The Wild North Land / The Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America

by Sir William Francis Butler

In one instant we were reduced to a most wretched state. Our canoe was gone; but that was not half our loss—our meat and tent had also gone with her; and we were left on the south shore of the river, while a deep, wide and rapid stream rolled between us and our camp, and we had no axe wherewith to cut trees for a raft—no line to lash them together. Night was coming on; we were without food, shipwrecked in the wilderness.

When the canoe had vanished, we took stock of all these things, and then determined on a course. It was to go back along the upper edge of the cañon to the entrance opposite our camping-place of the last night, there to make a raft from some logs which had been collected for a cache in the previous year, then to put together whatever line or piece of string we possessed, and, making a raft, endeavour to cross to the north shore, and thus gain our camp above the cañon.

It was a long piece of work, and we were already tired with the day’s toil, but it was the sole means by which we could hope to get back to our camp and to food again. After that we would deliberate upon further movements.

When men come heavily to grief in any enterprise, the full gravity of the disaster does not break all at once upon their minds; nay, I have generally found that the first view of the situation is the ludicrous one. One is often inclined to laugh over some plight, which means anything but a laughing matter in reality.

We made our way to the mouth of the cañon, and again held a council. Jacques did not like the idea of the raft; he would go down through the Beaver swamps along the south shore, and, it might be, find the canoe stranded on some beach lower down. Anyhow he would search, and next morning he would come up again along the river and hail us across the water in our camp with tidings of his success: so we parted.

We at once set to work to make our raft. We upset the logs of the old cache, floated them in the water, and lashed them together as best we could, with all the bits of line we could fasten together; then we got three rough poles, took our places on the rickety raft, and put out into the turbid river. Our raft sank deep into the water; down, down we went; no bottom for the poles, which we used as paddles in the current. At last we reached the shore of a large island, and our raft was thrown violently amidst a pile of driftwood. We scrambled on shore, broke our way through drift and thicket to the upper end of the island, and found a wide channel of water separating us still from the north shore. Wading up to our middles across a shallow part of this channel, we finally reached the north shore and our camp of the previous night; from thence we worked through the forest, and just at dusk we struck our camp of the morning. Thus, after many vicissitudes and much toil, we had got safely back to our camp; and though the outlook was dreary enough—for three large rivers and seventy miles of trackless forest lay between us and the mining camp to which we were tending, while all hope of assistance seemed cut off from us—still, after a hearty supper, we lay down to sleep, ready to meet on the morrow whatever it might bring forth.

Early next morning the voice of little Jacques sounded from the other side. He had had a rough time of it; he had gone through slough and swamp and thicket, and finally he had found the canoe stranded on an island four miles below the cañon, half full of water, but otherwise not much the worse for her trip. “Let us make a raft and go down, and we would all pull her up again, and everything would yet be right.” So, taking axes and line with us, we set off once more for the mouth of the cañon, and built a big raft of dry logs, and pushed it out into the current.

Jacques was on the opposite shore, so we took him on our raft, and away we went down current at the rate of seven miles an hour. We reached the island where our castaway canoe lay, and once more found ourselves the owners of a boat. Then we poled up to the cañon again, and, working hard, succeeded in landing the canoe safely behind the rock from which we had made our celebrated crossing on the previous day. The day was hot and fine, the leaves of the cotton-wood were green, the strawberries were in blossom, and in the morning a humming-bird had fluttered into the camp, carrying the glittering colours which he had gathered in the tropics. But these proofs of summer boded ill for us, for all around the glittering hills were sending down their foaming torrents to flood the Ominica.

On the night of the 13th the river, already high, rose nearly two feet. The morning of the 14th came, and, as soon as breakfast was over, we set out to make a last attempt to force the cañon. The programme was to be the same as that of two days ago; to cross above the rapid, and then with double-twisted line to drag the canoe up the fatal fall! We reached the canoe and took our places the same as before. This time, however, there was a vague feeling of uneasiness in every one’s mind; it may have been because we went at the work coldly, unwarmed by previous exercise; but despite the former successful attempt, we felt the presage of disaster ere we left the sheltering rock. Once more the word was given, and we shot into the boiling flood. There was a moment’s wild struggle, during which we worked with all the strength of despair. A second of suspense, and then we are borne backwards—slowly, faster, yet faster—until with a rush as of wings, and amid a roar of maddened water, we go downwards towards the cañon’s wall.

“The rock! the rock!—keep her from the rock!” roared Jacques. We might as well have tried to stop an express train. We struck, but it was the high bow, and the blow split us to the centre; another foot and we must have been shivered to atoms. And now, ere there was time for thought, we were rushing, stern foremost, to the edge of the great rapid. There was no escape; we were as helpless as if we had been chained in that black cañon. “Put steerway on her!” shouted Jacques, and his paddle dipped a moment in the surge and spray. Another instant and we were in it; there was a plunge—a dash of water on every side of us; the waves hissed around and above us, seeming to say, “Now we have got you; for two days you have been edging along us, flanking us, and fooling us; but now it is our turn!”