III
The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.
Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it—not just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River (barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow wheat all right—splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world. That is, twenty hours of sunlight—not daylight but sunlight—force growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does exist? Cataracts countless—Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs—areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high—areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region above Cumberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the ground would not hold the tent pegs.
It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by settlement—does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air—it might almost have been a Harvard air—if these distances were "as the crow flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me too often—he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.
"There ain't no distances as the crow flies in this country," he answered. "You got to travel 'cording as the waters collect or the ice goes out."
Well, here is your country, three thousand by two thousand miles, a great fur preserve. What exists in it? Very little wood, and that small. Undoubtedly some minerals. What else exists? A very sparse population of Indians, whose census no man knows, for it has never been taken; but it is a pretty safe guess to say there are not thirty thousand Indians all told in the north fur country. I put this guess tentatively and should be glad of information from any one in a position to guess closer. I have asked the Hudson's Bay Company and I have asked Revillons how many white hunters and traders they think are in the fur country of the North. I have never met any one who placed the number in the North at more than two thousand. Spread two thousand white hunters with ten thousand Indians—for of the total Indian population two-thirds are women and children—over an area the size of two-thirds of Europe—I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally and degenerate.
Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve—Labrador, which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox—the finest in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands—cross fox almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat, coarse harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter! The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals exist—as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day discoveries of Cobalt prove—and there is also heavy timber; but north of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the impenetrable and—I think—indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur preserve similar in climate to Labrador.
Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front of the camp at night? The Indian calls that "a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."
Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a river—it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and goose grass—ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game. Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the ground of the little fellows—waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts—hundreds of thousands of muskrat are taken out of this muskeg alone—exceed by a hundredfold the profits on the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten.
Look at the map again! North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake—more muskeg cut by limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a straight stretch of one thousand miles—nothing but rocks and cataracts and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them—and sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by the amber water ways.