And when it was all over he went his way, thinking he had done a very reprehensible act, and one by no means to be proud of. Poor moose that walks! in this trade for skins you are but a small item!
Society muffles itself in your toil-won sables in distant cities, while you starve and die out in the wilderness.
The credit of your twenty skins, hung to the rafter of Hudson’s Hope, is not a large one; but surely there is a Hope somewhere else, where your account is kept in golden letters, even though nothing but the clouds had baptized you, no missionary had cast water on your head, and God only knows who taught you to be honest.
Let me not be misunderstood in this matter. I believe, gentlemen missionaries, you mean well by this Indian. I will go further; you form, I think, almost the only class who would deal fairly by him, but you go to work in a wrong direction; your mode of proceeding is a mistake. If you would only be a little more human, and a little less divine—if you would study the necessities of the savage races amidst whom you have cast your lot—what good might ye not effect?
This Cree, this Blackfoot, this Chipewyan, this Beaver—what odds is it, in the name of all goodness, whether he fully understands the numbered or unnumbered things you tell him. Teach him the simple creed which you would teach a child. He is starving, and the feast you give him is of delicate and subtle food, long since compounded from the brain of schoolman and classicist. He is naked, and you would clothe him in mysterious raiment and fine tissue, which time has woven out of the webs of doubt and inquiry. All this will not warm him from the terrible blast of winter, or shelter him from the drenching rains of early summer. He has many faults, some virtues, innumerable wants. Begin with these. Preach against the first; cultivate the second; relieve as much as possible the third. Make him a good man before you attempt to make him an indifferent Christian. In a word, do more for his body; and after a bit, when you have taught him to help his wife in toil and trouble—to build a house and to live in it—to plant a few potatoes when the ground thaws, and to hoe them out ere it hardens again—when you have loosed the bands of starvation, nakedness, and hardship from the grasp in which they now hold him, then will come the moment for your books and your higher teaching. And in his hut, with a well-filled stomach, he will have time to sift truth from falsehood, amidst all the isms and arians under the guise of which you come to teach him. But just now he is only a proletarian and an open-arian, and not much even of these. Meantime I know that you wish well by him. You are ready to teach him—to tell him about a host of good, and some very indifferent, persons; but lo! in the middle of your homilies he falls asleep, and his sleep is the sleep of death. He starves and dies out before you. Of course I know the old old answer: “He is hopeless; we have tried everything; we can do nothing.” How often have I not been told, “He is hopeless; we can do nothing for this Red man!” But will any person dare to say that men such as this Indian at Hudson’s Hope are beyond the cure of man? If they be, then your creed must be a poor weak thing.
CHAPTER XXII.
Still westward.—The dangers of the ice.—We enter the main range.—In the mountains.—A grizzly.—Tho death of the moose.—Peace River Pass.—Pete Toy.—The Ominica.—“Travellers” at home.
We held our way up the river, fighting many a battle with the current. Round the points the stream ran strong, and our canoe was a big, lumbering affair, hollowed out of a single cotton-wood tree by Jacques, years before on the Fraser River, and ill-adapted to the ice, which was our most dangerous enemy. Many a near shave we had of being crushed under its heavy floes as we coasted along beneath their impending masses. When the river breaks up, portions of it stronger than the rest remain still frozen. At the back of these the floating ice jams, and the river rises rapidly behind the barrier thus flung across it. Then the pack gives way, and the pent-up waters rapidly lower. But along the shore, on either side, the huge blocks of ice lie stranded, heaped one upon another, and the water, still falling, brushes off from beneath the projecting pieces, leaving a steep wall of ice, sometimes twenty and thirty feet, brightly rising above the water. Along these impending masses we had to steer our canoe, and hazardous work it was, for every now and again some huge fragment, many tons in weight, would slide from its high resting-place, and crash into the river with a roar of thunder, driving the billows before it half-way across the wide river, and making our hearts jump half as much again.
At one point where the river ran with unusual velocity we battled long beneath a very high ice-wall. Once or twice the current carried us against its sides. We dared not touch it with our poles, for it hung by a thread, so far did its summit project over our heads.