Jack the Young Canoeman: An Eastern Boy's Voyage in a Chinook Canoe

by George Bird Grinnell

They had listened with much interest to the sealstealing story, and Jack was anxious to ask Crocker many questions about the strange animals that he must have seen during his voyage in the North Pacific, when he followed the seal herds after they left the islands, and about the great journey that the seals make south and west and east and north again, back to their starting point. But Fannin was anxious to get on, and after he had purchased from Crocker the provisions they needed, with a hearty handshake and with many good wishes the canoe travellers stepped over the side and pushed off.

The next morning was notable for the passage of the canoe through multitudes of black sea ducks, which Jack said were coots. The flock, or succession of flocks, were as numerous as those observed some weeks before off Comox Spit. There must have been many thousands of these birds scattered over several miles of water, and continually rising as the canoe disturbed them, either flying back over it or off to one side.

Late in the afternoon the travellers, as usual, began to look for a camping place along the shore, and for some time without success. The rocky shores rose straight up from the water and seemed very inhospitable; but at length a little bay, the most encouraging place in sight, invited the tired travellers to investigate it, and it was found that, although the little beach was almost everywhere piled high with driftwood, there was a narrow pebbly place where, by squeezing up close together, there would be room enough for the white men to sleep. A tiny trickle of water through a streak of wet moss ran down each side toward the bay, and it seemed that camp might be made here. The canoe was unloaded and its cargo carried up over the raft of floating drift logs to the beach. A little hole was scraped in the sand to catch the water that fell, drop by drop, from crevices in the rock. The largest stones were removed from the spot where the beds were to be spread, and a fire was kindled.

Long ago there had fallen from the shelf of the cliff, many feet above the beach, a giant fir tree, whose roots still rested where they had always been, and whose top was supported by the bottom of the bay. The spot where the beds were to be spread was directly beneath this leaning stick of timber, which, as it was six or eight feet through, would even offer a little shelter in case it should rain that night. Charlie, however, suggested that this was not a safe place for the white man to sleep, as during the night the tree might fall and crush them. But the other men laughed at him, and pointed out to him that as the stick had never changed its position for forty or fifty years, the chances were that it would not break or slip on this particular night. Charlie said that this might be true and went about his cooking. His spirits, however, were not high, for, even with what had just been bought from Crocker, the provision box was still very light. The fresh meat had been nearly all eaten, the baking powder had all been used, there was left nothing but a little bacon, a few cans of tomatoes, some flour, coffee, and raisins. To relieve the impending famine, Jack and Fannin went up on the hills to look for game, and, although they had found no deer, they started three or four grouse, of which two were secured and brought to the camp for the next morning's breakfast. As the party turned into their blankets that night Charlie looked at the great stick of timber which overhung them and said: "Well, I hope we'll be alive in the morning."

"Oh," said Hugh, "you go to bed, Charlie; you're like a cow-puncher I once knew. He called himself a fatalist, and said that he believed 'whatever was to be would be, whether it happened so or not.'"

Fannin said: "The only thing I am afraid of for to-night is that maybe this tide will rise so high that it will drown us out, and we will be floated off among this drift."

When they turned in, the fire, by which dinner had been cooked, was still glowing brightly under the old drift log against which Charlie had built it; and the only sound heard in camp was the lapping of the water against the beach.

That night Jack had a curious dream. He thought that he was asleep in his room at his home in Thirty-eighth street, when suddenly he was awakened by a bright light, and, rushing to the window, saw that the house across the street was blazing and that a number of policemen clad in white were dancing in front of the fire. As he watched them, and wondered anxiously about the fire, the smoke from the house seemed to turn and move in a thick cloud straight into his window, causing him to choke and cough. At this Jack awoke, and sitting up in his blanket he saw the great drift log, against which the fire had been built, glowing like a furnace. Charlie, clad only in his shirt and drawers, was darting about with a bucket of water in his hands, dashing it on the flames. The fire was soon put out; and next morning, on reckoning up their losses, it was found that they were not very serious. A few cooking utensils, a towel or two, and a coat were the only things seriously damaged. If the fire had burned a little longer and communicated itself to the rest of the drift stuff, the members of the party might have been very uncomfortable, and their loss might have been serious.

When they started the next morning, the surface of the water was smooth and unbroken. There was no breath of air, and great clouds obscured the sky. Before them was seen the white lighthouse of Port Atkinson, and on either side of the channel they were following rose a low, rock-bound, fir-fringed coast. Here, for almost the first time since the trip had been begun, no striking mountain ridges or snow-capped peaks were seen. The tide was running straight against them, and they had to work hard to advance at all. After they had passed the Port Atkinson lighthouse the Inlet broadened and spread out over wide flats. The canoe kept close to the shore, to avoid the ebbing tide, and startled from the grassy shore a number of blue herons which were resting or fishing at the water's edge. Sometimes, as they rounded a little point, a group of hogs were encountered, eagerly rooting in the bare flats for shell-fish. The first one of these groups that he saw astonished Jack, because the hogs were accompanied by a number of crows. About each hog, on the ground or resting on its back, or flying about it with tumultuous cries, were three or four black-winged attendants, which wrangled bitterly over the fragments of fish that the pig unearthed and failed to secure. Sometimes a crow would pounce on a clam or other edible morsel actually under the nose of the hog, and would snatch it away before the hog realized what was happening.

"Fannin," said Hugh, as they were passing along, "does this sort of thing happen regularly? Do these crows follow the hogs around all the time?"