CHAPTER I
THE FUR HUNTERS
Thirty or more years ago, one who stood at the foot of Main Street, Winnipeg, in front of the stone gate leading to the inner court of Fort Garry, and looked up across the river flats, would have seen a procession as picturesque as ever graced the streets of old Quebec—the dog brigades of the Hudson's Bay Company coming in from the winter's hunt.
Against the rolling snowdrifts appeared a line, at first grotesquely dwarfed under the mock suns of the eastern sky veiled in a soft frost fog. Then a husky-dog in bells and harness bounced up over the drifts, followed by another and yet another—eight or ten dogs to each long, low toboggan that slid along loaded and heaped with peltry. Beside each sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver—a swarthy fellow, on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his elbows—flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto, 'marche! marche!'—the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds to thread his way westward through the wilds of the continent.
Behind at a sort of dog-trot came women, clothed in skirts and shawls made of red and green blankets; papooses in moss bags on their mothers' backs, their little heads wobbling under the fur flaps and capotes. Then, as the dog teams sped from a trot to a gallop with whoops and jingling of bells, there whipped past a long, low, toboggan-shaped sleigh with the fastest dogs and the finest robes—the equipage of the chief factor or trader. Before the spectator could take in any more of the scene, dogs and sleighs, runners and women, had swept inside the gate.
At a still earlier period, say in the seventies, one who in summer chanced to be on Lake Winnipeg at the mouth of the great Saskatchewan river—which, by countless portages and interlinking lakes, is connected with all the vast water systems of the North—would have seen the fur traders sweeping down in huge flotillas of canoes and flat-bottomed Mackinaw boats—exultant after running the Grand Rapids, where the waters of the Great Plains converge to a width of some hundred rods and rush nine miles over rocks the size of a house in a furious cataract.
Summer or winter, it was a life of wild adventure and daily romance.
Here on the Saskatchewan every paddle-dip, every twist and turn of the supple canoes, revealed some new caprice of the river's moods. In places the current would be shallow and the canoes would lag. Then the paddlers must catch the veer of the flow or they would presently be out waist-deep shoving cargo and craft off sand bars. Again, as at Grand Rapids, where the banks were rock-faced and sheer, the canoes would run merrily in swift-flowing waters. No wonder the Indian voyageurs regarded all rivers as living personalities and made the River Goddess offerings of tobacco for fair wind and good voyage. And it is to be kept in mind that no river like the Saskatchewan can be permanently mapped. No map or chart of such a river could serve its purpose for more than a year. Chart it to-day, and perhaps to-morrow it jumps its river bed; and where was a current is now a swampy lake in which the paddlemen may lose their way.
When the waters chanced to be low at Grand Rapids, showing huge rocks through the white spray, cargoes would be unloaded and the peltry sent across the nine-mile portage by tramway; but when the river was high—as in June after the melting of the mountain snows—the voyageurs were always keen for the excitement of making the descent by canoe. Lestang, M'Kay, Mackenzie, a dozen famous guides, could boast two trips a day down the rapids, without so much as grazing a paddle on the rocks. Indeed, the different crews would race each other into the very vortex of the wildest water; and woe betide the old voyageur whose crew failed of the strong pull into the right current just when the craft took the plunge! Here, where the waters of the vast prairie region are descending over huge boulders and rocky islets between banks not a third of a mile apart, there is a wild river scene. Far ahead the paddlers can hear the roar of the swirl. Now the surface of the river rounds and rises in the eddies of an undertow, and the canoe leaps forward; then, a swifter plunge through the middle of a furious overfall. The steersman rises at the stern and leans forward like a runner.