The first Canadians not only taught our ancestors how to fish, but also how to use lights so that they could fish at night, and how to cut holes in the frozen lakes and rivers for the still popular icefishing.
Ice fishing was first taught to the French settlers at Trois Rivieres in the mid seventeenth century, as a way to obtain fresh food in the long winter months, and it eventually became so popular that small portable huts or wind screens were erected, though many of the early settlers found it a little too cold to enjoy: "Suddenly the head and shoulders of an Indian, raised from the edge of the buffalo skin, for such it was, dissipated any alarm. Going up to him, I found he was employed in fishing, and partly for protection, partly to keep the fish from being alarmed, had completely covered himself with the hide which so attracted my attention. He had cut a hole through the two-feet-thick ice about a foot square, and sat with a bait hanging from one hand, while in the other he held a short spear to transfix any deluded victim which it
