In the evening we had gained a spot some twelve miles from the hut, and we made our camp on a wooded flat set in a wide amphitheatre of hills. The next morning broke wet and stormy, and we lay in camp during the early part of the day. Towards mid-day the silence was broken by the discharge of a gun at the opposite side of the river. We at once answered it, and soon another report replied to ours. There were Indians in the vicinity, so we might expect a visit. About an hour later a most wretched group appeared at our camp. It consisted of two half-clad women, one of whom carried a baby on her back; a wild-looking boy, apparently about twelve or fourteen years of age, led the way, carrying an old gun; two dogs brought up the rear. A glance at the dogs showed that food, at least, was plentiful in the Indian camp—they were fat and sleek. If an Indian has a fat dog, you may know that game is abundant; if the dog is thin, food is scarce; if there be no dog at all, the Indian is starving, and the dog has been killed and eaten by his master. But to proceed:—
In a network of tattered blankets and dripping rags, these three wretched creatures stalked into our camp; they were as wet as if they had come underneath the river instead of across it; but that seemed to give them little thought. Jacques understood a few words of what they said, and the rest was made out by signs;—all the men were sick, and had been sick for months. This boy and another were alone able to hunt; but moose were plenty, and starvation had not come to supplement sickness; the women were “packing” the men.
Reader, what do you imagine that means? I will soon tell you. It means that when the camp moves—which it does every few days, as the game gets hunted away from one locality—the women carried the men on their backs in addition to the household gods. Literally these poor women carried on their bent backs the house, the clothes, the food, the baby, and the baby’s father.
What was the disease? They could not tell.
My slender stock of drugs was long since exhausted; I had nothing left but the pain-killer. I gave them half of my last bottle, and had it been the golden wealth of the sand-bars of this Peace River itself, it could not have been more thought of. To add to their misfortunes, the baby had come to grief about a week previously—it had tumbled head foremost into the fire. It was now unslung from its mother’s back for my inspection. Poor little Beaver! its face and head had got a dreadful burning; but, thanks to mountain air and Indian hardiness, it was getting all right.
Had I anything to rub on it? A little of the Mal de Raquette porpoise-oil and pain-killer yet remained, and with such an antidote the youthful Beaver might henceforth live in the camp-fire.
I know some excellent Christians at home who occasionally bestow a shilling or a half-crown upon a poor man at a church-door or a street-crossing, not for the humanity of the act, but just to purchase that amount of heaven in the next world. I believe they could tell you to a farthing how much of Paradise they had purchased last week or the week before. I am not sure that they are quite clear as to whether the quantity of heaven thus purchased, is regulated by the value set on the gift by the beggar or by the rich man; but if it be by the value placed on it by him who gets it, think, my Christian friends, think what a field for investment does not this wilderness present to you. Your shilling spent here amongst these Indians will be rated by them at more than its weight in gold; and a pennyworth of pain-killer might purchase you a perpetuity of Paradise.
Jacques, an adept in Indian trade, got a large measure of dried moose meat in exchange for a few plugs of tobacco; and the Indians went away wet, but happy.
One word more about Indians—and I mean to make it a long word and a strong word, and perhaps my reader will add, a wrong word; but never mind, it is meant the other way.
This portion of the Beaver tribe trade to Hudson’s Hope, the fort we have but lately quitted.