THE MAN AND HIS MISSION
At almost the same hour in which Sam Carr and his daughter held that
intimate conversation on the porch of their home a twenty-foot
Peterborough freight canoe was sliding down the left-hand bank of the
Athabasca like some gray river-beast seeking the shade of the birch and
willow growth that overhung the shore. The current beneath and the
thrust of the blades sent it swiftly along the last mile of the river
and shot the gray canoe suddenly beyond the sharp nose of a jutting
point fairly into the bosom of a great, still body of water that spread
away northeastward in a widening stretch, its farthest boundary a watery
junction with the horizon.
There were three men in the canoe. One squatted forward, another rested
his body on his heels in the after end. These two were swarthy, stockily
built men, scantily clad, moccasins on their feet, and worn felt hats
crowning lank, black hair long innocent of a barber's touch.
The third man sat amidships in a little space left among goods that were
piled to the top of the deep-sided craft. He was no more like his
companions than the North that surrounded them with its silent waterways
and hushed forests is like the tropical jungle. He was a fairly big
man, taller, wider-bodied than the other two. His hair was a
reddish-brown, his eyes as blue as the arched dome from which the hot
sun shed its glare.
He had on a straight-brimmed straw hat which in the various shifts of
the long water route and many camps had suffered disaster, so that a
part of the brim drooped forlornly over his left ear. This headgear had
preserved upon his brow the pallid fairness of his skin. From the
eyebrows down his face was in the last stages of sunburn, reddened,
minute shreds of skin flaking away much as a snake's skin sheds in
August. Otherwise he was dressed, like a countless multitude of other
men who walk the streets of every city in North America, in a
conventional sack suit, and shoes that still bore traces of blacking.
The paddlers were stripped to thin cotton shirts and worn overalls. The
only concession their passenger had made to the heat was the removal of
his laundered collar. Apparently his dignity did not permit him to lay
aside his coat and vest. As they cleared the point a faint breeze
wavered off the open water. He lifted his hat and let it play about his
moist hair.
"This is Lake Athabasca?" he asked.
"Oui, M'sieu Thompson," Mike Breyette answered from the bow, without
turning his head. "Dees de lak."
"How much longer will it take us to reach Port Pachugan?" Thompson made
further inquiry.
"Bout two-three hour, maybeso," Breyette responded.
He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois
of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in
the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship
passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young man,
and he did not understand French. He had a faint suspicion that his
convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished. Whether their talk
was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say. In the
first stages of their journey together, on the upper reaches of the
river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of
their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a
journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English. Mr. Wesley
Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a--to
him--strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and
administered shocked reproof. It was, in a way, practice for the tasks
the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform. But
if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of
discourtesy. Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners. Thereafter
they invariably swore in French.
They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake
shore, lest the combination of a sudden squall and a heavy-loaded canoe
should bring disaster. When Mike Breyette's "two-tree" hour was run Mr.
Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach
before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker
that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced
profound relief.
For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed
misgivings. The largest bodies of water he had been on intimate terms
with heretofore had been contained within the dimensions of a bathtub.
He could not swim. No matter that his faith in an all-wise Providence
was strong he could not forbear inward tremors at the certain knowledge
that only a scant quarter-inch of frail wood and canvas stood between
him and a watery grave. He regarded a canoe with distrust. Nor could he
understand the careless confidence with which his guides embarked in so
captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they
had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name.
To Thompson--if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and
transmuting them into words--the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a
turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there
over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the canoe's prow.
It did not comfort him to know that he was in the hands of two capable
rivermen, tried and proven in bad water, proud of their skill with the
paddle. Could he have done so the reverend young man would gladly have
walked after the first day in their company. But since that was out of
the question, he took his seat in the canoe each morning and faced each
stretch of troubled water with an inward prayer.
The last stretch and this last day had tried his soul to its utmost.
Pachugan lay near the end of the water route. What few miles he had to
travel beyond the post would lie along the lake shore, and the lake
reassured him with its smiling calm. Having never seen it harried by
fierce winds, pounding the beaches with curling waves, he could not
visualize it as other than it was now, glassy smooth, languid, inviting.
Over the last twenty miles of the river his guides had strained a point
now and then, just to see their passenger gasp. They would never have
another chance and it was rare sport, just as it is rare sport for
spirited youths to snowball a passer-by who does not take kindly to
their pastime.
In addition to these nerve-disturbing factors Thompson suffered from the
heat. A perverted dignity, nurtured in a hard-shell, middle-class
environment, prevented him from stripping to his undershirt. The sun's
rays, diffusing abnormal heat through the atmosphere, reflected
piercingly upward from the water, had played havoc with him. His first
act upon landing was to seat himself upon a flat-topped boulder and dab
tenderly at his smarting face while his men hauled up the canoe. That in
itself was a measure of his inefficiency, as inefficiency is measured in
the North. The Chief Factor of a district large enough to embrace a
European kingdom, traveling in state from post to post, would not have
been above lending a hand to haul the canoe clear. Thompson had come to
this _terra incognita_ to preach and pray, to save men's souls. So far
it had not occurred to him that aught else might be required of a man
before he could command a respectful hearing.
Back from the beach, in a clearing hacked out of the woods, stood a
score or more of low cabins flanking a building more ambitious in scope
and structure. More than a century had passed since the first foundation
logs were laid in the name of the Hudson's Bay Company, to the Company's
glory and profit. It had been a fort then, in all that the name implies
throughout the fur country. It had boasted a stockade, a brass cannon
which commanded the great gates that swung open to friendly strangers
and were closed sharply to potential foes. But the last remnant of
Pachugan's glory had gone glimmering down the corridors of time. The
Company was still as strong, stronger even in power more sure and subtle
than ever lay in armed retainers and absolute monopoly. But Fort
Pachugan had become a mere collecting station for the lesser furs, a
distributing center for trade goods to native trappers. There were no
more hostile tribes. The Company no longer dealt out the high justice,
the middle, and the low. The stockade and the brass cannon were
traditions. Pachugan sprawled on the bank of the lake, open to all
comers, a dimming landmark of the old days.
What folk were out of doors bent their eyes upon the canoe. The factor
himself rose from his seat on the porch and came down to have speech
with them. Thompson, recognizing authority, made known his name and his
mission. The burly Scot shook hands with him. They walked away together,
up to the factor's house. On the threshold the Reverend Wesley paused
for a backward look, drew the crumpled linen of his handkerchief across
his moist brow, and then disappeared within. Mike Breyette and Donald
MacDonald looked at each other expressively. Their swarthy faces slowly
expanded in a broad grin.
In the North, what with the crisp autumn, the long winter, and that
bleak, uncertain period which is neither winter nor spring, summer--as
we know it in softer lands--has but a brief span to endure. But Nature
there as elsewhere works out a balance, adheres to a certain law of
proportion. What Northern summers lack in length is compensated by
intensity. When the spring floods have passed and the warm rains follow
through lengthening days of sun, grass and flowers arise with magic
swiftness from a wonderfully fertile soil. Trees bud and leaf; berries
form hard on the blossoming. Overnight, as it were, the woods and
meadows, the river flats and the higher rolling country, become
transformed. And when August passes in a welter of flies and heat and
thunderstorms, the North is ready once more for the frosty segment of
its seasonal round. July and August are hot months in the high
latitudes. For six weeks or thereabouts the bottom-lands of the Peace
and the Athabasca can hold their own with the steaming tropics. After
that--well, this has to do in part with "after that." For it was in late
July when Wesley Thompson touched at Fort Pachugan, a Bible in his
pocket, a few hundred pounds of supplies in Mike Breyette's canoe,
certain aspirations of spiritual labor in his head, and little other
equipment to guide and succor him in that huge, scantily peopled
territory which his superiors had chosen as the field for his labors.
When Breyette and MacDonald had so bestowed the canoe that the
diligently foraging dogs of the post could not take toll of their
supplies they also hied them up to the cluster of log cabins ranging
about the Company store and factor's quarters. They were on tolerably
familiar ground. First they made for the cabin of Dougal MacPhee, an
ancient servitor of the Company and a distant relative of Breyette's,
for whom they had a gift of tobacco. Old Dougal welcomed them
laconically, without stirring from his seat in the shade. He sucked at
an old clay pipe. His half-breed woman, as wrinkled and time worn as
himself, squatted on the earth sewing moccasins. Old Dougal turned his
thumb toward a bench and bade them be seated.
"It's a bit war-rm," MacDonald opined, by way of opening the
conversation.
"What else wad it be this time o' year?" Dougal rumbled. "Tell us
somethin' we dinna ken. Wha's yon cam' wi' ye?"
"Man, but the heat makes ye crabbed," MacDonald returned with naïve
candor. "Yon's a meenister."
"Bagosh, yes," Breyette chuckled. "Dat ees de man of God w'at you see.
He's com' for save soul hon' de Eenjun hon' Lone Moose. Bagosh, we're
have som' fon weet heem dees treep."
"He's a loon," MacDonald paused with a forefinger in the bowl of his
pipe. "He doesna know a moccasin from a snowshoe, scarce. I'd like tae
be aboot when 'tis forty below--an' gettin' colder. I'm thinkin' he'd
relish a taste o' hell-fire then, for a change--eh, Mike?"
The two of them went off into a fit of silent laughter, for the abysmal
ignorance of Wesley Thompson concerning practical things, his awkward
length of body, his student's pallor that the Athabasca sun had played
such havoc with, his blue eyes that looked so often with trepidation or
amazement on the commonplaces of their world, his general incapacity and
blind belief that an all-wise Providence would personally intervene to
make things go right when they went wrong, had not struck these two
hardy children of the solitudes as other than a side-splitting joke.
"He rises i' the mornin'," MacDonald continued, "win' a word frae the
Book aboot the Lord providin', an' he'd starve if nabody was by t' cook
his meal. He canna build a fire wi'oot scorchin' his fingers. He lays
hold o' a paddle like a three months' babby. He bids ye pit yer trust i'
the Lord, an' himself rises up wi' a start every time a wolf raises the
long howl at nicht. I didna believe there was ever sae helpless a
creature. An' for a' that he's the laddie that's here tae show the
heathen--thae puir, sinfu' heathen, mind ye--how tae find grace. No that
he's any doot aboot bein' equal tae the job. For a' that he's nigh
helpless i' the woods he was forever ying-yangin' at me an' Mike for
what he ca's sinfu' pride in oor ain' persons. I've a notion that if yon
had a bit o' that same sinfu' pride he'd be the better able tae make his
way."
Old MacPhee took the blackened clay pipe from his mouth and puffed a
blue spiral into the dead, sultry air. A sour expression gathered about
his withered lips.
"Dinna gibe at yon puir mortal," he rebuked. "Ye canna keep fools frae
wanderin'. I've seen manny's the man like him. It's likely that once
he's had a fair taste o' the North he'll be less a saint an' more a
man."
The afternoon was far spent when they landed. Breyette and MacDonald
made themselves comfortable with their backs against the wall. Supper
came and was eaten. Evening closed in. The bold, scorching stare of the
sun faded. Little cooling breezes fluttered along the lake shore,
banishing the last trace of that brassy heat. Men who had lounged
indoors, or against shaded walls roamed about, and half-breed women
chattered in voluble gutturals back and forth between the cabins.