The Wild North Land / The Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America

by Sir William Francis Butler

Here, at Ile à la Crosse, I obtained an eighth dog. This dog was Major; he was an Esquimaux from Deer’s Lake, the birth-place of Cerf-vola, and he bore a very strong resemblance to my leader. It is not unlikely that they were closely related, perhaps brothers, who had thus, after many wanderings, come together; but, be that as it may, Cerf-vola treated his long-lost brother with evident suspicion, and continued to maintain towards all outsiders a dogged demeanour.

Major’s resemblance to the Untiring led to a grievous error on the morning of my departure from the fort.

It was two hours before daylight when the dogs were put into harness; it was a morning of bitter cold; a faint old moon hung in the east; over the dim lake, a shadowy Aurora flickered across the stars; it was as wild and cheerless a sight as eye of mortal could look upon; and the work of getting the poor unwilling dogs into their harness was done by the Indians and half-breeds in no amiable mood.

In the haste and darkness the Untiring was placed last in the train which he had so long led, the new-comer, Major, getting the foremost place. Upon my assuming charge of the train, an ominous tendency to growl and fight on the part of my steer-dog told me something was wrong; it was too dark to see plainly, but a touch of the Untiring’s nose told me that the right dog was in the wrong place.

The mistake was quickly rectified, but, nevertheless, I fear its memory long rankled in the mind of Cerf-vola, for all that day, and for some days after, he never missed an opportunity of counter-marching suddenly in his harness and prostrating the unoffending Major at his post of steer-dog; the attack was generally made with so much suddenness and vigour that Major instantly capitulated, “turning a turtle” in his traces. This unlooked-for assault was usually accompanied by a flank movement on the part of Spanker, who, whenever there was anything in the shape of fighting lying around, was sure to have a tooth in it on his own account, being never very particular as to whether he attacked the head of the rear dog or the tail of his friend in front.

All this led at times to fearful confusion in my train; they jumped on one another; they tangled traces, and back-bands, and collar-straps into sad knots and interlacings, which baffled my poor frozen fingers to unravel. Often have I seen them in a huge ball rolling over each other in the snow, while the rapid application of my whip only appeared to make matters worse, conveying the idea to Spanker or the Untiring that they were being badly bitten by an unknown belligerent.

Like the lady in Tennyson’s “Princess,” they “mouthed and mumbled” each other in a very perplexing manner, but, of course, from a cause totally at variance from that which influenced the matron in the poem. These events only occurred, however, when a new dog was added to the train; and, after a day or so, things got smoothed down, and all tugged at the moose-skin collars in peaceful unanimity.

But to return. We started from Ile à la Crosse, and held our way over a chain of lakes and rivers. Rivière Cruise was passed, Lac Clair lay at sun-down far stretching to our right into the blue cold north, and when dusk had come, we were halted for the night in a lonely Indian hut which stood on the shores of the Detroit, fully forty miles from our starting-place of the morning.

“A long, hard, cold day; storm, drift, and desolation. We are lost upon the lake.”

Such is the entry which meets my eye as I turn to the page of a scanty note-book which records the 22nd of February; and now looking back upon this day, it does not seem to me that the entry exaggerates in its pithy summing up the misery of the day’s travel. To recount the events of each day’s journey, to give minutely, starting-point, date, distance, and resting-place, is too frequently an error into which travellers are wont to fall. I have read somewhere in a review of a work on African travel, that no literary skill has hitherto been able to enliven the description of how the traveller left a village of dirty negroes in the morning, and struggled through swamps all day, and crossed a river swarming with hippopotami, and approached a wood where there were elephants, and finally got to another village of dirty negroes in the evening. The reviewer is right; the reiterated recital of Arctic cold and hardship, or of African heat and misery, must be as wearisome to the reader as its realization was painful to the writer; but the traveller has one advantage over the reader, the reality of the “storm, drift, and desolation” had the excitement of the very pain which they produced. To be lost in a haze of blinding snow, to have a spur of icy keenness urging one to fresh exertion, to seek with dazed eyes hour after hour for a faint print of snow shoes or mocassin on the solid surface of a large lake, to see the night approaching and to urge the dogs with whip and voice to fresh exertions, to greater efforts to gain some distant land-point ere night has wrapped the dreary scene in darkness; all this doled out hour by hour in narrative would be dull indeed.