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Wild North Land, The Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI.</h2></div> <div class="blockquot inhead medium"> A dog of no character.—The Green Lake.—Lac Ile à la Crosse.—A cold day.—Fort Ile à la Crosse.—A long-lost brother.—Lost upon the Lake.—Unwelcome neighbours.—Mr. Roderick Macfarlane.—A beautiful morning.—Marble features. </div> On the night of the 11th of February, under a brilliant moonlight, we quitted Fort Carlton; crossing the Saskatchewan, we climbed the steep northern bank, and paused a moment to look back. The moon was at its full, not a cloud slept in the vast blue vault of heaven, a great planet burned in the western sky; the river lay beneath in spotless lustre; shore and prairie, ridge and lowland, sparkled in the sheen of snow and moonlight. Then I sprung upon my sled, and followed the others, for the music of their dog-bells was already getting faint. The two following days saw us journeying on through a rich and fertile land. Clumps of poplar interspersed with pine, dotted the undulating surface of the country. Lakes were numerous, and96 the yellow grass along their margins still showed above the deep snow. Six trains of dogs, twenty-three dogs in all, made a goodly show; the northern ones all beaded, belled, and ribboned, were mostly large powerful animals. Cree, French, and English names were curiously intermixed, and as varied were the tongues used to urge the trains to fresh exertions. Sometimes a dog would be abused, vilified, and cursed, in French alone; at others, he would be implored, in Cree, to put forth greater efforts. “Kuskey-tay-o-atim-moos,” or the little “black dog” would be appealed to, “for the love of Heaven to haul his traces.” He would be solemnly informed that he was a dog of no character; that he was the child of very disreputable parents; that, in fact, his mother had been no better than she should have been. Generally speaking, this information did not appear to have much effect upon Kuskey-tay-o-atim-moos, who was doubtless well satisfied if the abuse hurled at him and his progenitors exhausted the ire of his driver, and saved his back at the expense of his relations. Four days of rapid travelling carried us far to the north. Early on the third day of travel the open country, with its lakelets and poplar ridges, was left behind, and the forest region entered upon for the first time. 97 Day had not yet dawned when we quitted a deserted hut which had given us shelter for the night; a succession of steep hills rose before us, and when the highest had been gained, the dawn had broken upon the dull grey landscape. Before us the great Sub-Arctic Forest stretched away to the north, a line of lakes, its rampart of defence against the wasting fires of the prairie region, lay beneath. This was the southern limit of that vast forest whose northern extreme must be sought where the waters of the Mackenzie mingle with the waves of the Arctic Sea. We entered this forest, and in four days reached the southern end of the Green Lake, a long narrow sheet of water of great depth. The dogs went briskly over the hard snow on the surface of the ice-covered lake, and ere sun set on the 15th of February we were housed in the little Hudson’s Bay post, near the northern extremity of the lake. We had run about 150 miles in four days. A little more than midway between Carlton and Green Lake, the traveller crosses the height of land between the Saskatchewan and Beaver Rivers; its elevation is about 1700 feet above the sea level, but the rise on either side is barely perceptible, and between the wooded hills, a network of lakes linked together by swamps and muskegs spreads in every direction. These lakes abound98 with the finest fish; the woods are fairly stocked with fur-bearing animals, and the country is in many respects fitted to be made the scene of Indian settlement, upon a plan not yet attempted by American or Canadian governments in their dealings with the red man. On the morning of the 17th February we quitted the Green Lake, and continued on our northern way. Early on the day of departure we struck the Beaver or Upper Churchill river, and followed its winding course for some forty miles. The shores were well wooded with white spruce, juniper, and birch; the banks, some ten or twenty feet above the surface of the ice, sloped easily back; while at every ten or fifteen miles smaller streams sought the main river, and at each accession the bed of the channel nearly doubled in width. Hitherto I have not spoken of the cold; the snow lay deep upon the ground, but so far the days had been fine, and the nights, though of course cold, were by no means excessively so. The morning of the 19th February found us camped on a pine ridge, between lakes, about fifteen miles south of Lac Ile à la Crosse, by the spot where an ox had perished of starvation during the previous autumn, his bones now furnishing a night-long repast for our hungry dogs. The night had been very cold, and despite of blanket or buffalo robe it was99 impossible to remain long asleep. It may seem strange to those who live in warm houses, who sleep in cosy rooms from which the draught is carefully excluded, and to whom the notion of seeking one’s rest on the ground, under a pine-tree in mid-winter, would appear eminently suicidal; it may seem strange, I say, how in a climate where cold is measured by degrees as much below the freezing point as the hottest shade heat of Carnatic or Scindian summer is known to be above it, that men should be able at the close of a hard day’s march to lie down to rest under the open heavens. Yet so it is. When the light begins to fade over the frozen solitude, and the first melancholy hoot of the night owl is heard, the traveller in the north looks around him for “a good camping-place.” In the forest country he has not long to seek for it; a few dead trees for fuel, a level space for his fire and his blanket, some green young pines to give him “brush” for his bed, and all his requirements are supplied. The camp is soon made, the fire lighted, the kettle filled with snow and set to boil, the supper finished, dogs fed, and the blankets spread out over the pine brush. It is scarcely necessary to say that there is not much time lost in the operation of undressing; under the circumstances one is more likely to reverse100 the process, and literally (not figuratively as in the case of modern society, preparing for her ball) to dress for the night. Then begins the cold; it has been bitterly cold all day, with darkness; the wind has lulled, and the frost has come out of the cold, grey sky with still, silent rigour. If you have a thermometer placed in the snow at your head the spirit will have shrunken back into the twenties and thirties below zero; and just when the dawn is stealing over the eastern pine tops it will not unfrequently be into the forties. Well then, that is cold if you like! You are tired by a thirty-mile march on snow shoes. You have lain down with stiffened limbs and blistered feet, and sleep comes to you by the mere force of your fatigue; but never goes the consciousness of the cold from your waking brain; and as you lie with crossed arms and up-gathered knees beneath your buffalo robe, you welcome as a benefactor any short-haired, shivering dog who may be forced from his lair in the snow to seek a few hours’ sleep upon the outside of your blankets. Yet do not imagine, reader, that all this is next to an impossibility, that men will perish under many nights of it. Men do not perish thus easily. Nay even, when before dawn the fire has been set alight, and the tea swallowed hot and strong, the whole thing is nigh forgotten, not unfrequently101 forgotten in the anticipations of a cold still more trying in the day’s journey which is before you. Such was the case now. We had slept coldly, and ere daylight the thermometer showed 32 degrees below zero. A strong wind swept through the fir-trees from the north; at daylight the wind lulled, but every one seemed to anticipate a bad day, and leather coats and capôtes were all in use. We set off at six o’clock. For a time calmness reigned, but at sunrise the north wind sprang up again, and the cold soon became more than one could bear. Before mid-day we reached the southern end of Lac Ile à la Crosse; before us to the north lay nearly thirty miles of shelterless lake, and down this great stretch of ice the wind came with merciless severity. We made a fire, drank a great deal of hot tea, muffled up as best we could, and put out into the lake. All that day I had been ill, and with no little difficulty had managed to keep up with the party. I do not think that I had, in the experience of many bitter days of travel, ever felt such cold; but I attributed this to illness more than to the day’s severity. We held on; right in our teeth blew the bitter blast, the dogs with low-bent heads tugged steadily onward, the half-breeds and Indians wrapped their blankets round their heads, and102 bending forward as they ran made their way against the wind. To run was instantly to freeze one’s face; to lie on the sled was to chill through the body to the very marrow. It was impossible to face it long, and again we put in to shore, made a fire, and boiled some tea. At mid-day the sun shone, and the thermometer stood at 26° below zero; the sun was utterly powerless to make itself felt in the slightest degree; a drift of dry snow flew before the bitter wind. Was this really great cold? I often asked myself. I had not long to wait for an answer. My two fellow-travellers were perhaps of all men in those regions best able to settle a question of cold. One had spent nigh thirty years in many parts of the Continent; the other had dwelt for years within the Arctic Circle, and had travelled the shores of the Arctic Ocean at a time when the Esquimaux keep close within their greasy snow huts. Both were renowned travellers in a land where bad travellers were unknown: the testimony of such men was conclusive, and for years they had not known so cold a day. “I doubt if I have ever felt greater cold than this, even on the Anderson or the Mackenzie,” said the man who was so well acquainted with winter hardship. After that I did not care so much; if they felt it cold, if their cheeks grew white and103 hard in the bitter blast, surely I could afford to freeze half my face and all my fingers to boot. Yet at the time it was no laughing matter; to look forward to an hour seemed an infinity of pain. One rubbed and rubbed away at solid nose and white cheek, but that only added one’s fingers to the list of iced things one had to carry. At last the sun began to decline to the west, the wind fell with it, the thick, low-tying drift disappeared, and it was possible by running hard to restore the circulation. With dusk came a magnificent Aurora; the sheeted light quivered over the frozen lake like fleecy clouds of many colours blown across the stars. Night had long closed when we reached the warm shelter of the shore, and saw the welcome lights of houses in the gloom. Dogs barked, bolts rattled, men and children issued from the snow-covered huts; and at the door of his house stood my kind fellow-traveller, the chief factor of the district, waiting to welcome me to his fort of Ile à la Crosse. The fort of Ile à la Crosse is a solitary spot. Behind it spreads a land of worthless forest, a region abounding in swamps and muskegs, in front the long arms of the Cruciform Lake. It is not from its shape that the lake bears its name; in the centre, where the four long arms meet, stands an island, on the open shore of which the Indians104 in bygone times were wont to play their favourite game of la Crosse. The game named the island, and the island in turn gave its name to the lake. The Beaver River enters the lake at the south-east, and leaves it again on the north-west side. The elevation of the lake above the level of Hudson’s Bay cannot be less than 1300 feet, so it is little wonder if the wild winds of the north should have full sweep across its frozen surface. The lake is well stocked with excellent white fish, and by the produce of the net the garrison of the fort is kept wholly in food, about 130 large fish being daily consumed in it. At a short distance from the fort stands the French Mission. One of the earliest established in the north, it has thrown out many branches into more remote solitudes. Four ladies of the order of Grey Nuns have made their home here, and their school already contains some thirty children. If one wants to see what can be made of a very limited space, one should visit this convent at Ile à la Crosse; the entire building is a small wooden structure, yet school, dormitory, oratory, kitchen, and dining-room are all contained therein. The sisters seemed happy and contented, chatted gaily of the outside world, or of their far-away homes in Lower Canada. Their present house was only a temporary erection. In one fell night fire had destroyed a larger building, and consumed105 their library, oratory, everything; and now its ravages were being slowly repaired. Of course it was an event to be long remembered, and the lady who described to us the calamity seemed still to feel the terror of the moment. My long journey left me no time for delay, and after one day’s rest it became necessary to resume the march. The morning of the 21st February found us again in motion. We now numbered some five sleds; the officer in charge of the Athabasca district, the next to the north, was still to be my fellow-traveller for nearly 400 miles to his post of Fort Chipewyan. All dogs save mine were fresh ones, but Cerf-vola showed not one sign of fatigue, and Spanker was still strong and hearty. Pony was, however, betraying every indication of giving out, and had long proved himself an arrant scoundrel. Dogs were scarce in the North this year. A distemper had swept over all the forts, and many a trusty hauler had gone to the land where harness is unknown. Here, at Ile à la Crosse, I obtained an eighth dog. This dog was Major; he was an Esquimaux from Deer’s Lake, the birth-place of Cerf-vola, and he bore a very strong resemblance to my leader. It is not unlikely that they were closely related, perhaps brothers, who had thus, after many wanderings,106 come together; but, be that as it may, Cerf-vola treated his long-lost brother with evident suspicion, and continued to maintain towards all outsiders a dogged demeanour. Major’s resemblance to the Untiring led to a grievous error on the morning of my departure from the fort. It was two hours before daylight when the dogs were put into harness; it was a morning of bitter cold; a faint old moon hung in the east; over the dim lake, a shadowy Aurora flickered across the stars; it was as wild and cheerless a sight as eye of mortal could look upon; and the work of getting the poor unwilling dogs into their harness was done by the Indians and half-breeds in no amiable mood. In the haste and darkness the Untiring was placed last in the train which he had so long led, the new-comer, Major, getting the foremost place. Upon my assuming charge of the train, an ominous tendency to growl and fight on the part of my steer-dog told me something was wrong; it was too dark to see plainly, but a touch of the Untiring’s nose told me that the right dog was in the wrong place. The mistake was quickly rectified, but, nevertheless, I fear its memory long rankled in the mind of Cerf-vola, for all that day, and for some107 days after, he never missed an opportunity of counter-marching suddenly in his harness and prostrating the unoffending Major at his post of steer-dog; the attack was generally made with so much suddenness and vigour that Major instantly capitulated, “turning a turtle” in his traces. This unlooked-for assault was usually accompanied by a flank movement on the part of Spanker, who, whenever there was anything in the shape of fighting lying around, was sure to have a tooth in it on his own account, being never very particular as to whether he attacked the head of the rear dog or the tail of his friend in front. All this led at times to fearful confusion in my train; they jumped on one another; they tangled traces, and back-bands, and collar-straps into sad knots and interlacings, which baffled my poor frozen fingers to unravel. Often have I seen them in a huge ball rolling over each other in the snow, while the rapid application of my whip only appeared to make matters worse, conveying the idea to Spanker or the Untiring that they were being badly bitten by an unknown belligerent. Like the lady in Tennyson’s “Princess,” they “mouthed and mumbled” each other in a very perplexing manner, but, of course, from a cause totally at variance from that which influenced the108 matron in the poem. These events only occurred, however, when a new dog was added to the train; and, after a day or so, things got smoothed down, and all tugged at the moose-skin collars in peaceful unanimity. But to return. We started from Ile à la Crosse, and held our way over a chain of lakes and rivers. Rivière Cruise was passed, Lac Clair lay at sun-down far stretching to our right into the blue cold north, and when dusk had come, we were halted for the night in a lonely Indian hut which stood on the shores of the Detroit, fully forty miles from our starting-place of the morning. “A long, hard, cold day; storm, drift, and desolation. We are lost upon the lake.” Such is the entry which meets my eye as I turn to the page of a scanty note-book which records the 22nd of February; and now looking back upon this day, it does not seem to me that the entry exaggerates in its pithy summing up the misery of the day’s travel. To recount the events of each day’s journey, to give minutely, starting-point, date, distance, and resting-place, is too frequently an error into which travellers are wont to fall. I have read somewhere in a review of a work on African travel, that no literary skill has hitherto been able to enliven the description of how the traveller left a village of dirty negroes in109 the morning, and struggled through swamps all day, and crossed a river swarming with hippopotami, and approached a wood where there were elephants, and finally got to another village of dirty negroes in the evening. The reviewer is right; the reiterated recital of Arctic cold and hardship, or of African heat and misery, must be as wearisome to the reader as its realization was painful to the writer; but the traveller has one advantage over the reader, the reality of the “storm, drift, and desolation” had the excitement of the very pain which they produced. To be lost in a haze of blinding snow, to have a spur of icy keenness urging one to fresh exertion, to seek with dazed eyes hour after hour for a faint print of snow shoes or mocassin on the solid surface of a large lake, to see the night approaching and to urge the dogs with whip and voice to fresh exertions, to greater efforts to gain some distant land-point ere night has wrapped the dreary scene in darkness; all this doled out hour by hour in narrative would be dull indeed. To me the chief excitement lay in the question, Will this trail lead to aught? Will we save daylight to the shore? But to the reader the fact is already patent that the trail did lead to something, and that the night did not find the travellers still lost on the frozen lake. 110 Neither could the reader enter into the joy with which, after such a day of toil and hardships, the traveller sees in the gloom the haven he has sought so long; it may be only a rude cabin with windows cut from the snow-drift or the moose-skin, it may be only a camp-fire in a pine clump, but nevertheless the lost wanderer hails with a feeling of intense joy the gleam which tells him of a resting-place; and as he stretches his weary limbs on the hut floor or the pine-bush, he laughs and jests over the misfortunes, fatigues, and fears, which but a short hour before were heartsickening enough. It was with feelings such as this that I beheld the lights of Rivière la Loche station on the night of the 22nd of February; for, through an afternoon of intense cold and blinding drift, we had struggled in vain to keep the track across the Buffalo Lake. The guide had vanished in the drift, and it was only through the exertions of my companion after hours of toil that we were able to regain the track, and reach, late on Saturday evening, the warm shelter of the little post; a small, clean room, a bright fire, a good supper, an entire twenty-four hours of sleep, and rest in prospect. Is it any wonder that with such surroundings the hut at Rivière la Loche seemed a palace? And now each succeeding day carried us further111 into the great wilderness of the north, over lakes whose dim shores loomed through the driving snow, and the ragged pines tossed wildly in the wind; through marsh and muskeg and tangled wood, and all the long monotony of dreary savagery which lies on that dim ridge, from whose sides the waters roll east to the Bay of Hudson, north to the Frozen Ocean. We reached the Methy Portage, and turned north-west through a long region of worthless forest. Now and again a wood Cariboo crossed the track; a marten showed upon a frozen lake; but no other sign of life was visible. The whole earth seemed to sleep in savage desolation; the snow lay deep upon the ground, and slowly we plodded on. To rise at half-past two o’clock a.m., start at four, and plod on until sunset, halting twice for an hour during the day, this was the history of each day’s toil. Yet, with this long day of work, we could only travel about twenty-five miles. In front, along the track, went a young Chipewyan Indian; then came a train of dogs floundering deep in the soft snow; then the other trains wound along upon firmer footing. Camp-making in the evening in this deep snow was tedious work. It was hard, too, to hunt up the various dogs in the small hours of the morning, from their lairs in snow-drift or beneath root of tree; but some dogs112 kept uncomfortably close to camp, and I well remember waking one night out of a deep sleep, to find two huge beasts tearing each other to pieces on the top of the buffalo bag in which I lay. After three days of wearisome labour on this summit ridge of the northern continent we reached the edge of a deep glen, 700 feet below the plateau. At the bottom of this valley a small river ran in many curves between high-wooded shores. The sleds bounded rapidly down the steep descent, dogs and loads rolling frequently in a confused heap together. Night had fallen when we gained the lower valley, and made a camp in the darkness near the winding river; the height of land was passed, and the river in the glen was the Clearwater of the Athabasca. I have before spoken of the life of hardship to which the wintering agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company are habituated, nor was I without some practical knowledge of the subject to which I have alluded. I had now, however, full opportunity of judging the measure of toil contained in the simple encomium one often utters in the north. “He is a good traveller.” Few men have led, even in the hard regions of the north, a life of greater toil than Mr. Roderick Macfarlane. He had left his island home when almost a boy, and in earliest manhood had entered113 the remote wilds of the Mackenzie River. For seventeen years he had remained cut off from the outer world; yet his mind had never permitted itself to sink amidst the oppressive solitudes by which he was surrounded: it rose rather to the level of the vastness and grandeur which Nature wears even in her extreme of desolation. He entered with vigour into the life of toil before him. By no means of a strong constitution or frame of body, he nevertheless fought his way to hardiness; midst cold and darkness and scant living, the natural accompaniments of remote travel, he traversed the country between the Peel, Mackenzie, and Liard rivers, and pushed his explorations to the hitherto unknown River Anderson. Here, on the borders of the Barren Ground, and far within the Arctic Circle, he founded the most northern and remote of all the trading stations of the Fur Company. In mid-winter he visited the shores of the Frozen Ocean, and dwelt with the Esquimaux along the desolate coasts of that bay which bears the name of England’s most hapless explorer. Nor was it all a land of desolation to him. Directed by a mind as sanguine as his own,2 he114 entered warmly into the pursuits of natural history, and classed and catalogued the numerous birds which seek in summer these friendless regions, proving in some instances the range of several of the tiniest of the feathered wanderers to reach from Texas to the Arctic shores. <div class="footnote"> 2 The late Major Kennicot, U.S.A., who, in charge of the United States telegraph exploration, died at Fort Yukon, Alaska. </div> All his travels were performed on snow shoes, driving his train of dogs, or beating the track for them in the snow. In a single winter, as I have before mentioned, he passed from the Mackenzie River to the Mississippi, driving the same train of dogs to Fort Garry, fully 2000 miles from his starting-point; and it was early in the following summer, on his return from England after a hasty visit, the first during twenty years, that I made his acquaintance in the American State of Minnesota. He was not only acquainted with all the vicissitudes of northern travel, but his mind was well stored with the history of previous exploration. Chance and the energy of the old North-West Company had accumulated a large store of valuable books in the principal fort on the Mackenzie. These had been carefully studied during periods of inaction, and arctic exploration in reality or in narrative was equally familiar to him. “I would have given my right arm to have been allowed to go on one of these search expeditions,” he often said to me; and perhaps, if115 those wise and sapient men, who, acting in a corporate or individual capacity, have the power of selection for the work of relief or exploration, would only accustom themselves to make choice of such materials, the bones that now dot the sands of King William’s Land or the estuary of the Great Fish River, might in the flesh yet move amongst us. One night we were camped on a solitary island in the Swan Lake. The camp had been made after sunset, and as the morning’s path lay across the lake, over hard snow where no track was necessary, it was our intention to start on our way long before daybreak. In this matter of early starting it is almost always impossible to rely on the Indian or the half-breed voyageur. They will lie close hid beneath their blankets, unless, indeed, the cold should become so intense as to force them to arise and light a fire; but, generally speaking, they will lie huddled so closely together that they can defy the elements, and it becomes no easy matter to arouse them from their pretended slumbers at two or three o’clock of a dead-cold morning. My companion, however, seemed to be able to live without sleep. At two o’clock he would arise from his deer-skin robe and set the camp astir. I generally got an hour’s law until the fire was fairly agoing and the tea-kettle had been boiled. 116 No matter what the morning was, he never complained. This morning on Swan Lake was bitterly cold—30° below zero at my head. “Beautiful morning!” he exclaimed, as I emerged from my buffalo robe at three o’clock; and he really meant it. I was not to be done. “Oh, delightful!” I managed to chatter forth, with a tolerable degree of acquiescence in my voice, a few mental reservations and many bodily ones all over me. But 30° below zero, unaccompanied by wind, is not so bad after all when one is fairly under weigh and has rubbed one’s nose for a time, and struck the huge “mittained” hands violently together, and run a mile or so; but let the faintest possible breath of wind arise—a “zephyr” the poets would call it, a thing just strong enough to turn smoke or twist the feather which a wild duck might detach from beneath his wing as he cleft the air above—then look out, or rather look down, cast the eye so much askant that it can catch a glimpse of the top of the nose, and you will see a ghostly sight. We have all heard of hard hearts, and stony eyes, and marble foreheads, alabaster shoulders, snowy necks, and firm-set lips, and all the long array of silicious similitudes used to express the various qualities of the human form divine; but117 firmer, and colder, and whiter, and harder than all stands forth prominently a frozen nose. A study of frozen noses would be interesting; one could work out from it an essay on the admirable fitness of things, and even history read by the light of frozen noses might teach us new theories. The Roman nose could not have stood an arctic winter, hence the limits of the Roman empire. The Esquimaux nose is admirably fitted for the climate in which it breathes, hence the limited nature it assumes. <hr /> <div id="toclink_118" class="chapter"> 118 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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