soon got around and the neighbours all arrived to witness this unusual event. The bear was skinned and dressed and the hams were sold in Sum- merside. Fox hunting with an axe was common practice and pelts were sold for two or three dollars in Summerside. V

THE INDIANS

This story as related by Louise Ramsey Cousins tells us of the Micmac Indians who were annual visitors to this area.

More than fifty years ago, come June, families of Indians from Lennox Island, numbering twenty or thirty, would arrive by boat and come up the Baltic River to Ramsey’s Woods, make their wigwams of birch bark and settle in for the summer. They fished and hunted, made baskets and fur— niture.

One family, Samuel Thomas and his wife, had two daughters, Bridget and Mary. Bridget and Mary were about the same age as Louise and became great friends 8 playing together and visiting each other. They would row across the river to obtain water from a fresh-water spring. . Louise vividly remembers one day, Sam Thomas and his brother Frank rushed to the shore, each carrying a gun. Speaking in Micmac, they told the girls to vacate the dory, not understanding thislanguage, Louise, frightened, ran home, later to learn that the two Indians had sighted a seal and a few days later when they came to her home for milk, they presented her father with a large bottle of seal oil for his harness.

In early fall, the Micmacs would travel around the communities selling or trading their baskets and furniture and then return to Lennox Island to spend the winter.