The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.

Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded, and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's development and acceptance—banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to the inconnu and the Indian.

It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race, wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American Indian."

We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl—gulls in great variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the banks—the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.

Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly south to kinder skies, the inconnu hurry northward seeking the sea. Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "Le convert du bon Dieu," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or unwitting of shelter.

According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great hunter, man.

In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power—the Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his children.

Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.

Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and dipped and seined their sustenance—inconnu, jack-fish, grayling, white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway—a trail worn smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.

Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph, self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife, Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.