CHAPTER XII
On Thursday, July 17th, at two o'clock in the afternoon, we struck camp and started on a four-mile portage to the next lake down stream, as the river-bed was too full of large boulders to navigate the strong current with safety. It was hard work carrying the cargo and canoe through the mosquito-stricken ironstone country, and we did not camp till midnight. Here another bad omen was observed. Mackinlay and I had gone ahead, after carrying over a load, to try and kill something for supper; we found a musk-ox, but made rather a clumsy mess of killing it, and the animal was badly heated before we finished it off. The meat was consequently discoloured, and Saltatha declared this to be an unfailing sign of some great misfortune at hand. The women had made us a few pair of moccasins each, but not nearly enough for the tracking-work that we should have to do when we turned up stream; and our stock of provisions, instead of the bales of dried meat that we had expected to enable us to travel without waste of time in hunting, consisted of ten dried deers'-ribs, so full of maggots, from having been imperfectly cured, that we threw them away on the second day out. Our flour and pemmican had of course been finished long ago, and we drank the last kettleful of tea before leaving Musk-ox Lake, but as the Labrador tea grows all over this country in profusion, this did not much matter; tobacco too was nearly at an end.
The lake was still full of floating ice, but we had no trouble in passing the canoe into the river at the north end, and found the stream considerably increased in volume by a couple of large tributaries that come in from the opposite sides of the lake. After dropping down two or three miles with a sluggish current, we heard the roar of a rapid, and put ashore on an island in mid-stream as soon as we sighted broken water. It was lucky we did so, as there was a heavy overfall impossible to run, and we were obliged to portage the whole length of the island and then shoot the tail of the rapid. Here we put ashore to patch the canoe, which was leaking badly, and pulled out big trout as quickly as we could throw in the spoon-bait; we found this could be done at the foot of all the rapids, so one need not take much thought about provisions in this part of the stream. After another small rapid, which was run with a full load, the river, heading straight to the north, passes through a small lake and emerges as a broad canal-like waterway with very slight current, flowing through the roughest part of the ironstone country that we had yet seen; the banks were steep too, and we could put the canoe alongside a natural wharf in any spot for a distance of five or six miles. In passing down these reaches we saw and killed musk-ox, but the caribou seemed to shirk the labour of crossing the confused masses of rocks, and none of these animals were seen till we reached a less rugged district. Again the channel widened out into a lake, two miles in length, with an ugly rapid at the north end; this we negotiated with the precaution of leaving guns and ammunition ashore, and directly afterwards Saltatha caused some excitement by saying he had caught a glimpse of a man walking on a neighbouring ridge; we put ashore, but could find no tracks, and came to the conclusion that it was Saltatha's imagination. A long day's travel was made successfully, and by ten o'clock we were clear of the ironstone and slipping quietly along through a pleasant sandy country. We camped at the foot of a high sand-butte covered with flowers and moss, and found a bunch of willows on the bank of the river. There were indications that some one had camped on the same spot many years ago; small sticks had been chopped with an axe, and bones of caribou were lying in heaps on the ground. The Yellow Knives at once said it was an old Esquimaux camp, and it was evident that they had little inclination to go any farther down stream; more probably the chopping was done by a band of Dog-Ribs, whose hunting-grounds lie to the west, or possibly by the members of Stewart's and Anderson's expeditions. On mounting the butte we saw that the country northward presented a much more fertile appearance than anything we had seen on the south side of the watershed. There was a luxurious growth of grass over the sandy ridges, and during the two months of summer one could imagine oneself back on the prairies of Alberta; the willows here too grew to a better size, and, as far as we descended the river, we had little trouble about fuel; in the winter, of course, the willows would be all drifted over with snow, and it would then be no easy matter to make a fire. This stream heads in the woodless country; consequently there is no drift-timber, and not a single pine-tree is to be seen along its course.
We had a pleasant camp enough that night, but rebellion was rife and burst into flame on the following morning when we ordered the men to take their places in the canoes. This is the hopeless part of having to rely on natives for travelling in the Barren Ground; they have no courage outside their own country. If we had had a good crew of half-breeds from Red River or the upper country of British Columbia we might even now, notwithstanding the lateness of the season, have pushed far out towards the northern sea-coast, and possibly have made the acquaintance of some of the scattered bands of Esquimaux who live there in happy ignorance of any more comfortable form of life. But we were practically in the hands of the Yellow Knives, for although I would myself have taken the risk of steering, none of the men who were willing to go knew how to stitch up a broken canoe, and it would have been madness to push on without this knowledge. Moise, our half-breed interpreter and steersman, who was an engaged servant of the Hudson's Bay Company and bound by his contract to obey Mackinlay's orders in everything, showed the Indian side of his nature by joining the mutineers and refusing to take his position in the stern of the canoe. For two hours we argued the matter on the bank of the river, and at one time I thought we should certainly have come to blows. Marlo and Carquoss were the ringleaders, but Saltatha was inclined to stand by us, although afraid of giving offence to the other Indians. The result of the dispute was that the worst two deserted, taking with them the little canoe, while Noel and Saltatha, tempted by many promises of great reward when we reached the fort, agreed to come with us, and Moise sulkily went back to his duty. After we had thus got rid of the element of discord things went on better; but the loss of the little canoe, besides doing away with our chance of crossing overland to Bathurst Inlet, increased the risk of losing all our possessions by one disaster. A pretty poetical thing is a birch-bark canoe, as it leaps down a sparkling river among its native birch woods, but too frail a craft for a long journey in the rockbound country beyond the line where timber grows. No chance here to strip the bark from a birch-tree and put a new side in a canoe that has struck a rock in the foaming rapid, or if needs be to build a new canoe altogether; three square feet of birch-bark, a little gum, and a bundle of fibre were our only resources for effecting repairs.
The day's journey began with a rapid, below which was a reach of quiet water gradually broadening out into a lake some eight miles in length; its surface was covered with ice at the north end, but we found an open channel close ashore on the west side and effected a passage through by skirting the bays. Several bands of musk-ox were seen, and there was always too much anxiety among the men to put ashore and shoot, or to do anything except push steadily on; just as we were leaving the lake a magnificent bull appeared on the top of a high ridge, and, standing on a flat rock within one hundred yards of us, leisurely surveyed the first human beings who had encroached upon his sanctuary for so many years.
Below the lake the river makes a sharp bend eastward, and for three miles is nothing but a succession of rapids. Moise when once at work was a splendid steersman, and he certainly handled the canoe with great skill through this difficult piece of navigation; we passed the mouths of two big streams coming in from the west, and at camping-time shot into a quiet sandy lake and put ashore for the night. A musk-ox that I killed from the door of the lodge, and the unlimited number of trout that we could catch in the river, enabled us to spend a peaceful Sunday without hunting. We explored towards the east, and came once more upon the iron country, which seems to run with a sharply defined edge in a north-easterly direction. There were few lakes out of the course of the river, but long stretches of flat grassy muskegs extended as far as the eye could see to the west. Four-footed game was plentiful, especially musk-ox; the caribou that we saw were generally solitary bucks, but it was now nearly time for the does to be coming back from the sea-coast; of the smaller animals we often came across a skulking wolf, a wolverine, an Arctic fox, or a hare, while the holes in the sand-hills were the abode of numerous siffleurs and ermines. A ferocious little mouse, brown in summer, but turning white as the winter comes on, is very common all over the Barren Ground; if disturbed from a tuft of grass it will turn on a man and dance with impotent rage at his feet; these mice naturally fall an easy prey to the hawks and owls, which make a good living here during the summer months. Beyond these predatory birds little feathered life was visible in this part of the country; a few gulls, terns, and skuas flitted along the reaches of the river, and occasionally a loon or a long-tailed duck could be seen in the lakes. The Canada goose and grey wavy were breeding in the marshes, but not in great quantities; the main body of geese go right out to the coast to lay their eggs, and do not start for the South till the end of August.
In the early morning we made a short portage over a small cascade immediately below the camp, and found that the river still held its northerly course through a chain of small lakes connected by short stretches of bad water. We made one more portage at mid-day and ran several rather nasty rapids. After dinner we were obliged to portage fully a mile to avoid an impassable reach, and then took more risk than we were justified in doing with our only canoe by running a couple of miles of broken water, full of boulders and with such a heavy sea that we shipped a good deal of water; luckily we did not touch anything, and dropped safely into a long narrow lake, on the east side of which camp was made for the night. This was the most dangerous day that we made; as although we always put ashore to inspect the rapids in case we might discover a waterfall below, we became emboldened by success and ran in safety through some places that we should not have attempted. Back's map of the river would have been a great help to us, but neither this nor an account of the previous journeys that had been made down the stream was procurable at the fort.
The next day a curious blue haze hung over everything, closely resembling the smoke of a forest fire at a distance from the scene of conflagration. The lake that we had camped on proved to be about six miles in length, with the usual rapid at its north end connecting it with another lake, the size of which we could not at first determine owing to the murky state of the air; nor could we at once find its outlet, but by keeping in a north-easterly direction soon felt the influence of a current, and found the volume of water much increased by the junction of a tributary, which we afterwards discovered came in from the north-west. On the east side of the stream, just as it left the lake, we noticed a circle of flat stones standing on end, evidently put up by human hands, and on landing discovered unmistakable signs of a band of Esquimaux having been encamped there not very long before. Seven small oval-shaped enclosures, surrounded by rough turf-heaps six inches in height, had been the dwelling-places, but we could not determine whether these low walls were the foundations of snow-houses or deer-skin lodges; there were several blackened fireplaces outside, but the fires must have been very small judging from the charred stumps of tiny green willow twigs, and we saw no wood within several miles of the encampment. The stones propped on end had been used probably for drying meat, and for tying up the dogs to keep them from stealing. Bones and horns of musk-ox and caribou were lying about in every direction, and their numbers showed that this must be a favourite camping-place of the Esquimaux; some of the musk-ox horns had been cut into rough spoons, and several were found in a half-finished condition. A flat stone kettle was picked up with the grease still sticking to it, and a small piece of copper let into the back, possibly an arrangement for a handle, showed that these people are able to work this metal; there were also a few bone arrow-heads scattered about in the camp. If any further proof were necessary to determine what tribe of people had camped here, it was forthcoming in the form of several pieces of undressed sealskin with the hair on, and these seemed to be of greater interest to our crew than any of the other discoveries; arrow-heads, spoons, and kettle were dropped in the contemplation of the skin of an animal they had never seen, and they instantly demanded a description of the seal. After we had told them all we knew upon the subject, we asked their opinion as to the length of time that the Esquimaux had remained here, and when they had left. Saltatha, reading the signs that a white man might miss, came to the conclusion that they had come here in the autumn, as was proved by the hard horns of male caribou lying about, that they had stayed here through the winter, and left late in the spring with dogs on the last snow, about six weeks before our arrival. He thought too that they made a practice of coming here regularly, in the same manner that the Yellow Knives come to the head-waters of the river, as the bones appeared to him to have belonged to animals killed at widely differing dates. We found hiding-places among the rocks close to the edge of the river, which had evidently been used for concealing men engaged in spearing the swimming caribou. The only weak point in Saltatha's theory seemed to be the absence of any carcasses of freshly killed caribou; but it is possible that the Esquimaux may have left before the females came out so far, and the animals would have been later than usual in arriving here owing to the backward nature of the spring.