Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids of Slave River without unloading.
Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a portage. Coming back this way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking. If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is "tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all dangerous, each voyageur lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long portage is measured by the number of pipes the voyageur smokes, each lighting up meaning a brief rest; and a portage of many "pipes" will be taken at a running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine miles is the length of one famous portage opposite the Chaudière Falls on the Ottawa.
In winter the voyageur becomes coureur des bois to his new masters. Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick; sometimes to the marche donc! marche donc! of the driver, with crisp tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.
These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.
At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining—the Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two important centres of trade in furs which are not imported—St. Paul and St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for the great companies a hundred years ago.
The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a by-word.
And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as usual!"
As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those chansons populaires, which have been sung by every generation of voyageurs since Frenchmen came to America, A La Claire Fontaine, a song which the French trappers' ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then—was it possible?—these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were singing—what? A song of the Grand Monarque which has led armies to battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern wilds—
"Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre
Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"
Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known outside the range of human criminals.