Every now and again he finds one of his guillotines down, and underneath it lies a small, thick-furred animal, in size something larger than a ferret, something smaller than a cat. It is needless to describe the colour of the animal; from childhood upwards it is familiar to us. Most persons can recall the figure of maiden aunt or stately visitor, muffed, cuffed, boa’d and pelissed, in all the splendour of her sables. Our little friend under the dead fall is none other than the sable—the marten of North America, the sable of Siberia.
A hundred miles away from the nearest fort this marten has been captured. When the snow and ice begin to show symptoms of softening, the Indian packs his furs together, and sets out, as we have seen, for the fort. There are, perhaps, five or six families together; the squaws and dogs are heavy laden, and the march is slow and toilsome. All the household gods have to be carried along. The leather tent, the battered copper kettle, the axe, the papoose strapped in the moss bag, the two puppy-dogs, yet unable to shift for themselves, the snow-shoes for hunting, the tattered blanket, the dry meat; it makes a big load, all told; and squaw and dog toil along with difficulty under it. The brave of course goes before, deigning only to carry his gun, and not always doing even that; the wife is but as a dog to him.
Well, day by day the party moves along till the fort is reached. Then comes the trade. The fifty or a hundred marten-skins are handed over: the debt of the past year is cancelled, partly or wholly; and advances are taken for the coming season.
The wild man’s first thought is for the little one,—a child’s white capôte, strouds or blanketing for tiny backs, a gaudy handkerchief for some toddling papoose. After that the shot and powder, the flints and ball for his own use; and lastly, the poor wife gets something for her share. She has managed to keep a couple of deer-skins for her own perquisite, and with these she derives a little pin-money.
It would be too long to follow the marten-skin through its many vicissitudes—how it changes from hand to hand, each time more than doubling its price, until at length some stately dowager spends more guineas upon it than its original captor realized pence for it.
Many a time have I met these long processions, sometimes when I have been alone on the march, and at others when my followers were around me; each time there was the inevitable hand-shaking, the good-humoured laughing, the magic word “thé;” a few matches, and a plug or two of tobacco given, and we separated. How easily they were made happy! And now and again among them would be seen a poor crippled Indian, maimed by fall from horse or shot from gun, hobbling along with the women in the rear of the straggling cortége, looking for all the world like a wild bird with a broken wing.
The spring was now rapidly approaching, and each day made some change in the state of the ice. The northern bank was quite clear of snow; the water on the river grew daily deeper, and at night the ice cracked and groaned as we walked upon it, as though the sleeping giant had begun to stir and stretch himself previous to his final waking.
On the morning of the 7th of April we passed the site of an old fort on the northern shore. I turned aside to examine it. Rank weeds and grass covered a few mounds, and faint traces of a fireplace could be still discerned. Moose-tracks were numerous around.
Just fifty years earlier, this old spot had been the scene of a murderous attack.
In the grey of the morning, a small band of Beaver Indians approached the fort, and shot its master and four men; a few others escaped in a canoe, leaving Fort St. John’s to its fate. It was immediately burned down, and the forest has long since claimed it as its own. In the phraseology of the period, this attack was said to have been made by the Indians in revenge for a series of “wife-lifting” which had been carried on against them by the denizens of the fort. History saith no more, but it is more than probable that this dangerous method of levying “black female” was thereafter discontinued by the Highland fur-traders.