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

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI.</h2></div> <div class="blockquot inhead medium"> Jacques, the French miner.—A fearful abyss.—The Great Cañon of the Peace River.—We are off on our western way.—Unfortunate Indians.—A burnt baby.—The moose that walks. </div> It was dusk when I reached the ruined hut which stood at the western end of the portage. My men had long preceded me, and Kalder had supper ready before the great fireplace. The fire shed its light upon a fourth figure; it was that of Jacques, the French miner, five feet two inches in height; miner, trapper, trader, and wanderer since he left his home in Lorraine, near the war-famous citadel of Belfort, some twenty years ago. I brought one piece of news to the hut: it was that although the river was free from ice opposite our resting-place, and to the end of the reach in view, yet it was fast closed in for the twenty or thirty miles which my mountain climb had enabled me to scan. So here in the midst of the mountains248 we awaited the disruption of the ice and the opening of our watery way. The delay thus occasioned was unexpected, and fell heavily on my supply of food; but rabbits and partridges were numerous, and Kalder’s gun proved itself to be a worthy weapon at these denizens of the forest, as well as at the beaver. On the evening of my arrival at the hut I had seen two moose drinking on a sand-bar near the mouth of the Cañon, but the river lay between me and them, and we could find no further trace of them on the following day. In one respect the delay was not irksome to me; it gave me an opportunity of exploring a portion of the Great Cañon, and forming some idea of the nature of the difficulties and dangers which made it an impassable chasm for the hardiest voyageurs. On the 29th of April the ice in the upper part of the river broke up, and came pouring down with great violence for some hours; blocks of ice many feet in thickness, and weighing several tons, came down the broad river, crushing against each other, and lining the shore with huge crystal masses. The river rose rapidly, and long after dark the grating of the ice-blocks in the broad channel below told us that the break-up must be a general249 one; the current before our hut was running six miles an hour, and the ice had begun to run early in the afternoon. All next day the ice continued to run at intervals, but towards evening it grew less, and at nightfall it had nearly ceased. During the day I set out to explore the Cañon. Making my way along the edge of what was, in ages past, the shore of a vast lake, I gained the summit of a ridge which hung directly over the Cañon. Through a mass of wrack and tangled forest I held on, guided by the dull roar of waters until I reached an open space, where a ledge of rock dipped suddenly into the abyss: on the outer edge of this rock a few spruce-trees sprung from cleft and fissure, and from beneath, deep down in the dark chasm, a roar of water floated up into the day above. Advancing cautiously to the smooth edge of the chasm, I took hold of a spruce-tree and looked over. Below lay one of those grim glimpses which the earth holds hidden, save from the eagle and the mid-day sun. Caught in a dark prison of stupendous cliffs (cliffs which hollowed out beneath, so that the topmost ledge literally hung over the boiling abyss of waters), the river foamed and lashed against rock and precipice, nine hundred feet below me. Like some caged beast that finds escape impossible on one side, it250 flew as madly and as vainly against the other; and then fell back in foam and roar and raging whirlpool. The rocks at the base held the record of its wrath in great trunks of trees, and blocks of ice lying piled and smashed in shapeless ruin. Looking down the Cañon towards the south, a great glen opened from the west; and the sun, now getting low in the heavens, poured through this valley a flood of light on red and grey walls of rugged rock; while half the pine-clad hills lay dark in shade, and half glowed golden in this level light; and far away, beyond the shadowy chasm and the sun-lit glen, one great mountain-peak lifted his dazzling crest of snow high into the blue air of the evening. There are many indications above the mouth of the Cañon, that the valley in which our hut stood was once a large lake. The beaches and terrace levels are distinctly marked, but the barrier fall was worn down into a rapid, and the Cañon became a slant of water for some thirty miles. At the entrance the rock is worn smooth and flat in many places, and huge cisterns have been hollowed in its surface—“kettles,” as the voyageur calls them—perfectly round, and holding still the granite boulder which had chiselled them, worn to the size and roundness of a cannon-ball from ages of revolution. Some of these kettles are tiny251 as a tea-cup; others are huge as the tun of Heidelberg. When I got back to the hut, night had fallen. At the end of the long river-reach a new moon hung in the orange-tinted west; the river was almost clear of ice, and it was resolved to start on the morrow. There was a certain amount of vagueness in the programme before me. For seventy miles the course was perfectly clear—there was, in fact, only one road to follow—but at the end of that distance two paths lay open, and circumstances could only determine the future route at that point. If the reader will imagine an immense letter Y laid longitudinally from west to east, he will have a fair idea of the Peace River above the Cañon. The tail of the Y will be the seventy miles of river running directly through the main range of the Rocky Mountains; the right arm will be the Findlay, having its source 300 miles higher up in that wilderness of mountains known as the Stickeen; the left arm will be the Parsnip River, sometimes called by mistake the Peace River, having its source 260 miles to the south near the waters of the upper Frazer. Countless lesser streams (some of them, nevertheless, having their 200 miles of life) roll down into these main systems; and it would seem as though the main252 channel had, like a skilful general, united all its widely-scattered forces at the forks, seventy miles above us, before entering on the gigantic task of piercing the vast barrier of the central mountains. Standing on the high ground at the back of the hut in which we awaited the opening of the great river, and looking westward at the mountains piled together in endless masses, it was difficult to imagine by what process a mighty river had cloven asunder this wilderness of rock,—giving us the singular spectacle of a wide, deep, tranquil stream flowing through the principal mountain range of the American continent. May-day broke in soft showers of rain; the mountains were shrouded in mist; the breeze was not strong enough to lift the gauze-like vapour from the tree-tops on the south shore. By nine o’clock the mists began to drift along the hill-sides; stray peaks came forth through rifts, then shut themselves up again; until finally the sun drew off the vapours, and clad mountain and valley in blue and gold. We loaded the canoe, closed the door of the old shanty, and shoved off upon our western way. There were four of us and one dog—two miners, my half-breed Kalder, myself, and Cerf-vola. I had arranged with Jacques to travel together, and I made him captain of the boat. None knew better253 the secrets of the Upper Peace River; for ten years he had delved its waters with his paddle, and its sand-bars with his miner’s shovel. Little Jacques—he was a curious specimen of humanity, and well worth some study too. I have already said that he was small, but that does not convey any idea of his real size. I think he was the smallest man I ever saw—of course I mean a man, and not a dwarf; Jacques had nothing of the dwarf about him—nay, he was a very giant in skill and craft of paddle, and pluck and daring. He had lived long upon his own resources, and had found them equal to most emergencies. He could set his sails to every shift of fortune, and make some headway in every wind. In summer he hunted gold; in winter he hunted furs. He had the largest head of thick bushy hair I ever saw. He had drawn 3000 dollars’ worth of pure gold out of a sand-pit on the Ominica River during the preceding summer; he had now a hundred fine marten-skins, the produce of his winter’s trapping. Jacques was rich, but all the same, Jacques must work. As I have said, Jacques was a native of Belfort. Belfort had proved a tough nut for Kaiser William’s legions; and many a time as I watched this little giant in times of peril, I thought that with 200,000 little Jacqueses one could fight big Bismarck’s254 beery battalions as often as they pleased. Of course Jacques had a pair of miner’s boots. A miner without a pair of miner’s boots would be like Hamlet with Hamlet left out. When Jacques donned these boots, and swung himself out on a huge forest trunk prostrate in a rapid, and hewed away at the giant to give our canoe a passage, he looked for all the world like his prototype the giant-killer, and the boots became the seven-leagued friends of our early days. How the big axe flew about his little head, until crash went the monster, and Jacques sprang back to rock or boat as lively as a squirrel. He had many queer stories of early days, and could recount with pride the history of the stirring times he had seen. What miner’s heart does not soften at the recollection, in these degenerate days, of how the Vigilants hanged six roughs one morning in the market-place of Frisco, just two-and-twenty years ago? We poled and paddled along the shore of the river; now on one side, now on the other, dodging the heavy floes of ice which still came at intervals along the current. In the evening we had gained a spot some twelve miles from the hut, and we made our camp on a wooded flat set in a wide amphitheatre of hills. The next morning broke wet and stormy, and we255 lay in camp during the early part of the day. Towards mid-day the silence was broken by the discharge of a gun at the opposite side of the river. We at once answered it, and soon another report replied to ours. There were Indians in the vicinity, so we might expect a visit. About an hour later a most wretched group appeared at our camp. It consisted of two half-clad women, one of whom carried a baby on her back; a wild-looking boy, apparently about twelve or fourteen years of age, led the way, carrying an old gun; two dogs brought up the rear. A glance at the dogs showed that food, at least, was plentiful in the Indian camp—they were fat and sleek. If an Indian has a fat dog, you may know that game is abundant; if the dog is thin, food is scarce; if there be no dog at all, the Indian is starving, and the dog has been killed and eaten by his master. But to proceed:— In a network of tattered blankets and dripping rags, these three wretched creatures stalked into our camp; they were as wet as if they had come underneath the river instead of across it; but that seemed to give them little thought. Jacques understood a few words of what they said, and the rest was made out by signs;—all the men were sick, and had been sick for months. This boy and another were alone able to hunt; but256 moose were plenty, and starvation had not come to supplement sickness; the women were “packing” the men. Reader, what do you imagine that means? I will soon tell you. It means that when the camp moves—which it does every few days, as the game gets hunted away from one locality—the women carried the men on their backs in addition to the household gods. Literally these poor women carried on their bent backs the house, the clothes, the food, the baby, and the baby’s father. What was the disease? They could not tell. My slender stock of drugs was long since exhausted; I had nothing left but the pain-killer. I gave them half of my last bottle, and had it been the golden wealth of the sand-bars of this Peace River itself, it could not have been more thought of. To add to their misfortunes, the baby had come to grief about a week previously—it had tumbled head foremost into the fire. It was now unslung from its mother’s back for my inspection. Poor little Beaver! its face and head had got a dreadful burning; but, thanks to mountain air and Indian hardiness, it was getting all right. Had I anything to rub on it? A little of the Mal de Raquette porpoise-oil and pain-killer yet remained, and with such an antidote the youthful Beaver might henceforth live in the camp-fire. 257 I know some excellent Christians at home who occasionally bestow a shilling or a half-crown upon a poor man at a church-door or a street-crossing, not for the humanity of the act, but just to purchase that amount of heaven in the next world. I believe they could tell you to a farthing how much of Paradise they had purchased last week or the week before. I am not sure that they are quite clear as to whether the quantity of heaven thus purchased, is regulated by the value set on the gift by the beggar or by the rich man; but if it be by the value placed on it by him who gets it, think, my Christian friends, think what a field for investment does not this wilderness present to you. Your shilling spent here amongst these Indians will be rated by them at more than its weight in gold; and a pennyworth of pain-killer might purchase you a perpetuity of Paradise. Jacques, an adept in Indian trade, got a large measure of dried moose meat in exchange for a few plugs of tobacco; and the Indians went away wet, but happy. One word more about Indians—and I mean to make it a long word and a strong word, and perhaps my reader will add, a wrong word; but never mind, it is meant the other way. This portion of the Beaver tribe trade to Hudson’s Hope, the fort we have but lately quitted. 258 Here is the story of a trade made last summer by “the moose that walks.” “The moose that walks” arrived at Hudson’s Hope early in the spring. He was sorely in want of gunpowder and shot, for it was the season when the beaver leave their winter houses, and when it is easy to shoot them. So he carried his thirty marten-skins to the fort, to barter them for shot, powder, and tobacco. There was no person at the Hope. The dwelling-house was closed, the store shut up, the man in charge had not yet come up from St. John’s; now what was to be done? Inside that wooden house lay piles and piles of all that the walking moose most needed; there was a whole keg of powder; there were bags of shot and tobacco—there was as much as the moose could smoke in his whole life. Through a rent in the parchment window the moose looked at all these wonderful things, and at the red flannel shirts, and at the four flint guns, and the spotted cotton handkerchiefs, each worth a sable skin at one end of the fur trade, half a sixpence at the other. There was tea, too—tea, that magic medicine before which life’s cares vanished like snow in spring sunshine. The moose sat down to think about all these things, but thinking only made matters worse.259 He was short of ammunition, therefore he had no food, and to think of food when one is very hungry is an unsatisfactory business. It is true that “the moose that walks” had only to walk in through that parchment window, and help himself till he was tired. But no, that would not do. “Ah!” my Christian friend will exclaim, “Ah! yes, the poor Indian had known the good missionary, and had learnt the lesson of honesty and respect for his neighbour’s property.” Yes; he had learnt the lesson of honesty, but his teacher, my friend, had been other than human. The good missionary had never reached the Hope of Hudson, nor improved the morals of “the moose that walks.” But let us go on. After waiting two days he determined to set off for St. John, two full days’ travel. He set out, but his heart failed him, and he turned back again. At last, on the fourth day he entered the parchment window, leaving outside his comrade, to whom he jealously denied admittance. Then he took from the cask of powder three skins’ worth, from the tobacco four skins’ worth, from the shot the same; and sticking the requisite number of martens in the powder-barrel and the shot-bag and the tobacco-case, he hung up his remaining skins on a nail to the credit of his account, and departed260 from this El Dorado, this Bank of England of the Red man in the wilderness, this Hunt and Roskell of Peace River. And when it was all over he went his way, thinking he had done a very reprehensible act, and one by no means to be proud of. Poor moose that walks! in this trade for skins you are but a small item! Society muffles itself in your toil-won sables in distant cities, while you starve and die out in the wilderness. The credit of your twenty skins, hung to the rafter of Hudson’s Hope, is not a large one; but surely there is a Hope somewhere else, where your account is kept in golden letters, even though nothing but the clouds had baptized you, no missionary had cast water on your head, and God only knows who taught you to be honest. Let me not be misunderstood in this matter. I believe, gentlemen missionaries, you mean well by this Indian. I will go further; you form, I think, almost the only class who would deal fairly by him, but you go to work in a wrong direction; your mode of proceeding is a mistake. If you would only be a little more human, and a little less divine—if you would study the necessities of the savage races amidst whom you have cast your lot—what good might ye not effect? 261 This Cree, this Blackfoot, this Chipewyan, this Beaver—what odds is it, in the name of all goodness, whether he fully understands the numbered or unnumbered things you tell him. Teach him the simple creed which you would teach a child. He is starving, and the feast you give him is of delicate and subtle food, long since compounded from the brain of schoolman and classicist. He is naked, and you would clothe him in mysterious raiment and fine tissue, which time has woven out of the webs of doubt and inquiry. All this will not warm him from the terrible blast of winter, or shelter him from the drenching rains of early summer. He has many faults, some virtues, innumerable wants. Begin with these. Preach against the first; cultivate the second; relieve as much as possible the third. Make him a good man before you attempt to make him an indifferent Christian. In a word, do more for his body; and after a bit, when you have taught him to help his wife in toil and trouble—to build a house and to live in it—to plant a few potatoes when the ground thaws, and to hoe them out ere it hardens again—when you have loosed the bands of starvation, nakedness, and hardship from the grasp in which they now hold him, then will come the moment for your books and your higher teaching. And in his hut, with a well-filled262 stomach, he will have time to sift truth from falsehood, amidst all the isms and arians under the guise of which you come to teach him. But just now he is only a proletarian and an open-arian, and not much even of these. Meantime I know that you wish well by him. You are ready to teach him—to tell him about a host of good, and some very indifferent, persons; but lo! in the middle of your homilies he falls asleep, and his sleep is the sleep of death. He starves and dies out before you. Of course I know the old old answer: “He is hopeless; we have tried everything; we can do nothing.” How often have I not been told, “He is hopeless; we can do nothing for this Red man!” But will any person dare to say that men such as this Indian at Hudson’s Hope are beyond the cure of man? If they be, then your creed must be a poor weak thing. <hr /> <div id="toclink_263" class="chapter"> 263 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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