A "Chute" on the Gatineau.
This procuring of guides through an unknown country, on the instalment plan, was very fascinating to me, and it illustrated a characteristic of the northern forest Indian which is universal. The red man of the prairies was a nomad, but the son of the woods does not make very long pilgrimages, or know much about the world beyond his own hunting-ground. Before he is old enough to remember any thing he makes his first journey to the trading-post where his ancestors have for generations been regular customers and perpetual debtors. He does not remember how or when he learned the way. On his own stream and its tributaries he is an infallible guide, for he learned all the landmarks before he could pronounce their names. But every forest traveller has found the Indians in one locality reluctant to go far from home. When Alexander Mackenzie felt his way, by stream and portage, to the great river which bears his name, and thence down to the Frozen Ocean, he found that the Indians on one reach of the river always believed that below their own country there were impassable rapids and insurmountable rocks, ferocious beasts and hidden perils. If you will journey toward the head of the Ottawa, in the fall of this year, you will find precisely the same state of aboriginal mind. The Indians around the Grand Lake Victoria are within a few miles of the sources of rivers flowing toward the four quarters of the American continent. Ten days' steady canoeing in any direction would take them to Hudson's Bay or Lake Huron or Lake Ontario or Montreal. But they never travel for the sake of seeing the country, or get far from home.
It was on the last day Jocko was with us, October 26th, that I made the photograph of him which is one of the illustrations of this article. He was in his shirt-sleeves and wore an old straw hat. While we were eating our lunch at noon, the black flies were a little attentive and it was uncomfortably warm. That was the climate of the far Upper Ottawa in the last days of October. There was not yet a suggestion of snow. For all the atmospheric indications told us, we might have been in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
The Ottawa above Grand Lake House comes down out of the rocky hills, and is full of rapids. In many smooth places the current is very swift, and it was worth coming a long way to see Joe and Jocko paddle up places where Billy and I could not go. Fighting inch by inch against a rapid current is one of the most trying tests of endurance I know. It is unlike anything else in the world. You pull and pull, and realize that an instant's relaxation will cost you all you have gained. If the water only would stop for an instant! But it is so easy for the current to rush on and on. How futile are human energy and perseverance against a power which has never for one second faltered in uncounted years!
Jocko told Joe—he could not say it in English—that he enjoyed travelling with us more than he did with the Hudson's Bay Company people, because they travelled for dear life, making fifty or sixty miles a day, and nearly paralyzed his arms. When he had gone from Hunter's Point to Grand Lake House a few weeks before, he and Mr. Christopherson had made the trip in less than three days, but his arms were numb all the next night. He liked to find a white man who travelled "like an Indian," and said if I would come up this fall he would show me some moose and deer hunting around the head of the Coulonge and Dumoine, the like of which white men did not often see.
We reached the camp of the old chief, Jocko's objective point, just at purple twilight, when the smoke was rising straight toward the sky, and we witnessed one of the most peaceful and beautiful bits of wilderness comfort I have ever beheld. It seemed more like approaching a white man's farm than an Indian camp.
There were two or three log-houses, a few acres of cleared land, and two or three horses and cows. A tame horned owl scolded us from the roof of a barn. The Indian girls were singing and calling to each other across the wide river. A score of children and grandchildren of the fat old chief turned out to welcome us, and we slept in one of the log-barns, on the hay. Jocko sat up and visited with his Indian girl friends, and I heard them laughing and chatting until long after midnight.
As I lay looking out at the shining surface of the Ottawa, from my cosey nest in the sweet, wild hay, it was bewildering to remember that so much of Canada lay south of us. Only a rifle-shot away, at the end of a forest path, were the bubbling springs which form the sources of the Coulonge, that pine-embowered stream which, for two hundred miles, straight away to the south, traverses the centre of the great interior island whose borders we were encircling. I thought of the long reaches of moonlit river, where the timid deer were drinking, and the moose, in all the ardor of their courtship, roared hoarse contempt for impertinent rivals. And this was only one of the streams whose sources we were circumnavigating: the Maganasipi, the Bear, the swamp-fed Black, the Dumoine, the Tomasine, the Desert—all these rivers and a thousand lakes, gathered all at last in the generous arms of the twin rivers, and borne away to join the grand chorus, the voice of many waters.
In the morning there was a pow-wow, as the result of which a son and grandson of the chief agreed to see us out to the Gatineau, the boy going along to help his father if a freeze-up should make it necessary to carry their canoe back over the ice. For many miles through devious channels and short cuts, we ran past natural meadows where the unsown grass had grown high and dried up for the lack of something to feed upon it—ancient beaver meadows, from which all trace of the original forest had long ago disappeared. Joe and the Indian discussed the beaver question earnestly. It appears that the most interesting issue in Algonquin politics is what to do about the beavers. There are plenty of them all through the back country, and the Indians regard them as their personal property. They only kill a certain proportion of the little animals, and carefully preserve the supply. The beaver's habit of building for himself and family a comfortable and conspicuous residence enables the hunters to take a pretty accurate census of the population, and to tell just where the animals are to be found. On our way we turned aside and photographed a beaver-dam and a house. The natural history books generally picture these constructions as quite symmetrical affairs, but all I have ever seen have been rough piles of sticks and mud, and the photographs show typical beaver construction.