Now the Diprotodon was a kind of ferocious kangaroo, carnivorous and predaceous, which lived in the Tertiary Period and had a skull three feet in length. Those who are not of this species, I shall designate as fanatics who cling to worn-out shibboleths over which they snarl like pestilent dogs; or prigs who affect neurotic cults that are exceedingly false and not native to this country. I will be superior and insufferably arrogant so that they may be vastly annoyed with me and rage like the Psalmist's "heathen." I shall not be kindly to any, nor say them fair words, no matter how much I may desire to, nor how much it hurts me to tell lies.
Then will the wise people take their pens in hand to say that "This writer is possessed of the discriminating sense to an extraordinary degree. She has vision, luminosity, verve, technique, and artistic self-restraint—these, and other palpable qualities which bid us hope, in spite of all which has been said to the contrary, that the time is not so hopelessly remote when Canada may lay some small claim to having a literature of her own."
Oh Me! Oh Me! This is what they will say, and I will laugh in my throat and in my sleeves. I win not care the point of one pencil what they say, so long as they refrain from using the adjective breezy. When a northern woman goes visiting and the wise people wish to be kind, they all apply this word to her. When the dubious visitor looks into the dictionary for the exact meaning of breeze, she finds it stands for either an uproar or a gentle gale. People have been murdered for less obvious errors, so that all wise people will please to be forewarned.
If you were to ask here what the Indian woman wished to write in a book about the white people, I would not be able to tell you, for, at this juncture, we all forgot to talk and crowded to the prow of the vessel to see a moose that swam boldly ahead of us in the river. He kept far enough away to be out of range, so that no one shot him. I use the word shot in deference to the untaught urban folk into whose hands this book may pass. What the men really desired was to "trump" him.
We did not see him take to the bank, for we took to the bank ourselves in order to load wood for the engine. He is a worthy gentleman, the moose, and should be well esteemed. Dropped in a thicket, hunted by wolves, unprotected save by his sharp hoof, which, however, will rip anything softer than a steel plate, he ranges the forests till his antlers are full-branched, and then, at the age of three, without costing the Province or the Indian a cent, he tips the scales at a thousand pounds of meat.
We are invited to the tent of Mrs. Jack Fish, who receives us seated. This is not owing to any lack of hospitality on her part, but because she is very old and quite blind. The Oblate Brothers say she is over a hundred years old, and truly she might pass for the honourable great-grandmother of all Canada. Her son, with whom she lives, minds a wood-pile on the Athabasca, but in the winter he has a house of logs at Tomato Creek to which he retires. All Indians live in tents from preference, and not from the sordid reason assigned them by the would-be poet who declares that "Itchie, Mitchie lives in a tent," for "He can't afford to pay the rent." There are no rented houses in this country, and no man has ever heard of a landlord. Every person holds his house, or his several houses, in fee simple. In Great Britain, these residences would be designated as "shooting boxes."
Neither would it be a sign of mental superiority on the part of the traveller to consider Jack Knife's job a menial one. Banking situations or provincial politics may have an importance in the fence country, but in boreal regions the prime test of intelligence is a knowledge of how to handle a boat or an axe.
Madam, our hostess, informs the Factor's widow that she keeps quite well except for an evil and tormenting spirit in her chest. She desires to know who are in our company, and when she learns that the Okimow, or Great Chief of the Peace River Country, is one of us, she asks for tobacco. Ah! the Chief at Fort Edmonton would be generous to her, but he is dead now and there is no tobacco to soothe her pain. When she was young, her people fought with the Blackfeet tribe in the Bear Hills, and many of the Crees were scalped. She fled through the forests to Fort Edmonton, carrying her two children on her back, but there was much rain and almost she was drowned crossing the rivers. That was many, many nesting-moons ago, and now she is old and her pipe is empty of tobacco.
"Is the kind lady going down the river to find a man?"
No! the kind lady has white hair and her man is dead.