The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the Primrose Captain. "Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.

We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the "Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the river, the paddle pointing to the sky—a cry came over the water, and that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves dotards dozing in the sun.

At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones, among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates, R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck, an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since. Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the Mosquito Portage and we do not.

We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order Diptera," "sub-order Nemocera," and chiefly "of the family Culicidae," and he also goes so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant." We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on "Mosquito" out of some convent dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson introduced by his friend of the cloth. "Brother Jones will now give an address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes to you full of his subject."

The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a Slave River priest had said to us, "These have not delicate sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper appreciation of material things."

Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a match-head on our face and hands the "bull-dog" contests with the mosquito. An interesting study is the "bull-dog." He looks like a cross between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we went along to examine the different parts of his person under a microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not "long" on the "bull-dog." He told us that his Sunday name was "Tabanus," and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could learn for ourselves by direct contact.

Personally I have very little rancour against the "bull-dog." He looks worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites. Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the "bull-dogs," often jump over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when they were possessed of devils.

Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, "The deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs," ruminates audibly, "Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly resourceful beggars, these Colonials." A literary scientist sending out copy from the North wrote, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-dogs," which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs."

Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60° North, the northern boundary of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg. One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in seed, shinleaf (Pyrola elliptica), our old friend yarrow, and golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or kinnikinic-tobacco (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) with its astringent leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.