CLINGING TO THE CANOE.
I remembered, too, without trouble, all the surroundings of the scene; the bordering ice which was close below us—for the channel of water took a central course a little bit lower down the river, and the ice lay on both sides of it—while the current ran underneath as water can only run when four feet of solid ice is pressing upon it. Once under that ice and all was over with us. How it came about I cannot tell, but all at once I found myself free; I suppose one struggle something wilder than the rest had set me free, for long afterwards one of my legs bore tokens of the fight. In another second I was on the surface. I grasped the canoe, but it was round as a log, and turned like a wheel in the water, rolling me down each time, half-drowned as I already was.
My companion, the miner, had gone at once clear of the canoe, and, catching her by the stern, had held himself well above the water. One look at Kalder and Charette on the ice told me they were both utterly demoralized: Kalder had got behind Charette, while the latter held the line without well knowing what to do with it. Perhaps it was better that he did so, as the line was a miserably frail one, little better than a piece of twine, and the weight upon it now in this strong current was very great. Very slowly Charette hauled in the line that held us to Mother Earth; then Kalder recovered his presence of mind, and flung a leathern line across the up-turned canoe. I grasped it, and in another instant the bark grated against the edge of the ice. Numbed and frozen I drew myself on to the canoe, then on to the crumbling ice along the edge, and finally to the solid pack itself. Wet, water-logged, numbed, and frozen, we made our way across the ice to the shore. My gun and revolver had vanished; they lay somewhere under twenty feet of water.
Thus, without arms, with watch feebly ticking—as though endeavouring to paddle itself with its hands through billows of water, with Aneroid so elevated, I presume, at its escape from beneath the water, that in a sudden revulsion of feeling it indicated an amount of elevation above the sea level totally inconsistent with anything short of a Himalayan altitude, at which excited state it continued to exist during the remainder of my wandering—we reached the Hope of Hudson. There never was truer saying than that when things go to the worst they mend. When I had changed my dripping clothes for a suit of Charette’s Sunday finery, when Mrs. Charette had got ready a cup of tea and a bit of moose steak, and when the note-book, letters, and likenesses, which one carries as relics of civilization into the realms of savagery, had all been duly dried and renovated, matters began to look a good deal better.
Early on the following morning Charette and Kalder moored a couple of canoes in the open water, and began to drag for the gun with a fish-hook fastened to the end of a long pole; the gun was in a leathern case, and an hour’s work resulted in its recovery, none the worse for its submersion. My ammunition was still safe, but as the supply of it available for a breech-loader was limited, we were on the whole badly off for arms. I armed Kalder with a flint trading-gun—a weapon which, when he had tried it at a mark, and then hammered the barrel, first on one side then on the other, he declared to be a good “beaver gun.” The miner also possessed a gun, but as the hammer of one barrel hung dangling gracefully down the side, and as he possessed no percussion-caps for the other barrel (a want he supplied by an ingenious use of wax vestas), the striking of his match conveyed a similar idea to the mind of any bird or beast at whose person he presented the muzzle; and while the gun was thinking about going off, the bird or beast had already made up its mind to take a similar course.
Now this matter of weapons was a serious item in our affairs, for numerous are the delays and mishaps of an up-river journey in the wild land we were about to penetrate. Down stream all is well; a raft can always be made that will run from four to six miles an hour; but the best craft that men can build will not go a mile an hour up-stream on many parts of these rivers, and of this up-river we had some 200 miles before us.
On the 27th of April I set out from Hudson’s Hope to cross the portage of ten miles, which avoids the Great Cañon, at the farther end of which the Peace River becomes navigable for a canoe.
We crossed the river once more at the scene of our accident two days previously; but this time, warned by experience, a large canoe was taken, and we passed safely over to the north shore. It took some time to hunt up the horses, and mid-day had come before we finally got clear of the Hope of Hudson.
The portage trail curved up a steep hill of 800 or 900 feet; then on through sandy flats and by small swamps, until, at some eight or nine miles from the Hope of Hudson, the outer spurs of the mountains begin to flank us on either side. To the north a conspicuous ridge, called the Buffalo’s Head, rises abruptly from the plain, some 3000 feet above the pass; its rock summit promised a wide view of mountain ranges on one side, and of the great valley of the Peace River on the other. It stood alone, the easternmost of all the ranges, and the Cañon of the Peace River flowed round it upon two sides, south and west.
Months before, at the forks of the Athabasca River, a man who had once wandered into these wilds told me, in reply to a question of mine, that there was one spot near the mouth of the Peace River pass which commanded a wide range of mountain and prairie. It was the Buffalo’s Head.