, he used to travel from here to get fish
from the fish warehouse at Duck Lake, on the shore at the confluence at Duck
Lake. It was by the creek. At eight o’clock, after a mass service there, and
after he had eaten, he went and got some fish. He would load them up and be
back by twelve o’clock. He would make it back to this small portage at the
little lake by twelve, according to Jonas, who used to go with him. They
loaded up two hundred fish apiece. It was quite far, on the other side of
Duck Lake, over at the fish warehouse by the creek. He had good dogs then,
but he used only four, and at the same time he would ride in the sleigh with
two hundred fish on board. Those fish had to be skewered. He pierced them
with small stakes to feed the dogs during the winter, you know. He fished in
the fall and stashed his fish over there; that’s where he would go for more
when he was running short. That is what this priest did: he would travel
around. Eventually, his health failed, but he was all right for quite a long
time before he started getting sick. When the sickness caught up with him,
began to decline slowly, and he gradually went down. That is what happened