CHAPTER VIII
COUNTRY DELIGHTS
Sometimes, I go a-fishing and shooting, and even then I carry a note-book, that if I lose game, I may at least bring home my pleasant thoughts!—PLINY.
I am fishing for graylings, but so far have caught none, my case being similar to that of one Chang Chi-Ho, who in the eighth century, "spent his time angling but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish."
And truth to tell, I have not even the grace of an object, unless it be to talk to the men folk who are lading the big flat scows called "Sturgeon-Heads," for the trip down the river.
By these right pleasant waters of the Athabasca, you are no longer guided by duty but throw a rein on the senses. You do things because you want to do them, and not because you ought to. This is owing to the fact that the time-table loses its thrall north of 55°. I intend stopping here a long while.
It is a sun-steeped day, and the river looks like a bed of sequins. The sun, although it is strong in Alberta, doesn't seem to ripen people like it does farther south. I can see this from the way people give me greeting and from how they tell me all that is in their hearts.
Antoine hears that far off in that place called Montreal they dig worms out of the clay for bait, and that these worms have neither shells nor fur. This must be "wan beeg lie," for how could the worms keep from freezing? It is not according to reason. These white men with trails in the middle of their hair say these things so that the Crees, who are very shrewd rivermen, will go to live in Montreal.
I heartily concur with Antoine. I have been to Montreal myself and have never seen so much as the sign of an earth-worm. They tell queer yarns, those Eastern fellows who come from down North to write books and buy land, but Antoine and I won't be fooled by them. Indeed, we won't.
Antoine caught a pike the other day without a line, but he lost it again. It was the biggest fish he ever caught, but this is only natural, and is no new thing, for ever since the first slippery fish slithered through the hands of primeval man, it has always been the biggest one that got away. Where these biggest fish foregather ultimately has always been a mystery to me. Some day, we shall discover a piscatorial paradise with millions of them in it.
Antoine presents me to Captain Shot, an Indian who has been on this river for forty-eight years. The Captain is seventy-three, and his name is really Fausennent. He is called "Shot" because he was the first man to shoot the rapids of the Athabasca. I say that Antoine "presents me" but I say it advisedly, for the North levels people, by which is meant the primitive north where they live with nature. In this environment, the man who builds boats and supplies food or fuel, is the superior of the man or woman who writes, or pronounces theories. I may be able to hoodwink the people up south as to my importance in our community, but it is different here. And this is as it should be.
Captain Shot is engaged in building a boat for the Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company, and there is even a smoking-room in it. But, Blessed Mother! it is no trouble to build a boat now—none at all, for presently the railway will be completed and the boilers and metal fixings will come in over it, but in the old days—that is to say up till now—it was different. When the Northern Navigation Co. brought in the boilers for their boats, they hauled them a hundred miles over the trail from Edmonton, and it took seventy-two horses on each boiler.
"Didn't the government help any?" I ask.
Oh yes! the late government at Ottawa tried to help transportation by sending in fifty reindeer; but the Captain has heard tell that some men swore terrible oaths at the government, and set their dogs about eating up the deer, for these men hold a kind of an idea it is railways the country hereabouts needs, but he is not quite sure as to the rights of the story.
There are four hundred men employed here at the Landing in building scows and transhipping. Only a few of the scows are brought back, for they have to be tracked up by power of man. For this reason, a new flotilla is built each year.
Captain Shot has many estimable sons, all of whom are rivermen and shipbuilders. They could hardly be expected to disgrace their name by becoming mere farmers or teamsters after the unwisdom of the white man's way. Ho! Ho! the idea of any one wishing to become a farmer.
But I was telling you about the scows. Unless you sat here catching fish, you could never believe how much stuff can be packed into a scow. As I watch the men at work, I think of Mark Twain's ambitious blue-jay who tried to fill a house with acorns. Still the men do not seem lacking in confidence, and keep wading backward and forward through the water with sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, chests of tea, crates of hardware, tins of stuff, and treasures in boxes that can only be guessed at. I am hoping the biggest box contains dolls, ribbons, work-bags, picture books, peppermint bull's eyes, and things like that, for a mission school Christmas-tree somewhere down near the Arctic. I am almost praying that it does.
The smaller boxes are called permits, and each contain six bottles of whisky. These are for the pioneering gentlemen at the different posts who are delicate, and who honestly desire to get strong.
Each permit is signed by a doctor so that the liquor must be considered strictly as medicine. Irritating people who fail to understand that there are only two licensed hotels between Edmonton and the North Pole, sneer about there being a thousand delicate men on the rivers; but, for my part, I am inclined to stand by the doctors, although I have always held the clinical thermometer to be the only thing about the medical profession with an integrity beyond question.
If any one should glean from reading these lines that all there is to loading a scow is to load it, he or she is a much misled person. The last bale is hardly stowed away till two of the men have disappeared. No one saw them go, least of all the Boss, but any one can see they are not here now. The Boss is a creature of steel who seems to forget there is much to be done in the last hour or two before a boatman leaves the Landing for the stretched out journey beyond. Various purchases are to be made; people are to be seen; drinks are to be had against a long, long thirst, to mention nothing of new vows to Marie, Babette, and Josephine.
After awhile, the voyageurs are all rounded up with the exception of Luke. The best the Boss can say for Luke is that he has been given a Christian name. Jake is sent to fetch him. Luke turns up, but Scotty must find Jake. Luke isn't drunk either—not he. It's the scow that's drunk. Who said Luke was "fuller'n a goat," I'd like to know. Ultimately, the Boss starts off to get Scotty and Jake. He gets them, and he sits them down in a highly decisive manner, only to find that Bill, and Jean Baptiste, and One-eyed Pete have gone up town for a dunnage bag they left at the Grand Union Hotel.... The Boss looks eight feet tall when he is angry, but, otherwise, to the unseeing eye, he is only a young factor, or maybe an independent trader, intent on his work like scores of other ordinary, unaccounted workmen. Contrawise, the eye of imagination may see in him an adventuring gentleman launching a craft that is to traverse for hundreds of miles through many and diverse waterways, carrying with it a veritable cargo of blessings to the far and lonely outposts of the North which, as yet, are little else than names.
The rivermen push off from shore with their oars till, in the centre of the stream, the current catches them and carries them along. This is their only method of locomotion, to float and float with the stream. They have a steering-pole in the scow similar to that which may be seen in pictures of old Roman galleys, and when, because of darkness, the voyageurs wish to stay their course, they make to shore by its aid, even as the Romans did more than two thousand years ago. To make the simile complete, I stand on the bank and repeat the invocation of the Roman poet: "Oh ship that conveyest Virgil to Greece, duly deliver up the precious life entrusted to thy care."...
If I hadn't jerked the crown of an old hat out of the river under the impression that it was a fish, Justine would not have laughed out loud and I would not have had an excuse to get acquainted with her. She has been sitting nearby this half-hour. Her name isn't really Justine and I forget what it is. She is the prettiest breed-girl in the country and, by the same token, the frailest. "Believe me, Madam," explained an old officer of the Mounted Police, the other day, "those eyes were never given her for the good of her soul. She is a little worth-nothing person like all the other breed-girls."
This man despises breed-women and he has made a sufficiently intimate study of them to form an opinion. He wishes they were all dead. "For an absolute truth, Madam, listen to me. For years, these women have paddled their canoes up this river with kegs of contraband liquor a-swing from ropes beneath and none of the force ever suspected. They were so monstrously civil, they would even give us 'a lift' if we desired it. I was highly surprised when we found them out, and so disgusted with myself that, for a time, I thought of becoming a type-setter. By Jove! you know; a fellow doesn't expect to find a keg outside a canoe. Now does he?"
But I am not one of those who believe there are good women and bad women. Some are elemental and others are not; that is the only difference. I will maintain this to the very day my tongue wears out.
Justine's white father must have had a head and shoulders of the most perfect classical type. As she sits on the beach with a light shawl drawn down over her head, this girl resembles greatly the Madonna of Bouguereau. I tell her this, and we talk for a long while. She thinks my suggestion that she marry a riverman, or a trapper, and have quite a large family, a wholly foolish suggestion. It causes her to think little of both my discernment and my knowledge of men. Rivermen, she would have me understand, hardly ever come home, and when they do, only to get drunk and beat their wives. A white man won't marry a breed girl, nowadays, and if he should give her his heart, he expects it to be returned sometime. Still, Justine considers his transient affections to be preferable to those of the breed's, in that a white man seldom strikes his girl. Justine gives me a short lesson in Cree, and, among other words, I learn that saky hagen is the equivalent of "one I love," and that nichimoos means "sweetheart." The former is usually applied to a child, the latter to an adult.
When I ask Justine to tell me a story about the North, she complies because she has been educated in a mission school and speaks English well. And then she is not in the least afraid of me since I showed so lamentable a lack of insight about marriage. Now listen to the story.
Once a mallard who was sick of love asked a blackbird to marry him. "Marry me," he said, "and I will give you fish to eat and wild rice. And when the sun is hot, I will hide you in the rushes and keep you under my wings."
And so they lived together as man and wife and the blackbird bore her husband three sons, but soon he tired of her and made believe he was dead so that she went away and left him in peace.
And then the mallard went in search of another wife.... It was a story I craved of Justine, and lo! she has told me a parable.