There was a certain amount of vagueness in the programme before me. For seventy miles the course was perfectly clear—there was, in fact, only one road to follow—but at the end of that distance two paths lay open, and circumstances could only determine the future route at that point.
If the reader will imagine an immense letter Y laid longitudinally from west to east, he will have a fair idea of the Peace River above the Cañon. The tail of the Y will be the seventy miles of river running directly through the main range of the Rocky Mountains; the right arm will be the Findlay, having its source 300 miles higher up in that wilderness of mountains known as the Stickeen; the left arm will be the Parsnip River, sometimes called by mistake the Peace River, having its source 260 miles to the south near the waters of the upper Frazer. Countless lesser streams (some of them, nevertheless, having their 200 miles of life) roll down into these main systems; and it would seem as though the main channel had, like a skilful general, united all its widely-scattered forces at the forks, seventy miles above us, before entering on the gigantic task of piercing the vast barrier of the central mountains.
Standing on the high ground at the back of the hut in which we awaited the opening of the great river, and looking westward at the mountains piled together in endless masses, it was difficult to imagine by what process a mighty river had cloven asunder this wilderness of rock,—giving us the singular spectacle of a wide, deep, tranquil stream flowing through the principal mountain range of the American continent.
May-day broke in soft showers of rain; the mountains were shrouded in mist; the breeze was not strong enough to lift the gauze-like vapour from the tree-tops on the south shore. By nine o’clock the mists began to drift along the hill-sides; stray peaks came forth through rifts, then shut themselves up again; until finally the sun drew off the vapours, and clad mountain and valley in blue and gold.
We loaded the canoe, closed the door of the old shanty, and shoved off upon our western way. There were four of us and one dog—two miners, my half-breed Kalder, myself, and Cerf-vola. I had arranged with Jacques to travel together, and I made him captain of the boat. None knew better the secrets of the Upper Peace River; for ten years he had delved its waters with his paddle, and its sand-bars with his miner’s shovel.
Little Jacques—he was a curious specimen of humanity, and well worth some study too. I have already said that he was small, but that does not convey any idea of his real size. I think he was the smallest man I ever saw—of course I mean a man, and not a dwarf; Jacques had nothing of the dwarf about him—nay, he was a very giant in skill and craft of paddle, and pluck and daring. He had lived long upon his own resources, and had found them equal to most emergencies.
He could set his sails to every shift of fortune, and make some headway in every wind. In summer he hunted gold; in winter he hunted furs. He had the largest head of thick bushy hair I ever saw. He had drawn 3000 dollars’ worth of pure gold out of a sand-pit on the Ominica River during the preceding summer; he had now a hundred fine marten-skins, the produce of his winter’s trapping. Jacques was rich, but all the same, Jacques must work. As I have said, Jacques was a native of Belfort. Belfort had proved a tough nut for Kaiser William’s legions; and many a time as I watched this little giant in times of peril, I thought that with 200,000 little Jacqueses one could fight big Bismarck’s beery battalions as often as they pleased. Of course Jacques had a pair of miner’s boots. A miner without a pair of miner’s boots would be like Hamlet with Hamlet left out. When Jacques donned these boots, and swung himself out on a huge forest trunk prostrate in a rapid, and hewed away at the giant to give our canoe a passage, he looked for all the world like his prototype the giant-killer, and the boots became the seven-leagued friends of our early days.
How the big axe flew about his little head, until crash went the monster, and Jacques sprang back to rock or boat as lively as a squirrel.
He had many queer stories of early days, and could recount with pride the history of the stirring times he had seen. What miner’s heart does not soften at the recollection, in these degenerate days, of how the Vigilants hanged six roughs one morning in the market-place of Frisco, just two-and-twenty years ago?
We poled and paddled along the shore of the river; now on one side, now on the other, dodging the heavy floes of ice which still came at intervals along the current.