CHAPTER XVII
THE THIRD BUFFALO HUNT
The Indians are simply large children, and further, no matter how reasonable your proposition, they take a long time to consider it and are subject to all kinds of mental revulsion. So we were lucky to get away from Fort Smith on July 4 with young Francois Bezkya as guide. He was a full-blooded Chipewyan Indian, so full that he had knowledge of no other tongue, and Billy had to be go-between.
Bezkya, the son of my old patient, came well recommended as a good man and a moose-hunter. A "good man" means a strong, steady worker, as canoeman or portager. He may be morally the vilest outcast unhung; that in no wise modifies the phrase "he is a good man." But more: the present was a moosehunter; this is a wonderfully pregnant phrase. Moose-hunting by fair stalking is the pinnacle of woodcraft. The Crees alone, as a tribe, are supposed to be masters of the art; but many of the Chipewyans are highly successful. One must be a consummate trailer, a good shot, have tireless limbs and wind and a complete knowledge of the animal's habits and ways of moving and thinking. One must watch the wind, without ceasing, for no hunter has the slightest chance of success if once the Moose should scent him. This last is fundamental, a three-times sacred principle. Not long ago one of these Chipewyans went to confessional. Although a year had passed since last he got cleaned up, he could think of nothing to confess. Oh! spotless soul! However, under pressure of the priest, he at length remembered a black transgression. The fall before, while hunting, he went to the windward of a thicket that seemed likely to hold his Moose, because on the lee, the proper side, the footing happened to be very bad, and so he lost his Moose. Yes! there was indeed a dark shadow on his recent past.
A man may be a good hunter, i.e., an all-round trapper and woodman, but not a moose-hunter. At Fort Smith are two or three scores of hunters, and yet I am told there are only three moose-hunters. The phrase is not usually qualified; he is, or is not, a moose-hunter. Just as a man is, or is not, an Oxford M.A. The force, then, of the phrase appears, and we were content to learn that young Bezkya, besides knowing the Buffalo country, was also a good man and a moose-hunter.
We set out in two canoes, Bezkya and Jarvis in the small one, Billy, Selig, Preble, and I in the large one, leaving the other police boys to make Fort Resolution in the H. B. steamer.
Being the 4th of July, the usual torrential rains set in. During the worst of it we put in at Salt River village. It was amusing to see the rubbish about the doors of these temporarily deserted cabins. The midden-heaps of the Cave-men are our principal sources of information about those by-gone races; the future ethnologist who discovers Salt River midden-heaps will find all the usual skulls, bones, jaws, teeth, flints, etc., mixed with moccasin beads from Venice, brass cartridges from New England, broken mirrors from France, Eley cap-boxes from London, copper rings, silver pins, lead bullets, and pewter spoons, and interpersed with them bits of telephone wires and the fragments of gramophone discs. I wonder what they will make of the last!
Eight miles farther we camped in the rain, reaching the Buffalo Portage next morning at 10, and had everything over its 5 miles by 7 o'clock at night.
It is easily set down on paper, but the uninitiated can scarcely realise the fearful toil of portaging. If you are an office man, suppose you take an angular box weighing 20 or 30 pounds; if a farmer, double the weight, poise it on your shoulders or otherwise, as you please, and carry it half a mile on a level pavement in cool, bright weather, and I am mistaken if you do not find yourself suffering horribly before the end of a quarter-mile; the last part of the trip will have been made in something like mortal agony. Remember, then, that each of these portagers was carrying 150 to 250 pounds of broken stuff, not half a mile, but several miles, not on level pavement, but over broken rocks, up banks, through quagmires and brush—in short, across ground that would be difficult walking without any burden, and not in cool, clear weather, but through stifling swamps with no free hand to ease the myriad punctures of his body, face, and limbs whenever unsufficiently protected from the stingers that roam in clouds. It is the hardest work I ever saw performed by human beings; the burdens are heavier than some men will allow their horses to carry.
Yet all this frightful labour was cheerfully gone through by white men, half-breeds, and Indians alike. They accept it as a part of their daily routine. This fact alone is enough to guarantee the industrial future of the red-man when the hunter life is no longer possible.
Next day we embarked on the Little Buffalo River, beginning what should have been and would have been a trip of memorable joys but for the awful, awful, awful—see Chapter IX.
The Little Buffalo is the most beautiful river in the whole world except, perhaps, its affluent, the Nyarling.
This statement sounds like the exaggeration of mere impulsive utterance. Perhaps it is; but I am writing now after thinking the matter over for two and a half years, during, which time I have seen a thousand others, including the upper Thames, the Afton, the Seine, the Arno, the Tiber, the Iser, the Spree, and the Rhine.
A hundred miles long is this uncharted stream; fifty feet its breadth of limpid tide; eight feet deep, crystal clear, calm, slow, and deep to the margin. A steamer could ply on its placid, unobstructed flood, a child could navigate it anywhere. The heavenly beauty of the shores, with virgin forest of fresh, green spruces towering a hundred feet on every side, or varied in open places with long rows and thick-set hedges of the gorgeous, wild, red, Athabaska rose, made a stream that most canoemen, woodmen, and naturalists would think without a fault or flaw, and with every river beauty in its highest possible degree. Not trees and flood alone had strenuous power to win our souls; at every point and bank, in every bend, were living creatures of the north, Beaver and Bear, not often seen but abundant; Moose tracks showed from time to time and birds were here in thousands. Rare winter birds, as we had long been taught to think them in our southern homes; here we found them in their native land and heard not a few sweet melodies, of which in faraway Ontario, New Jersey, and Maryland we had been favoured only with promising scraps when wintry clouds were broken by the sun. Nor were the old familiar ones away—Flicker, Sapsucker, Hairy Woodpecker, Kingfisher, Least Flycatcher, Alder Flycatcher, Robin, Crow, and Horned Owl were here to mingle their noises with the stranger melodies and calls of Lincoln Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Snipe, Rusty Blackbird, and Bohemian Waxwing.
Never elsewhere have I seen Horned Owls so plentiful. I did not know that there were so many Bear and Beaver left; I never was so much impressed by the inspiring raucous clamour of the Cranes, the continual spatter of Ducks, the cries of Gulls and Yellowlegs. Hour after hour we paddled down that stately river adding our 3 1/2 miles to its 1 mile speed; each turn brought to view some new and lovelier aspect of bird and forest life. I never knew a land of balmier air; I never felt the piney breeze more sweet; nowhere but in the higher mountains is there such a tonic sense abroad; the bright woods and river reaches were eloquent of a clime whose maladies are mostly foreign-born. But alas! I had to view it all swaddled, body, hands, and head, like a bee-man handling his swarms. Songs were muffled, scenes were dimmed by the thick, protecting, suffocating veil without which men can scarcely live.
Ten billion dollars would be all too small reward, a trifle totally inadequate to compensate, mere nominal recognition of the man who shall invent and realise a scheme to save this earthly paradise from this its damning pest and malediction.