IV
If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south end of this field.
We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains—such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South—the skeleton of a moose, come to its death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big game; and presently the river was lost—not in a lake—but in a swamp. A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie. We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it—leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.
"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop that lying."
Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first birch tree affording a new strip of bark.
Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian families to prevent lapses to barbarism.
Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks above the reach of animal marauders—testimony to the honesty of the passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city can not boast of its denizens.
"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times," declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were starving owing to the rabbit famine."
In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice—a matter of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."
But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.
Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the slow keel.
One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky—a far honk—then stillness. Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted against the lonely red sunset sky—a lob stick—a dark evergreen stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck—eighty years old he was—squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperor—the first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars—trading Sam Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar. Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and care-free than you are—peace to his aged bones!
Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun, only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe. Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.
Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and by seven in the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles—all three were speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred miles to this lagoon of dead water?"
"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks—it isn't drift—it's birds—it's duck and geese—I have never seen anything like it—I have lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of anything—of anything like it."
Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south. That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe—the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft—with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.
That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit and ermine, the furs that clothe—not princes and millionaire, who buy silver fox and sea otter—but you and me and the rest of us whose object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since 1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game—save in the year of the unexplained rabbit pest—shows no sign of diminishing.
Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.
To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer, "Poor—poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not make that answer.
To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world, especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.
"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.