Antoine presents me to Captain Shot, an Indian who has been on this river for forty-eight years. The Captain is seventy-three, and his name is really Fausennent. He is called "Shot" because he was the first man to shoot the rapids of the Athabasca. I say that Antoine "presents me" but I say it advisedly, for the North levels people, by which is meant the primitive north where they live with nature. In this environment, the man who builds boats and supplies food or fuel, is the superior of the man or woman who writes, or pronounces theories. I may be able to hoodwink the people up south as to my importance in our community, but it is different here. And this is as it should be.
Captain Shot is engaged in building a boat for the Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company, and there is even a smoking-room in it. But, Blessed Mother! it is no trouble to build a boat now—none at all, for presently the railway will be completed and the boilers and metal fixings will come in over it, but in the old days—that is to say up till now—it was different. When the Northern Navigation Co. brought in the boilers for their boats, they hauled them a hundred miles over the trail from Edmonton, and it took seventy-two horses on each boiler.
"Didn't the government help any?" I ask.
Oh yes! the late government at Ottawa tried to help transportation by sending in fifty reindeer; but the Captain has heard tell that some men swore terrible oaths at the government, and set their dogs about eating up the deer, for these men hold a kind of an idea it is railways the country hereabouts needs, but he is not quite sure as to the rights of the story.
There are four hundred men employed here at the Landing in building scows and transhipping. Only a few of the scows are brought back, for they have to be tracked up by power of man. For this reason, a new flotilla is built each year.
Captain Shot has many estimable sons, all of whom are rivermen and shipbuilders. They could hardly be expected to disgrace their name by becoming mere farmers or teamsters after the unwisdom of the white man's way. Ho! Ho! the idea of any one wishing to become a farmer.
But I was telling you about the scows. Unless you sat here catching fish, you could never believe how much stuff can be packed into a scow. As I watch the men at work, I think of Mark Twain's ambitious blue-jay who tried to fill a house with acorns. Still the men do not seem lacking in confidence, and keep wading backward and forward through the water with sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, chests of tea, crates of hardware, tins of stuff, and treasures in boxes that can only be guessed at. I am hoping the biggest box contains dolls, ribbons, work-bags, picture books, peppermint bull's eyes, and things like that, for a mission school Christmas-tree somewhere down near the Arctic. I am almost praying that it does.
The smaller boxes are called permits, and each contain six bottles of whisky. These are for the pioneering gentlemen at the different posts who are delicate, and who honestly desire to get strong.
Each permit is signed by a doctor so that the liquor must be considered strictly as medicine. Irritating people who fail to understand that there are only two licensed hotels between Edmonton and the North Pole, sneer about there being a thousand delicate men on the rivers; but, for my part, I am inclined to stand by the doctors, although I have always held the clinical thermometer to be the only thing about the medical profession with an integrity beyond question.
If any one should glean from reading these lines that all there is to loading a scow is to load it, he or she is a much misled person. The last bale is hardly stowed away till two of the men have disappeared. No one saw them go, least of all the Boss, but any one can see they are not here now. The Boss is a creature of steel who seems to forget there is much to be done in the last hour or two before a boatman leaves the Landing for the stretched out journey beyond. Various purchases are to be made; people are to be seen; drinks are to be had against a long, long thirst, to mention nothing of new vows to Marie, Babette, and Josephine.