Still keeping west, we began to ascend the Peace River; we had struck its banks more than 100 miles above its delta, by making this direct line across Lac Clair and the intervening ridges.
Peace River does not debouch into Lake Athabasca, but as we have said into the Slave River some twenty miles below the lake; at high water, however, it communicates with Athabasca through the canal-like channel of the Quatre Fourche, and when water is low in Peace River, Athabasca repays the gift by sending back through the same channel a portion of her surplus tide.
Since leaving Lac Clair I had endured no little misery; the effects of that long day’s travel from the river Athabasca had from the outset been apparent, and each day now further increased them. The muscles of ancles and instep had become painfully inflamed, to raise the snow-shoe from the ground was frequently no easy matter, and at last every step was taken in pain. I could not lie upon my sled because the ground was rough and broken, and the sled upset at every hill side into the soft snow; besides there was the fact that the hills were short and steep, and dogs could not easily have dragged me to the summit. There was nothing for me but to tramp on in spite of aching ancles.
At the camp I tried my remedies, but all were useless. From pain-killer, moose fat, laudanum and porpoise oil I concocted a mixture, which I feel convinced contains a vast fortune for any enterprising professor in the next century, and which even in these infant ages of “puffing” might still be made to realize some few millions of dollars; but nevertheless, my poor puffed foot resisted every attempt to reduce it to symmetry, or what was more important, to induce it to resume work.
That sixteen-hour day had inflamed its worst passions, and it had struck for an “eight-hour movement.” One can afford to laugh over it all now, but then it was gloomy work enough; to make one step off the old hidden dog-track of the early winter was to sink instantly into the soft snow to the depth of three or four feet, and when we camped at night on the wooded shore, our blankets were laid in a deep furrow between lofty snow walls, which it had taken us a full hour to scoop out. At last, after six days of weary travel through ridge and along river reach, we drew near a house.
Where the little stream called the Red River enters from the south the wide channel of the Peace River, there stands a small Hudson’s Bay post. Here, on the evening of the 17th of March, we put in for the night. At this solitary post dwelt M. Jean Batiste St. Cyr; an old and faithful follower of the Hudson’s Bay Company. When the powerful North-West Fur Company became merged into the wealthier but less enterprising corporation of the Hudson’s Bay, they left behind them in the North a race of faithful servitors—men drawn in early life from the best rural habitans of Lower Canada—men worthy of that old France from which they sprung, a race now almost extinct in the north, as indeed it is almost all the world over. What we call “the spirit of the age” is against it; faithful service to powers of earth, or even to those of Heaven, not being included in the catalogue of virtues taught in the big school of modern democracy.
From one of this old class of French Canadians, M. Jean Batiste St. Cyr was descended.
Weary limbs and aching ancles pleaded for delay at this little post, but advancing spring, and still more the repeated assaults of my servant and his comrades upon my stock of luxuries, urged movement as the only means of saving some little portion of those good things put away for me by my kind host at Chipewyan. It seems positively ridiculous now, how one could regard the possession of flour and sugar, of sweet cake and sweet pemmican, as some of the most essential requisites of life. And yet so it was. With the grocer in the neighbouring street, and the baker round the corner, we can afford to look upon flour and sugar as very common-place articles indeed; but if any person wishes to arrive at a correct notion of their true value in the philosophy of life let him eliminate them from his daily bill of fare, and restrict himself solely to moose meat, grease, and milkless tea. For a day or two he will get on well enough, then he will begin to ponder long upon bread, cakes, and other kindred subjects; until day by day he learns to long for bread, then the Bath buns of his earlier years will float in enchanting visions before him; and like Clive at the recollection of that treasure-chamber in the Moorshedabad Palace, he will marvel at the moderation which left untouched a single cake upon that wondrous counter.
It is not difficult to understand the feelings which influenced a distant northern Missionary, when upon his return to semi-civilization, his friends having prepared a feast to bid him welcome, he asked them to give him bread and nothing else. He had been without it for years, and his mind had learned to hunger for it more than the body.
My servitor, not content with living as his master lived, was helping the other rascals to the precious fare. English half-breed, French ditto, and full Christian Swampy had apparently formed an offensive and defensive alliance upon the basis of a common rascality, Article I. of the treaty having reference to the furtive partition of my best white sugar, flour, and Souchong tea; things which, when they have to be “portaged” far on men’s shoulders in a savage land, are not usually deemed fitted for savage stomachs too.