CHAPTER XIV
TIDE WATER AND THE POST
When Easton came to his senses, he found himself warming by the fire. It is wonderful how quickly a half-frozen man will revive. As soon as we were thoroughly thawed out we stripped to our underclothing and hung our things up to dry, permitting our underclothing to dry on us as we stood near the blaze. We were little the worse for our dip, escaping with slightly frosted fingers and toes. I discovered in my pockets a half plug of black tobacco such as we use in the North, put it on the end of a stick and dried it out, and then we had a smoke. We agreed that we had never in our life before had so satisfactory a smoke as that. The stimulant was needed and it put new life into us.
Easton was very pessimistic. He was generally inclined to look upon the dark side of things anyway, and now he believed our fate was sealed, especially if we could not find our paddles, and he began to talk about returning to our cache and thence to the Indians. But I had been in much worse predicaments than this, and paddles or no paddles, determined to go on, for we could work our way down the river somehow with poles and the bag of pemmican would keep us alive until we reached the Post—unless the freeze-up caught us.
When we had dried ourselves we went to the canoe to make an inventory of our remaining goods and chattels, and with a vague hope that a paddle might be found on the shore. What, then, was our surprise and our joy to find not only the paddles but our dunnage bags and my instrument bag amongst the rocks, where an eddy below the rapid swirled the water in. Thus our blankets and clothing were safe, we had fifty pounds of pemmican, our tent and tent stove, and in the small bag that I have mentioned as having remained in the canoe with the other things was all our tea and five or six pounds of caribou tallow. Our matches—and this was a great piece of good fortune—were uninjured, and we had a good stock of them. The tent stove seemed useless without the pipe, but we determined to cling to it, as our luggage now was light. Our guns, axes, the balance of our provisions, including salt, the tea kettle and all our other cooking utensils, were gone, and worst of all, three hundred and fifty unexposed photographic films. Only twenty or thirty unexposed films were saved, but fortunately, only one roll of ten exposed films, which was in one of the cameras, was injured, and none of the exposed films was lost. One camera was damaged beyond use, as were also my aneroid barometer and binoculars. However, we were fortunate to get off so easily as we did, and the accident taught us the lesson to take no chances in rapids and to tie everything fast at all times. Carelessness is pretty sure to demand its penalty, and the wilderness is constantly springing surprises upon those who submit themselves to its care.
A pretty dreary camp we pitched that evening near the place of our mishap. Fortunately there was plenty of dead wood loose on the ground, and we did very well for our camp fire without the axes. A pemmican can with the end cut off about an inch from the top, with a piece of copper wire that I found in my dunnage bag fashioned into a bale, made a very serviceable tea pail, from which we drank in turn, as our cups were lost. The top of the can answered for a frying pan in which to melt our caribou tallow and pemmican when we wanted our ration hot, and as a plate. Tent pegs were cut with our jackknives and the tent stretched between two trees, which avoided the necessity of tent poles. Thus, with our cooking and living outfit reduced to the simplest and crudest form, and with a limited and unvaried diet of pemmican, tallow and tea, we were on the whole able, so long as loose wood could be found for our night camps, to keep comparatively comfortable and free from any severe hardships.
We certainly had great reason to be thankful, and that night before we rolled into our blankets I read aloud by the light of our camp fire from my little Bible the one hundred and seventh Psalm, in thanksgiving.
The next morning before starting forward we paddled out to the rapid, in the vain hope that we might be able to recover some of the lost articles from the bottom of the river, but at the place where the spill had occurred the water was too swift and deep for us to do anything, and we were forced to abandon the attempt and reluctantly resume our journey without the things.
That night we felt sorely the loss of the axes. Our camp was pitched in a spot where no loose wood was to be found save very small sticks, insufficient in quantity for an adequate fire in the open, for the evening was cold. We could not pitch our tent wigwam fashion with an opening at the top for the smoke to escape, as to do that several poles were necessary, and we had no means of cutting them. However, with the expectation that enough smoke would find its way out of the stovepipe hole to permit us to remain inside, we built a small round Indian fire in the center of the tent. We managed to endure the smoke and warm ourselves while tea was making, but the experiment proved a failure and was not to be resorted to again, for I feared it might result in an attack of smoke-blindness. This is an affliction almost identical in effect to snow-blindness. I had suffered from it in the first days of my wandering alone in the Susan Valley in the winter of 1903, and knew what it meant, and that an attack of it would preclude traveling while it lasted, to say nothing of the pain that it would inflict.
Here a portage was necessary around a half-mile canyon through which the river, a rushing torrent, tumbled in the interval over a series of small falls, and all the way the perpendicular walls of basaltic rock that confined it rose on either side to a height of fifty to seventy-five feet above the seething water. Just below this canyon another river joined us from the east, increasing the volume of water very materially. Our tumplines were gone, but with the tracking line and pieces of deer skin we improvised new ones that answered our purpose very well.
The hills, barren almost to their base, and growing in altitude with every mile we traveled, were now closely hugging the river valley, which was almost destitute of trees. Rapids were practically continuous and always strewn with dangerous rocks that kept us constantly on the alert and our nerves strung to the highest tension.
The general course of the river for several days was north, thirty degrees east, but later assumed an almost due northerly course. It made some wide sweeps as it worked its tortuous way through the ranges, sometimes almost doubling on itself. At intervals small streams joined it and it was constantly growing in width and depth. Once we came to a place where it dropped over massive bed rock in a series of falls, some of which were thirty or more feet in height. Few portages, however, were necessary. We took our chances on everything that there was any prospect of the canoe living through— rapids that under ordinary circumstances we should never have trusted--for the grip of the cold weather was tightening with each October day. The small lakes away from the river, where the water was still, must even now have been frozen, but the river current was so big and strong that it had as yet warded off the frost shackles. When the real winter came, however, it would be upon us in a night, and then even this mighty torrent must submit to its power.
At one point the valley suddenly widened and the hills receded, and here the river broke up into many small streams—no less than five— but some four or five miles farther on these various channels came together again, and then the growing hills closed in until they pinched the river banks more closely than ever.
On the morning of October sixth we swung around a big bend in the river, ran a short but precipitous rapid and suddenly came upon another large river flowing in from the west. This stream came through a sandy valley, and below the junction of the rivers the sand banks rose on the east side a hundred feet or so above the water. The increase here in the size of the stream was marked—it was wide and deep. A terrific gale was blowing and caught us directly in our faces as we turned the bend and lost the cover of the lee share above the curve, and paddling ahead was impossible. The waves were so strong, in fact, that we barely escaped swamping before we effected a landing.
We here found ourselves in an exceedingly unpleasant position. We were only fitted with summer clothing, which was now insufficient protection. There was not enough loose wood to make an open fire to keep us warm for more than an hour or so, and we could not go on to look for a better camping place. In a notch between the sand ridges we found a small cluster of trees, between two of which our tent was stretched, but it was mighty uncomfortable with no means of warming. “If we only had our stovepipe now we’d be able to break enough small stuff to keep the stove going,” said Easton. With nothing else to do we climbed a knoll to look at the river below, and there on the knoll what should we find but several lengths of nearly worn-out but still serviceable pipe that some Indian had abandoned. “It’s like Robinson Crusoe,” said Easton. “Just as soon as we need something that we can’t get on very well without we find it. A special Providence is surely caring for us.” We appropriated that pipe, all right, and it did not take us long to get a fire in the stove, which we had clung to, useless as it had seemed to be.
A mass of ripe cranberries, so thick that we crushed them with every step, grew on the hills, and we picked our pailful and stewed them, using crystallose (a small phial of which I had in my dunnage bag) as sweetening. A pound of pemmican a day with a bit of tallow is sustaining, but not filling, and left us with a constant, gnawing hunger. These berries were a godsend, and sour as they were we filled up on them and for once gratified our appetites. We had a great desire, too, for something sweet, and always pounced upon the stray raisins in the pemmican. When either of us found one in his ration it was divided between us. Our great longing was for bread and molasses, just as it had been with Hubbard and me when we were short of food, and we were constantly talking of the feasts we would have of these delicacies when we reached the Post—wheat bread and common black molasses.
The George River all the way down to this point had been in past years a veritable slaughter house. There were great piles of caribou antlers (the barren-ground caribou or reindeer), sometimes as many as two or three hundred pairs in a single pile, where the Indians had speared the animals in the river, and everywhere along the banks were scattered dry bones. Abandoned camps, and some of them large ones and not very old, were distributed at frequent intervals, though we saw no more of the Indians themselves until we reached Ungava Bay.
Wolves were numerous. We saw their tracks in the sand and fresh signs of them were common. They always abound where there are caribou, which form their main living. Ptarmigans in the early morning clucked on the river banks like chickens in a barnyard, and we saw some very large flocks of them. Geese and black ducks, making their way to the southward, were met with daily. But we had no arms or ammunition with which to kill them. I saw some fox signs, but there were very few or no rabbit signs, strange to say, until we were a full hundred miles farther down the river.
This camp, where we found the stovepipe, we soon discovered was nearly at the head of Indian House Lake, so called by a Hudson’s Bay Company factor-John McLean-because of the numbers of Indians that he found living on its shores. McLean, about seventy years earlier, had ascended the river in the interests of his company, for the purpose of establishing interior posts. The most inland Post that he erected was at the lower end of this lake, which is fifty-five miles in length. He also built a Post on a large lake which he describes in his published journal as lying to the west of Indian House Lake. The exact location of this latter lake is not now known, but I am inclined to think it is one which the Indians say is the source of Whale River, a stream of considerable size emptying into Ungava Bay one hundred and twenty miles to the westward of the mouth of the George River. These two rivers are doubtless much nearer together, however, farther inland, where Whale River has its rise. The difficulty experienced by McLean in getting supplies to these two Posts rendered them unprofitable, and after experimenting with them for three years they were abandoned. The agents in charge were each spring on the verge of starvation before the opening of the waters brought fish and food or they were relieved by the brigades from Ungava. They had to depend almost wholly upon their hunters for provisions. It was not attempted in those days to carry in flour, pork and other food stuffs now considered by the traders necessaries. And almost the only goods handled by them in the Indian trade were axes, knives, guns, ammunition and beads.
Indian House Lake now, as then, is a general rendezvous for the Indians during the summer months, when they congregate there to fish and to hunt reindeer. In the autumn they scatter to the better trapping grounds, where fur bearing animals are found in greater abun-dance. We were too late in the season to meet these Indians, though we saw many of their camping places.
A snowstorm began on October seventh, but the wind had so far abated that we were able to resume our journey. It was a bleak and dismal day. Save for now and then a small grove of spruce trees in some sheltered nook, and these at long intervals, the country was destitute and barren of growth. Below our camp, upon entering the lake, there was a wide, flat stretch of sand wash from the river, and below this from the lake shore on either side, great barren, grim hills rose in solemn majesty, across whose rocky face the wind swept the snow in fitful gusts and squalls. Off on a mountain side a wolf disturbed the white silence with his dismal cry, and farther on a big black fellow came to the water’s edge, and with the snow blowing wildly about him held his head in the air and howled a challenge at us as we passed close by. Perhaps he yearned for companionship and welcomed the sight of living things. For my part, grim and uncanny as he looked, I was glad to see him. He was something to vary the monotony of the great solemn silence of our world.
The storm increased, and early in the day the snow began to fall so heavily that we could not see our way, and forced us to turn into a bay where we found a small cluster of trees amongst big bowlders, and pitched our tent in their shelter. The snow had drifted in and filled the space between the rocks, and on this we piled armfuls of scraggy boughs and made a fairly level and wholly comfortable bed; but it was a long, tedious job digging with our hands and feet into the snow for bits of wood for our stove. The conditions were growing harder and harder with every day, and our experience here was a common one with us for the most of the remainder of the way down the river from this point.
The day we reached the lower end of the lake I summed up briefly its characteristics in my field book as follows:
“Indian House Lake has a varying width of from a quarter mile to three miles. It is apparently not deep. Both shores are followed by ridges of the most barren, rocky hills imaginable, some of them rising to a height of eight to nine hundred feet and sloping down sharply to the shores, which are strewn with large loose bowlders or are precipitous bed rock. An occasional sand knoll occurs, and upon nearly every one of these is an abandoned Indian camp. The timber growth—none at all or very scanty spruce and tamarack. Length of lake (approximated) fifty-five miles.”
I had hoped to locate the site of McLean’s old Post buildings, more than three score years ago destroyed by the Indians, doubtless for firewood, but the snow had bidden what few traces of them time had not destroyed, and they were passed unnoticed. The storm which raged all the time we were here made progress slow, and it was not until the morning of the tenth that we reached the end of the lake, where the river, vastly increased in volume, poured out through a rapid.
Below Indian House Lake there were only a few short stretches of slack water to relieve the pretty continuous rapids. The river wound in and out, in and out, rushing on its tumultuous way amongst ever higher mountains. There was no time to examine the rapids before we shot them. We had to take our chances, and as we swung around every curve we half expected to find before us a cataract that would hurl us to destruction. The banks were often sheer from the water’s edge, and made landing difficult or even impossible. In one place for a dis-tance of many miles the river had worn its way through the mountains, leaving high, perpendicular walls of solid rock on either side, forming a sort of canyon. In other places high bowlders, piled by some giant force, formed fifty-foot high walls, which we had to scale each night to make our camp. In the morning some peak in the blue distance would be noted as a landmark. In a couple of hours we would rush past it and mark another one, which, too, would soon be left behind.
The rapids continued the characteristic of the river and were terrific. Often it would seem that no canoe could ride the high, white waves, or that we could not avoid the swirl of mighty cross-current eddies, which would have swallowed up our canoe like a chip had we got into them. There were rapids whose roar could be distinctly heard for five or six miles. These we approached with the greatest care, and portaged around the worst places. The water was so clear that often we found ourselves dodging rocks, which, when we passed them, were ten or twelve feet below the surface. It was here that a peculiar optical illusion occurred. The water appeared to be running down an incline of about twenty degrees. At the place where this was noticed, however, the current was not exceptionally swift. We were in a section now where the Indians never go, owing to the character of the river—a section that is wholly untraveled and unhunted.
After leaving Indian House Lake, as we descended from the plateau, the weather grew milder. There were chilly winds and bleak rains, but the snow, though remaining on the mountains, disappeared gradually from the valley, and this was a blessing to us, for it enabled us to make camp with a little less labor, and the bits of wood were left uncovered, to be gathered with more ease. Every hour of light we needed, for with each dawn and twilight the days were becoming noticeably shorter. The sun now rose in the southeast, crossed a small segment of the sky, and almost before we were aware of it set in the southwest.
The wilderness gripped us closer and closer as the days went by. Remembrances of the outside world were becoming like dreamland fancies—something hazy, indefinite and unreal. We could hardly bring ourselves to believe that we had really met the Indians. It seemed to us that all our lives we had been going on and on through rushing water, or with packs over rocky portages, and the Post we were aiming to reach appeared no nearer to us than it did the day we left Northwest River—long, long ago. We seldom spoke. Sometimes in a whole day not a dozen words would be exchanged. If we did talk at all it was at night over soothing pipes, after the bit of pemmican we allowed ourselves was disposed of, and was usually of something to eat—planning feasts of darn goods, bread and molasses when we should reach a place where these luxuries were to be had. It was much like the way children plan what wonderful things they will do, and what unbounded good things they will indulge in, when they attain that high pinnacle of their ambition—“grown-ups.”
After our upset in the rapid Easton eschewed water entirely, except for drinking purposes. He had had enough of it, he said. I did bathe my hands and face occasionally, particularly in the morning, to rouse me from the torpor of the always heavy sleep of night. What savages men will revert into when they are buried for a long period in the wilderness and shake off the trammels and customs of the conventionalism of civilization! It does not take long to make an Indian out of a white man so far as habits and customs of living go.
Our routine of daily life was always the same. Long before daylight I would arise, kindle a fire, put over it our tea water, and then get Easton out of his blankets. At daylight we would start. At midday we had tea, and at twilight made the best camp we could.
The hills were assuming a different aspect—less conical in form and not so high. The bowlders on the river banks were superseded by massive bed-rock granite. The coves and hollows were better wooded and there were some stretches of slack water. On October fifteenth we portaged around a series of low falls, below which was a small lake expansion with a river flowing into it from the east. Here we found the first evidence of human life that we had seen in a long while—a wide portage trail that had been cut through now burned and dead trees on the eastern side of the river. It was fully six feet in width and had been used for the passage of larger boats than canoes. The moss was still unrenewed where the tramp of many moccasins had worn it off. This was the trail made by John McLean’s brigades nearly three-quarters of a century before, for in their journeys to Indian House Lake they had used rowboats and not canoes for the transportation of supplies.
The day we passed over this portage was a most miserable one. We were soaked from morning till night with mingled snow and rain, and numb with the cold, but when we made our night camp, below the junction of the rivers, one or two ax cuttings were found, and I knew that now our troubles were nearly at an end and we were not far from men. The next afternoon (Monday, October sixteenth) we stopped two or three miles below a rapid to boil our kettle, and before our tea was made the canoe was high and dry on the rocks. We had reached tide water at last! How we hurried through that luncheon, and with what light hearts we launched the canoe again, and how we peered into every bay for the Post buildings that we knew were now close at hand can be imagined. These bays were being left wide stretches of mud and rocks by the receding water, which has a tide fall here of nearly forty feet. At last, as we rounded a rocky point, we saw the Post. The group of little white buildings nestling deep in a cove, a feathery curl of smoke rising peacefully from the agent’s house, an Eskimo tupek (tent), boats standing high on the mud flat below, and the howl of a husky dog in the distance, formed a picture of comfort that I shall long remember.
