And now, as I have said, the end of January had come, and it was time to start; all my preparations were completed, Cerf-vola and his companions were fat, strong, and hearty. Dog shoes, copper kettles, a buffalo robe, a thermometer, some three or four dozen rounds of ammunition, a little tobacco and pain-killer, a dial compass, a pedometer, snow shoes, about fifteen pounds of baggage, tea, sugar, a little flour, and lastly, the inevitable pemmican; all were put together, and I only waited the arrival of the winter packet from the south to set out.
Let me see if I can convey to the reader’s mind a notion of this winter packet.
Towards the middle of the month of December there is unusual bustle in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Garry on the Red River; the winter packet is being made ready. Two oblong boxes are filled with letters and papers addressed to nine different districts of the northern continent. The limited term district is a singularly unappropriate one: a single instance will suffice. From the post of the Forks of the Athabasca and Clear Water Rivers to the Rocky Mountain Portage is fully 900 miles as a man can travel, yet all that distance lies within the limits of the single Athabasca district; and there are others larger still. From the Fort Resolution on the Slave River to the ramparts on the Upper Yukon, 1100 miles lay their lengths within the limits of the Mackenzie River district.
Just as the days are at their shortest, a dog sled bearing the winter packet starts from Fort Garry; a man walks behind it, another man some distance in advance of the dogs. It holds its way down the Red River to Lake Winnipeg; in about nine days’ travel it crosses that lake to the north shore at Norway House; from thence, lessened of its packet of letters for the Bay of Hudson and the distant Churchill, it journeys in twenty days’ travel up the Great Saskatchewan River to Carlton House. Here it undergoes a complete readjustment; the Saskatchewan and Lesser Slave Lake letters are detached from it, and about the 1st of February it starts on its long journey to the north.
During the succeeding months it holds steadily along its northern way, sending off at long, long intervals branch dog packets to right and left; finally, just as the sunshine of mid-May is beginning to carry a faint whisper of the coming spring to the valleys of the Upper Yukon, the dog train, last of many, drags the packet, now but a tiny bundle, into the enclosure of La Pierre’s House. It has travelled nearly 3000 miles; a score of different dog teams have hauled it, and it has camped for more than a hundred nights in the great northern forest.
The end of January had come, but contrary to the experience of several years had brought no packet from Fort Garry, and many were the surmises afloat as to the cause of this delay. The old Swampy Indian Adam who, for more than a score of years had driven the dog packet, had tumbled into a water-hole in the ice, and his dogs had literally exemplified one portion of the popular saying of following their leader through fire and water; and the packet, Adam, and the dogs, lay at the bottom of the Saskatchewan River. Such was one anticipated cause of this non-appearance.
To many persons the delay was very vexatious, but to me it was something more. Time was a precious article: it is true a northern winter is a long one, but so also was the route I was about to follow, and I hoped to reach the upper regions of the Rocky Mountains while winter yet held with icy grasp the waters of the Peace River Cañon.
The beginning of February came, and I could wait no longer for the missing packet. On the 3rd, at mid-day, I set out on my journey. The day was bright and beautiful, the dogs climbed defiantly the steep high point, and we paused a moment on the summit; beneath lay hut and pine wood and precipitous bank, all sparkling with snow and sunshine; and beyond, standing motionless and silent, rose the Great Sub-Arctic Forest.