Nor was it all a land of desolation to him. Directed by a mind as sanguine as his own,[2] he entered warmly into the pursuits of natural history, and classed and catalogued the numerous birds which seek in summer these friendless regions, proving in some instances the range of several of the tiniest of the feathered wanderers to reach from Texas to the Arctic shores.
[2] The late Major Kennicot, U.S.A., who, in charge of the United States telegraph exploration, died at Fort Yukon, Alaska.
All his travels were performed on snow shoes, driving his train of dogs, or beating the track for them in the snow. In a single winter, as I have before mentioned, he passed from the Mackenzie River to the Mississippi, driving the same train of dogs to Fort Garry, fully 2000 miles from his starting-point; and it was early in the following summer, on his return from England after a hasty visit, the first during twenty years, that I made his acquaintance in the American State of Minnesota. He was not only acquainted with all the vicissitudes of northern travel, but his mind was well stored with the history of previous exploration. Chance and the energy of the old North-West Company had accumulated a large store of valuable books in the principal fort on the Mackenzie. These had been carefully studied during periods of inaction, and arctic exploration in reality or in narrative was equally familiar to him.
“I would have given my right arm to have been allowed to go on one of these search expeditions,” he often said to me; and perhaps, if those wise and sapient men, who, acting in a corporate or individual capacity, have the power of selection for the work of relief or exploration, would only accustom themselves to make choice of such materials, the bones that now dot the sands of King William’s Land or the estuary of the Great Fish River, might in the flesh yet move amongst us.
One night we were camped on a solitary island in the Swan Lake. The camp had been made after sunset, and as the morning’s path lay across the lake, over hard snow where no track was necessary, it was our intention to start on our way long before daybreak. In this matter of early starting it is almost always impossible to rely on the Indian or the half-breed voyageur. They will lie close hid beneath their blankets, unless, indeed, the cold should become so intense as to force them to arise and light a fire; but, generally speaking, they will lie huddled so closely together that they can defy the elements, and it becomes no easy matter to arouse them from their pretended slumbers at two or three o’clock of a dead-cold morning. My companion, however, seemed to be able to live without sleep. At two o’clock he would arise from his deer-skin robe and set the camp astir. I generally got an hour’s law until the fire was fairly agoing and the tea-kettle had been boiled.
No matter what the morning was, he never complained. This morning on Swan Lake was bitterly cold—30° below zero at my head.
“Beautiful morning!” he exclaimed, as I emerged from my buffalo robe at three o’clock; and he really meant it. I was not to be done.
“Oh, delightful!” I managed to chatter forth, with a tolerable degree of acquiescence in my voice, a few mental reservations and many bodily ones all over me.
But 30° below zero, unaccompanied by wind, is not so bad after all when one is fairly under weigh and has rubbed one’s nose for a time, and struck the huge “mittained” hands violently together, and run a mile or so; but let the faintest possible breath of wind arise—a “zephyr” the poets would call it, a thing just strong enough to turn smoke or twist the feather which a wild duck might detach from beneath his wing as he cleft the air above—then look out, or rather look down, cast the eye so much askant that it can catch a glimpse of the top of the nose, and you will see a ghostly sight.
We have all heard of hard hearts, and stony eyes, and marble foreheads, alabaster shoulders, snowy necks, and firm-set lips, and all the long array of silicious similitudes used to express the various qualities of the human form divine; but firmer, and colder, and whiter, and harder than all stands forth prominently a frozen nose.