They had been living on a daily ration of a spoonful of flour and rice and the half of a red squirrel each. But even this gave out, and the sorely beset men tried eating moccasin leather, and ended on muckalucks or messinke boots. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I would explain that muckalucks are contrived out of raw sealskin. Bishop Stringer has since told me that when he had divided the food, his companion assigned the portions, and vice versa. This is one of the trail's lessons. At last, after eleven days of blind stumbling, they came out at an Indian camp on the Peel River. Twenty miles further down, at the Hudson's Bay Fort, the factor weighed the much-emaciated men and found that each had lost fifty pounds.
In his letter to his wife, who was visiting in Kincardine, Ontario, the Bishop says of his experiences: "The one thing that made us unhappy was that you and the others might worry about us when we did not turn up. But this feeling wore off when it meant a matter of life or death, and day after day we wondered how long we would last—whether you would ever hear from us. You can imagine we were much in prayer, and over and over again reconsecrated ourselves to the Master's service."
This Bishop of Mackenzie River is surely an outstanding personality, and reminds me of what Robert Louis Stevenson said of the late John Chalmers, a missionary of New Guinea: "You can't weary me of that fellow," he asserted; "he is as big as a house and far bigger than any church."
Bishop Stringer's predecessor in the diocese was William Carpenter Bompas, the Apostle of the North, the man who has been classified by the Church Missionary Society as "indisputably the most self-sacrificing bishop in the world."
His diocese, too, was the largest in the world, consisting of one million square miles. It had the same peculiarity as Bobbie Burns's "cauld, cauld kirk"—-there were "in't but few."
William Bompas went North in 1865 and stayed there forty years, coming out only twice. On the first of these occasions he returned to England to be elevated to the episcopate.
The only medical training the Bishop had under gone was a short course in the treatment of snowblindness, and this when he went to England for his consecration. This is a form of blindness that causes great suffering among the Indians, and the Bishop had himself been stricken with it on several occasions. On one of these, stumbling painfully at every step, he was led by an Eskimo boy for seventy-five miles. Writing of his agonies, he says: "They are delights. The first foot-prints on earth made by our risen Saviour were the nail-marks of suffering, and for the spread of the gospel, too, am prepared to suffer."
Like Stringer, Bompas also endured frequent starvation, but seldom spoke of it as a personal happening, but rather as applying to others—a virtue most hard and difficult to be practised. Writing about it to a friend in England, he said: "Horses were killed for food and furs eaten at several of the posts. The Indians had to eat a good many of their beaver skins."
Another man who endured the privations of the pioneer in this district is the present Bishop of Keewatin, Joseph Lofthouse.
The most interesting, and certainly the most romantic story of his career, is that of his marriage. His sweetheart, a young English girl, was due to arrive on the yearly vessel of the Hudson's Bay Company. Lofthouse travelled several hundred miles to meet her, but found she had not come, being unavoidably detained in England. The following summer he made the same journey, but this time as the vessel pulled up the harbour, he was able to single out the lassie's face on the deck. Yes, sir! if you had lived among Eskimos and Indians all these years, you, too, would tremble and choke in the throat at the ship's rope hit the mooring-post.