In all these rivers just after emerging from the lakes the current was quite swift, and so shallow in many places as almost to deserve the name of rapids. This was particularly the case where the swift stream cut into the high banks that loomed some forty to sixty feet above us as we rushed by, a top stratum that rested upon the stiff yellow clay being full of rounded bowlders, which, when undermined, were letdown into the river's bed, choking it partially with most dangerous-looking obstacles.
During the whole day we were passing through burned districts of heavy timber that looked dismal enough, backed, as they were, by dense clouds of black smoke rising ahead of us, showing plainly that the devastation was still going on. Many of these sweepings of fire were quite old; so old, in fact, that the dark rotting trunks had become mere banks of brown stretched along the ground, the blackened bark of the stumps being the only testimony as to the manner of its destruction. Others, again, were so recent that the last rain had not yet beaten the white ashes from their blackened limbs, while late that evening we dashed through the region of smoke and flame we had discerned earlier in the day. It is wonderful what great wide strips of river these flames will cross, probably carried by the high winds, when light bunches of dry, resinous matter are in a blaze. We saw one instance which, however, must be a rare one, of a blazing tree that fell into the water, where it immediately found a hydrostatic equilibrium, so that its upper branches continued on fire, blazing and smoking away like a small steam launch. It might readily have crossed the river as it floated down, and becoming entangled in the dry driftwood of the opposite bank, have been the nucleus of a new conflagration, the limits of which would have been determined by the wind and the nature of the material in its path. Of course, in such an intricate wilderness of black and brown trunks and stumps, any kind of game that approaches to black in color, such as a moose or black or brown bear; in fact, any thing darker than a snow-white mountain-goat, can easily avoid the most eagle-eyed hunter, by simply keeping still, since it could scarcely be distinguished at any distance above a hundred yards.