This ceremony ended, the chief arose, and gave the Englishman his hand, in which he was followed by all the rest.
At the Sault Ste Marie, on the river connecting Lake Superior and Huron, Henry spent part of the spring of 1763-4, and engaged with a few French Canadians and Indians in making maple sugar, the season for which--April--was now at hand.
A temporary house for eight persons was built in a convenient part of the maple woods, distant about three miles from the fort.

The men then gathered the bark of white birch trees, and made out of it vessels to hold the sap which was to flow from the incisions they cut in the bark of the maple trees.

Into these cuts they introduced wooden spouts or ducts, and under them were placed the birch-bark vessels.
When these were filled, the sweet liquid was poured into larger buckets, and the buckets were emptied into bags of elkskin containing perhaps a hundred gallons.

Boilers (probably of metal, introduced by the French) were next set up in the camp over fires kept burning day and night, and the maple sap thus boiled became, by concentration, maple sugar.
The women attended to all the business of sugar manufacture, while the men cut wood and went out hunting and fishing to secure food for the community; though, as a matter of fact, sugar and syrup were their main sustenance during all this absence from home.

"I have known Indians", wrote Henry, "to live for a time wholly on maple sugar and syrup and become fat." The sap of the maple had certain medicinal qualities which were exceedingly good for persons who had previously been eating little else than meat and fish, so that the three weeks of sugar-boiling in Canada was, no doubt, a splendid assistance to the health of the natives.