CHAPTER XIV
ON THE LESSER SLAVE RIVER
Gitchie Manito, the Mighty,
Mitchie Manito, the bad;
In the breast of every Redman,
In the dust of every dead man,
There's a tiny heap of Gitchie—
And a mighty mound of Mitchie—
There's the good and there's the bad.—CY WARMAN.
From Soto Landing, the Lesser Slave River bends its course to the north and west till it empties into Lesser Slave Lake at Sawridge. It is a small river, being about a hundred and fifty feet wide and about thirty deep. Owing to its sharp curving banks much care is required in its navigation. Its banks are heavily wooded and as we pass down its quiet reaches we seem to have sailed into a dreamful world, where just to breathe is a delight. I account it sinful to talk in these surroundings, but one may not hope to enjoy solitude for any considerable time in a country where women-travellers are sufficiently rare to arouse a raging curiosity in the breast of every male entity who comes within reach of her. People like these northmen, who live out of doors most of the year, are not easily bored. They are interested in things; they are perennially young, and this, I take it, is the secret of Pan.
Now, the trouble about having a man near is that he is always picking up your things and so making you nervous. I prefer to wait till ready to move before regaining my handkerchief, my back-comb, my hand satchel and my scarf. This is why I pretend not to notice the iron-built person with strong white teeth who has seated himself nearby and who is watching a chance to restore something. He is what the Irish call "bold-like." I know what he is thinking about and understand his motive perfectly. He wants to know if I have ever been north before. He is the thirteenth man so to wonder. I am, however, severely purposed not to tell him.
There is a belief, common in the cities, that no questions are asked in the bush; that people may travel for days together without divulging ends. Here is a good place to spend an arrow on this widely droll deception. An uninquisitive man is as hard to find here as an unsociable cockerel. Goodness Divine! the chief use of a stranger in the woods is to keep the denizens of it from dying from ennui and lack of news. They would consider it the essence of uncordiality not to show an interest in the affairs of a stranger, especially as the stranger might possibly have succeeded in smuggling a flash [Transcriber's note: flask?] or two past the police on the prohibition line.
This bush-ranger catches me off my guard when a bulldog fly takes a piece out of my ear. It is his opportunity to produce a vial of collodion for the wound. As he pulls out the cork and finds a match to dip in the mixture, he tells me that the bulldog fly is no sweet angel and equal to ten thousand times its weight in prize-fighters—a statement which I do not think it fit to disbelieve. The collodion having eased the hurt this impudent gentleman draws up his chair and talks with an immense volubility concerning the species, genera, and habits of these flies till one might take him for a professor of entomology.
The long winter nights in this province enable the denizens of it to become well posted in any subject which they may elect to pursue. This was how the late Bishop Bompas, who lived here for over half a century, became the first authority in the world on Syriac, so that the savants of Europe were wont to refer their mooted points to this lonely old prelate for decision, waiting a year, or often longer, for the answer which was carried by Indians for hundreds of miles down the out trail to Edmonton. My new friend declares that, like Montaigne, the bulldog fly has only one virtue and that this one got in by stealth.
"Yes?" say I, with a rising reflection which delicately hints at an answer.
He does not seem to hear me, this cold-chilled, care-hardened northerner, and goes on stuffing his pipe with exit-plug and searching through pocket after pocket for a match as if my remark were of no concernment. He is trying to pretend he has known me for a long time, and that I was the one who took the initiative in this acquaintanceship. This is why I became dumb, and why he repeats his statement. Still I am wordless, whereupon he vouchsafes, with an exasperating drawl, that the fly's one virtue lies in the fact that it prefers picturesque food which is very eatable.
Our parliament should legislate against the cunning arts of these designing northerners, against which no town-bred woman may hope to set up an adequate defence, however perfect may be her poise, or fertile and calculating her brain.
This person tells me that all a man needs to succeed in the North-West Provinces is to keep his head hard and his pores open—a recipe, no doubt, equally applicable in the more southerly regions, and one which I am supposed to deduct he, himself, has proven with very happy success.
He has been south getting people to come to the Peace River Country, the new and unpossessed empire where there are twenty-two hours of daylight and which will, one day, be belted by a string of cities and gridironed by a score of railways. It is good to listen to this fellow talk, for, in his calculations lineal or intellectual, he can measure nothing less than a mile. He is typical of the great and splendid body of Canadian and English pioneers who have absolutely no truck with pessimism. These men and women are opening up this empire and they are under no misapprehensions concerning it. They are people with a vision, which vision they are willing to endorse with the best years of their lives.
Kitemakis, the poor one, who intends writing the book about the white folk, has drawn near to us and is listening to our talk. We invite her to join us and, after awhile, she tells us curious legends of the north in which fear does many times more prevail than love; these, and old superstitions which catch your fancy sharply and fresh the dusty dryness of your spirit.
Although they are in no great credit with historians, it is an odd idea of mine that the only true history of a country is to be found in its fairy tales. These seem to be the crystallization of the country's psychology. On the trail, on the river, in the woods, you may glean from the Redmen and their mate-women tales that are well veined with the fine gold of poetry, but which, as a general thing, are inconclusive and do not serve aright the ends of justice. As you search into the untaught minds of these Indian folk and pull on their mental muscle, you must perforce recall the amazing sensation of the gentleman who took the hand of a little ragged girl in his and felt that she wanted a thumb.
Or again, in your Anglo-Saxon superiority you may feel like that Merodach, the King of Uruk, of whom a philosopher tells us. This Merodach wished to make his enemies his footstool, so as he sat at meat, he kept a hundred kings beneath his table with their thumbs cut off that they might be living witnesses to his power and leniency.
And when Merodach observed how painfully the kings fed themselves with the crumbs that fell to them, he praised God for having given thumbs to man. "It is by the absence of thumbs," he said, "that we are enabled to discern their use."
Listen now to this tale of the North: Once there was a smiling woman in this land and wherever she went she brought warmth with her and light, so that even the ice melted in the rivers. Her eyes were blue like the flowers and her skin was white like the milk of a young mother. As she passed through the land the fish swam out of their caves, the birds rested on their nests, and even the dead women who were in the clay stirred themselves when she passed over, for once they had known lovers and had carried men children. She was vastly kind, this woman, and was known even to the dear God and the Holy Virgin in the country of the beautiful heaven.
Now, there was also in this river land an evil man of impetuous appetite who was part bear, and had seven tongues, and his arms had claws instead of hands. And it befell that when he saw the woman and heard her voice that was sweet like the singing voice of an arrow when it leaves the bow, he yearned to her with a vehement love and wooed her with cunning words and with dram songs that she might come to him and be his mate-woman.
"So strong am I," he said, "that my blow can break any skull. My skin is flushed, and my flesh is warm with thoughts of you. My bed is of soft skins and I will feed you with yellow marrow from white bones. I am Mistikwan, the Head, and I have strength and skill to feed the mouth of my woman. I am Askinekew, the Young Man."
But the woman flouted him, for he was hateful with his hands of hair and his seven tongues; besides she knew, this woman, that there were matters of scandal against him and that the people of the Crees said weyesekao, "He is a flesh-eater," and hid themselves in the trees as he passed by.
And because she thus flouted him, the dew stood out on his face like the juice on the fir-tree, for he loved her most exceedingly.
But as he drew near and grasped her in his strong arms that could not be unloosed, the woman's heart became weak as the poplar smoke when it turns into air.
And thus he holds her for nine months, this Askinekew, the Young Man who is strong and very mischievous, till she bears him a son, when it happens that for three months he falls asleep so that the woman goes free to bring heat and light to the river-land and meat and fish to the kettles.
Thus does Kitemakis, "the poor one," tell me the story of winter and summer and of the birth of the year.
And Kitemakis, who has "the young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks," advises me to hold no converse with left-handed people, for it is well known in these parts that such have communion with the devils.
I am bewared too, that if I have a bad dream, that is to say, if I dream of small-pox, or of white people, I must cut a lock from over my ear and burn it in the fire.
Also, Madam is instructed to throw away the wishbone of any bird she may eat in order that it may grow again and be food for other folk.
And Kitemakis tells me further that when Amisk, the beaver, dies his soul lives on. In the happy hunting grounds the beaver was a carpenter who, through some distemper of the mind, kept working while the moose were on the runway so that he frightened them away. This caused the chief hunter to become very angry and he said to the beaver, "Thou shalt built always, and men shall break down thy work and take thy pelt for covering. Also, thou shalt eat wood forever."
I cannot hear any more of these stories for my attention is drawn to a man who has come close to the ship in a small row-boat. The engine has stopped and a permit is handed to him over the side of the vessel. The man looks like a Scotchman, seems like an Irishman, but in reality is a German, an erstwhile soldier, who makes his livelihood in curing and smoking fish. He is indulging in a surly and wrong-headed paroxysm because Elise, his wife, is not on the boat. Elise went to the city to have her teeth filled and still lingers in the south. A certain rude fellow with a brass-throated laugh is suggesting of the soldier-fisherman that Elise may be appreciative of the change of society and that he is foolish to look for her under two months. "Better enjoy your permit before Elise gets home; that's my advice," enjoins the tormentor.
"About the viskey, not one tam I care," replies the irascible husband, "it's ma vife I vant. Ma vife she in Edmonton stays"—a praiseworthy choice on his part which, to our way of thinking, minifies the oft-urged but yet unproven claim that "A woman's only a woman, but a good cigar's a smoke."
As the man pushes off, Baldy, a pucker-faced fellow whose real name is Nathaniel, assures me that this German is considered "sorta queer" hereabouts, and that it is nothing short of flat irreverence for a man to speak so lightly about his permit in a land of such inordinate thirsts.
This matter of leaving home for the treatment of sore molars has suddenly become an important one in the north. Hitherto, the traders of the Hudson's Bay Company and the missionaries did not need to go to the city on business, or to see their mother-in-law; their errand was teeth. But this summer, the Company seems to have waxed over-wise, for the Inspector of Posts is bringing a dentist. It was only yesterday that a woman who [Transcriber's note: line possibly missing here] women alike consider this to be an ill courtesy and hold to the hope that the dentist may be drowned at Athabasca Landing. The woman who tells me of it believes when one gives nine-tenths of her time to the Company, the church, and the household it is not wicked to take one-tenth for herself. Indeed, there are times when she honestly desires to be wicked and to take several-tenths for herself. The whole arrangement she stigmatizes as a graceless one and a blot on the Company's escutcheon.
Still, there are drawbacks in being so far from a dentist. It was only yesterday that a woman who was using the river as her wash-pot, dropped her new set of teeth overboard. She had not been out for five years and made the trip with her husband and her two youngest sons at the cost of much time and money. However amusing the incident might be to thoughtless onlookers, at the bottom it was almost tragic, and she, at least, is hoping that the H. B. Co. dentist will meet no dire or untimely fate before reaching Grouard. This is a healthful-bodied, healthful-minded woman with a temperament that adjusts itself to life. She is proud of the fact that she is educating her five sons at home; that she cooks for the ten men engaged in her husband's saw-mill, and that she has twelve hundred cabbages in her garden. I am glad she wears a hoop of diamonds on her finger and that her fur wrap would cost a fortune in Paris. It means that her husband is no stingy, unappreciative curmudgeon and that all is well with her.
Sawridge is at the mouth of the Lesser Slave River where it enters into the lake of the same name. At present, it consists of a Hudson's Bay Company post and a telegraph office. Some day, by reason of its location, it will be a good-sized town. Farther on are the Swan Hills and the Swan River. This is the river referred to by Lever in Charles O'Malley. The young gentleman whose affairs were in an ill posture had his choice, you may remember, between going to "Hell or Swan River." This was a libel on the place and an impudent falsity, for, if you omit the mosquitoes with their unhandsome manners, one might call it the trail to Paradise. Besides, if life cut too hard the young gentleman might have taken his last trail here. It would not have been a bad death either—a wide sky, a wide sea, and a sudden dip into immortality—or oblivion.
On the lower deck, the Indians who travel to Grouard for the Golden Jubilee of the great Bishop Grouard are whiling away the time by playing poker. The cards which they use weigh twice as much as when purchased, but why worry in a land where microbes are unheard of and so have no pernicious consequence. These Indians have the air of unambitious men; they have not cared to come into the big Canadian job. They appear to do little else than eat, sleep, and gamble. But, god of civilization, what else is there to do except make love, and men cannot make love to preposterous women who work always. These fellows have, however, one saving quality, having never formed themselves into unions. Now that even the farmers have gone over to the enemy, the Redmen would appear to be our last hope.
A doctor on the boat who knows all about the Indians, tells me of their misfortunes, peccadilloes, their thin transitory pleasures and their love and practise of idleness. But this is not strange, for gossip is so common in the north that every one knows "the carryings-on" of every one else from the Arctic circle clear up to the Landing. Indeed, I have heard tell that these northerners know what you are up to before you have done it.
The Indians, the doctor would have me notice, are beginning to chew gum and hence their teeth and gums are deteriorating.
The mildewed fellow who is dealing the cards is pestiferous with disease. His birth was a biological tragedy. The doctor thinks he could best serve his tribe by dying without delay.
André, the man who has just won the jackpot, is not the prototype of the expression "Honest Indian." He is a bad Indian, a most bad Indian.
"His profession?" I ask.
"Oh, André is my camp-cook," is the reply, "and when he washes himself he uses quite a cupful of water." By way of amends, André affects a stupendous scarf-pin, a watch-chain, and two rings. Ah well! to quote Mr. Artemus Ward, "The best of us has our weaknesses, and if a man has jewelry let him show it." Besides, it is entirely thinkable that even a man like André might have to dress for those whose discernment goes no deeper than clothes and ornamentation.
The difference between an Indian and a half-breed lies in the fact that the Indian is in treaty with the government and lives on a reservation. The breed is free to come and go, but his blood is just as pure as the Indian's so far as its redness is concerned.
In most cases, the children look to their mother as the head of the family. The doctor says this is quite fitting. Take the case of Marie there—Yes! the little girl with the precise plaits—she is the daughter of old Henrietta and a Mounted Policeman. Jacqueline, her sister who in-toes so queerly, is the result of old Henrietta's fancy for a fur trader. It can be readily seen how several masculine heads to the family would complicate matters and that it is wholly desirable the girls should look to their mother for their lineage. In the north, as yet, it has not been necessary to cover vices with cloaks.
The Indian women have fallen on better days since the government passed a law prohibiting the Indian from selling his cattle without a permit from the agency, and making it illegal for a white man to purchase. Previously, the Indian gambled away his animals, leaving his squaw and papooses to suffer from starvation.
"The old effigy" asleep in the sun is, I am informed, a chief of distinction. Like Froissart's Knights, the hereditary chieftain may be blind, crippled and infirm. His body fordone with age is by them considered to be full of the spirit of wisdom. He is the giver of law and keeper of traditions. The Indians have no dead-line in their tribal codes, it being held in suspension north of 55° with the league rules and the game laws, a fact which leads to the deduction that what the world has gained by civilization is fairly balanced by what it has lost.
While we have been getting acquainted with the Indians, our ship has carried us into the finest duck grounds in the world, the teal and mallard rising from the rice beds in almost incredible numbers. It seems impossible that their numbers should ever be noticeably depleted, nor are they likely to be, until Grouard, which we have now reached, has become the splendid metropolis its people have planned and which, no doubt, their efforts will one day materialize.
"We believe," says my medical friend, "that any one who says Grouard isn't going to be a large city hasn't got things properly sized-up. I hope you won't go south again, my interesting child," he further continues; "it would seem like being cut off in the flower of your days. While sometimes shadowed here, the days are never dull, and if no one loves you in this burgh, believe me, it will be entirely your own fault."