XXII
BOUCHER, THE FRENCH-CANADIAN VOYAGEUR
I want to tell the girls and boys a really true story, not taken from books, but told me from life by the man whose name is at the head of this tale. And I am going to let you draw your own lesson about the spirit that made possible his act.
You know the voyageur was a man used by the fur traders to bring the furs from the Indian lands to the settled parts of civilization. They ran the rivers and shot the rapids and travelled the woods, away from the far north Hudson Bay forts down to Montreal and Quebec. They were brave, rough, hardy men who shot rapids in birch-bark canoes, hunted for bear and muskrat and otter and beaver, and lived a wild, free life in the open.
I spent three months once, far north of Winnipeg in the Keewatin territory, among the Indians, and there I met Boucher, who told his story in broken English, a sort of mixture of English, French and Cree.
He sat in a little wooden shack with an old pipe between his fingers, a bed covered with mosquito netting in one corner and a table and stool in another. His thin gray locks of hair were brushed back, and shaky fingers passed his pipe at intervals between his teeth.
The bare rocks behind and the deep Northern river in front; the cry of the loon one moment and the intense stillness of the loneliness the next, gave a weird feeling as the evening twilight added its shadows to the picture of the old man telling his strange story.
Sir John Franklin and his band of men had been lost in their quest for the Northwest passage. Boucher was one of those who formed a search party to try to recover the bones of the great traveller.
The journey tried their strength and heroism; provisions were used up and their safety became a matter of anxious concern. Their boots were torn off and their moccasins torn into rags. He told me how for hours he travelled the river, where blistering sands were varied by floating ice, and where the eyes were blinded by the shadeless heat of the sun and the reflection of ice and water.
They became mere skeletons, until at last the leader said some would have to go and hunt for food. Boucher volunteered, but in his search he lost his way.