One word now about this sense of hearing possessed by the moose. The most favourable day for hunting is in wild windy weather, when the dry branches of the forest crack in the gale. Nevertheless, Indians have assured me that, on such days, when they have sighted a moose, they have broken a dry stick; and although many branches were waving and cracking in the woods, the animal started at the sound—distinguishing it from the natural noises of the forest.
But although the moose are still as numerous on Peace River as they were in days far removed from the present, there is another animal which has almost wholly disappeared.
The giant form of the wood-buffalo no longer darkens the steep lofty shores. When first Mackenzie beheld the long reaches of the river, the “gentle lawns” which alternated with “abrupt precipices” were “enlivened” by vast herds of buffaloes. This was in 1793. Thirty-three years later, Sir George Simpson also ascended the river with his matchless Iroquois crew. Yet no buffalo darkened the lofty shores.
What destroyed them in that short interval? The answer is not difficult to seek—deep snow. The buffalo grazes on the grass, the moose browses on the tall willows. During one winter of exceptionally deep snow, eighty buffaloes were killed in a single day in the vicinity of Dunvegan. The Indians ran them into the snowdrifts, and then despatched them with knives.
It is still a matter of dispute whether the wood-buffalo is the same species as his namesake of the southern plains; but it is generally believed by the Indians that he is of a kindred race. He is nevertheless larger, darker, and wilder; and although the northern land, in which he is still found, abounds in open prairies and small plains, he nevertheless seeks in preference the thickest woods. Whether he be of the plain race or not, one thing is certain—his habits vary much from his southern cousin. The range of the wood-buffalo is much farther north than is generally believed. There are scattered herds even now on the banks of the Liard River as far as sixty-one degrees of north latitude.
The earth had never elsewhere such an accumulation of animal life as this northern continent must have exhibited some five or six centuries ago, when, from the Great Slave Lake to the Gulf of Florida, millions upon millions of bisons roamed the wilderness.
Have we said enough of animals, or can we spare a few words to the bears and the beavers? Of all the animals which the New World gave to man the beaver was the most extraordinary. His cunning surpassed that of the fox; his skill was greater than that of the honey-bee; his patience was more enduring than the spider’s; his labour could turn the waters of a mighty river, and change the face of an entire country. He could cut down forests, and build bridges; he dwelt in a house with rooms, a common hall and a neat doorway in it. He could fell a forest tree in any direction he pleased, or carry it on his back when his sharp teeth had lopped its branches. He worked in companies, with a master beaver at the head of each—companies from whose ranks an idle or a lazy beaver was ignominiously expelled. He dwelt along the shores of quiet lakes, or by the margins of rushing streams, and silent majestic rivers, far in the heart of the solitude.
But there came a time when men deemed his soft, dark skin a fitting covering for their heads; and wild men hunted him out in his lonely home. They trapped him from Texas to the Great Bear Lake; they hunted him in the wildest recesses of the Rocky Mountains; rival companies went in pursuit of him. In endeavouring to cover the heads of others, hundreds of trappers lost their own head-covering; the beaver brought many a white man’s scalp to the red man’s lodge-pole; and many a red man’s life went out with the beaver’s. In the West he became well-nigh extinct, in the nearer North he became scarce; yet here in Peace River he held his own against all comers. Nigh 30,000 beavers die annually along its shores, and when spring opens its waters the night is ever broken by the dull plunge of countless beavers in the pools and eddies of the great river.
Along the lofty shores of the Peace River the Saskootum berry grows in vast quantities. In August its fruit is ripe, and the bears come forth to enjoy it; black, brown, and grizzly, stalk along the shores and hill-sides browsing on this luscious berry. On such food Bruin grows fat and unwieldy; he becomes “sleek-headed” and “sleeps of nights,” thus falling an easy prey to his hunter.
While he was alive he loved the “poire” berries, and now when he is dead the red man continues the connexion, and his daintiest morsel is the bear’s fat and Saskootum berries mixed with powdered moose-meat. It is the dessert of a Peace River feast; the fat, white as cream, is eaten in large quantities, and although at first a little of it suffices, yet after a while one learns to like it, and the dried Saskootum and “bear’s butter” becomes a luxury.