cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that
French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific
angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while
his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question
"science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout
(the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible
that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the
trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if
possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of
bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the
Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they
make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is
going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal
quantities, at the other.
The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The
natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece
of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give
them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle,
leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the
struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it
is managed peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water,
making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they
lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along
the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the
resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that
it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck
the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then
measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above
soundings--that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and
their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep
jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent
intervals.
The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon jack-fish, or pike. They
haunt the grassy places in little bogs and coves, and are caught by
trolling. A jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the famous
guide in that country, tells of those fish of such size that when a man
of ordinary height held the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of
the fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsible for the further
assertion that he saw an Indian squaw drag a net, with meshes seven
inches square, and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more than
fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another local historian told of a
surveyor who caught a big jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and
could only be dragged until its head came to the surface, when he shot
it and it broke away--that narrative I will leave for the next New
Yorker who goes to Nepigon. And yet it seems to me that such stories
distinguish a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually caught
there. Men would not dare to romance like that at many places I have
fished in, where the trout are scheduled and numbered, and where you
have got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the month to catch
one.
The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack-fish. At night they use
a bark torch, and slaughter the big fish with comparative ease; but
their great skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when the pike
are sunning themselves in the grass and weeds along-shore. But when I
made my trip up the river, I saw them using so many nets as to threaten
the early reduction of the stream to the plane of the ordinary resort.
The water was so clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see each
one's catch--here a half-dozen suckers, there a jack-fish, and next a
couple of beautiful trout. Finding a squaw attending to her net, we
bought a trout from her before we had cast a line. The habit of buying
fish under such circumstances becomes second nature to a New Yorker. We
are a peculiar people. Our fishermen are modest away from the city, but
at home they assume the confident tone which comes of knowing the way to
Fulton fish-market.
The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and
saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are
records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may
actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yourself
seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the
Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and
from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay
post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles--an old York
boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that
Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted
them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you
will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the
Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness,
capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are
built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the
bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are
very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic
Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into
eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.
There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the
bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario
and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the
ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions
were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted
upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried
salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to
deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The
open-air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of hunting or
chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the
camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he
ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa
in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At
night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted
ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp
that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking
his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I
ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the
artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips,
that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's
ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the
same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and
baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the _piece de
resistance_ at every meal. I know now--though I would not have confessed
it at the time--that mixed with admiration of salt pork was a growing
dread that in time, if no change offered itself, I should tire of that
diet. I began to feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the Sea
than a brother. The woodland atmosphere began to taste of it. When I
came in-doors it seemed to me that the log shanty was gradually turning
into fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it felt to eat
quail a day for thirty days. One man cannot know everything. But I felt
that I was learning.
One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, and started out of
the shanty door with an unwonted air of business.
"Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. "Good job if get trout."
A good job? Why the thought was like a floating spar to a sailor
overboard! I went with him. It was a cold day, but I was dressed in
Canadian style--the style of a country where every one puts on
everything he owns: all his stockings at once, all his flannel shirts
and drawers, all his coats on top of one another, and when there is
nothing else left, draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of
moccasins, a tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be able
to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling with so many clothes on.
They seem to separate you from yourself, and the person you feel inside
your clothing might easily be mistaken for another individual. But you
are warm, and that's the main thing.
[Illustration: TROUT-FISHING THROUGH THE ICE]
I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through the deathly
stillness of the snow-choked forest, and presently, from a knoll and
through an opening, we saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its
unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with balsam, and pine and
other evergreens, it looked as though some mighty hand had squeezed a
colossal tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. Never had I
seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so exquisitely pure and peaceful, so
irresistibly beautiful. I think I should have hesitated to print my
ham-like moccasin upon that virgin sheet had I been the guide, but
"Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, making the powdery flakes fly before
and behind him, and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly faded
from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed the signs of a fox and a
deer that had crossed during the night, so that our profanation of the
scene was neither serious nor exclusive.
The Indian walked to an island near the farther shore, and using his axe
with the light, easy freedom that a white man sometimes attains with a
penknife, he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six yards of
fish-line in two in the middle of the piece, and tied one end of each
part to one end of each stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a
fastening would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to each
fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little cube of pork fat which
had gathered an envelope of granulated smoking-tobacco while at rest in
his pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was a foot thick,
and over these we stood, sticks in hand, with the lines dangling through
the holes. Hardly had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened
around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked to one side,
and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It was a speckled trout. This
surprised me, for I had no idea of catching anything but lake or gray
trout in that water. I caught a gray trout next--a smaller one than the
first--and in another minute I had landed another three-pound speckled
beauty. My pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to
fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork remained on those two
hooks a week, and caught us many a mess of trout.
There came a lull, which gave us time to philosophize on the contrast
between this sort of fishing and the fashionable sport of using the most
costly and delicate rods--like pieces of jewelry--and of calculating to
a nicety what sort of flies to use in matching the changing weather of
the varying tastes of trout in waters where even all these calculations
and provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a day. Here I
was, armed like an urchin beside a minnow brook, and catching bigger
trout than I ever saw outside Fulton Market--trout of the choicest
variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew impatient, and cut himself
a new hole out over deep water. He caught a couple of two-and-a-half-pound
brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was as well rewarded. But
he was still discontented, and moved to a strait opening into a little
bay, where he cut two more holes. "Eas' wind," said he, "fish no bite."
I found on that occasion that no quantity of clothing will keep a man
warm in that almost arctic climate. First my hands became cold, and then
my feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up the fishing
holes if the water was not constantly disturbed. The thermometer must
have registered ten or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became
quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice that formed upon
them. When they coiled for an instant upon the ice at the edge of a
hole, they stuck to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting my
free hand in my pocket as fast as I shifted my pole from one hand to the
other, I managed to persist in fishing. I noticed many interesting
things as I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless
wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not cold, though not half so
warmly dressed as I. The circulation or vitality of those scions of
nature must be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed to trouble
them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found
and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air,
or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log
fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did
not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time.
Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill,
bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest
quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised
his head to listen. "Dat squirrel," he would say, when I asked him. Or,
"Woodcock, him calling rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very
queer, distant, muffled sound was. "You hear dat when you walk. Keep
still, no hear dat," he said. It was the noise the ice made when I
moved.
As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log jutting out over the
edge of the lake, and looked me over. A white weasel ran about in the
bushes so close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut shell.
That morning some partridge had been seen feeding in the bush close to
members of our party. It was a country where small game is not hunted,
and does not always hide at a man's approach. We had left our fish lying
on the ice near the various holes from which we pulled them, and I
thought of them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying out in
their hoarse tones. They were sure to see the fish dotting the snow like
raisins in a bowl of rice.
"Won't they steal the fish?" I asked.
"T'ink not," said the Indian.
"I don't know anything about ravens," I said, "but if they are even
distantly related to a crow, they will steal whatever they can lift."
We could not see our fish around the bend of the lake, so the Indian
dropped his rod and walked stolidly after the birds. As soon as he
passed out of sight I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were
unruly children.
"'Way, there!" he cried--"'way! Leave dat fish, you. What you do dere,
you t'ief?"
It was an outcropping of the French blood in his veins that made it
possible for him to do such violence to Indian reticence. The birds had
seen our fish, and were about to seize them. Only the foolish bird
tradition that renders it necessary for everything with wings to circle
precisely so many times over its prey before taking it saved us our game
and lost them their dinner. They had not completed half their quota of
circles when Brossy began to yell at them. When he returned his brain
had awakened, and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. He said
that the lumbermen in that country pack their dinners in canvas sacks
and hide them in the snow. Often the ravens come, and, searching out
this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. I bade good-bye
to pork three times a day after that. At least twice a day we feasted
upon trout.
VI
"A SKIN FOR A SKIN"
The motto of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company
Those who go to the newer parts of Canada to-day will find that several
of those places which their school geographies displayed as Hudson Bay
posts a few years ago are now towns and cities. In them they will find
the trading stations of old now transformed into general stores.
Alongside of the Canadian headquarters of the great corporation, where
used to stand the walls of Fort Garry, they will see the principal store
of the city of Winnipeg, an institution worthy of any city, and more
nearly to be likened to Whiteley's Necessary Store in London than to any
shopping-place in New York. As in Whiteley's you may buy a house, or
anything belonging in or around a house, so you may in this great
Manitoban establishment. The great retail emporium of Victoria, the
capital of British Columbia, is the Hudson Bay store; and in Calgary,
the metropolis of Alberta and the Canadian plains, the principal
shopping-place in a territory beside which Texas dwindles to the
proportions of a park is the Hudson Bay store.
These and many other shops indicate a new development of the business of
the last of England's great chartered monopolies, but instead of marking
the manner in which civilization has forced it to abandon its original
function, this merely demonstrates that the proprietors have taken
advantage of new conditions while still pursuing their original trade.
It is true that the huge corporation is becoming a great retail
shop-keeping company. It is also true that by the surrender of its
monopolistic privileges it got a consolation prize of money and of
twenty millions of dollars' worth of land, so that its chief business
may yet become that of developing and selling real estate. But to-day it
is still, as it was two centuries ago, the greatest of fur-trading
corporations, and fur-trading is to-day a principal source of its
profits.
Reminders of their old associations as forts still confront the visitor
to the modern city shops of the company. The great shop in Victoria, for
instance, which, as a fort, was the hub around which grew the wheel that
is now the capital of the province, has its fur trade conducted in a
sort of barn-like annex of the bazaar; but there it is, nevertheless,
and busy among the great heaps of furs are men who can remember when the
Hydahs and the T'linkets and the other neighboring tribes came down in
their war canoes to trade their winter's catch of skins for guns and
beads, vermilion, blankets, and the rest. Now this is the mere catch-all
for the furs got at posts farther up the coast and in the interior. But
upstairs, above the store, where the fashionable ladies are looking over
laces and purchasing perfumes, you will see a collection of queer old
guns of a pattern familiar to Daniel Boone. They are relics of the fur
company's stock of those famous "trade-guns" which disappeared long
before they had cleared the plains of buffalo, and which the Indians
used to deck with brass nails and bright paint, and value as no man
to-day values a watch. But close to the trade-guns of romantic memory is
something yet more highly suggestive of the company's former position.
This is a heap of unclaimed trunks, "left," the employes will tell you,
"by travellers, hunters, and explorers who never came back to inquire
for them."
[Illustration: RIVAL TRADERS RACING TO THE INDIAN CAMP]
It was not long ago that conditions existed such as in that region
rendered the disappearance of a traveller more than a possibility. The
wretched, squat, bow-legged, dirty laborers of that coast, who now dress
as we do, and earn good wages in the salmon-fishing and canning
industries, were not long ago very numerous, and still more villanous.
They were not to be compared with the plains Indians as warriors or as
men, but they were more treacherous, and wanting in high qualities. In
the interior to-day are some Indians such as they were who are accused
of cannibalism, and who have necessitated warlike defences at distant
trading-posts. Travellers who escaped Indian treachery risked
starvation, and stood their chances of losing their reckoning, of
freezing to death, of encounters with grizzlies, of snow-slides, of
canoe accidents in rapids, and of all the other casualties of life in a
territory which to-day is not half explored. Those are not the trunks of
Hudson Bay men, for such would have been sent home to English and
Scottish mourners; they are the luggage of chance men who happened
along, and outfitted at the old post before going farther. But the
company's men were there before them, had penetrated the region
farther and earlier, and there they are to-day, carrying on the fur
trade under conditions strongly resembling those their predecessors once
encountered at posts that are now towns in farming regions, and where
now the locomotive and the steamer are familiar vehicles. Moreover, the
status of the company in British Columbia is its status all the way
across the North from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
To me the most interesting and picturesque life to be found in North
America, at least north of Mexico, is that which is occasioned by this
principal phase of the company's operations. In and around the fur trade
is found the most notable relic of the white man's earliest life on this
continent. Our wild life in this country is, happily, gone. The
frontiersman is more difficult to find than the frontier, the cowboy has
become a laborer almost like any other, our Indians are as the animals
in our parks, and there is little of our country that is not threaded by
railroads or wagon-ways. But in new or western Canada this is not so. A
vast extent of it north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which hugs our
border, has been explored only as to its waterways, its valleys, or its
open plains, and where it has been traversed much of it remains as
Nature and her near of kin, the red men, had it of old. On the streams
canoes are the vehicles of travel and of commerce; in the forests
"trails" lead from trading-post to trading-post, the people are Indians,
half-breeds, and Esquimaux, who live by hunting and fishing as their
forebears did; the Hudson Bay posts are the seats of white population;
the post factors are the magistrates.
All this is changing with a rapidity which history will liken to the
sliding of scenes before the lens of a magic-lantern. Miners are
crushing the foot-hills on either side of the Rocky Mountains, farmers
and cattle-men have advanced far northward on the prairie and on the
plains in narrow lines, and railroads are pushing hither and thither.
Soon the limits of the inhospitable zone this side of the Arctic Sea,
and of the marshy, weakly-wooded country on either side of Hudson Bay
will circumscribe the fur-trader's field, except in so far as there may
remain equally permanent hunting-grounds in Labrador and in the
mountains of British Columbia. Therefore now, when the Hudson Bay
Company is laying the foundations of widely different interests, is the
time for halting the old original view that stood in the stereopticon
for centuries, that we may see what it revealed, and will still show far
longer than it takes for us to view it.
The Hudson Bay Company's agents were not the first hunters and
fur-traders in British America, ancient as was their foundation. The
French, from the Canadas, preceded them no one knows how many years,
though it is said that it was as early as 1627 that Louis XIII.
chartered a company of the same sort and for the same aims as the
English company. Whatever came of that corporation I do not know, but by
the time the Englishmen established themselves on Hudson Bay, individual
Frenchmen and half-breeds had penetrated the country still farther west.
They were of hardy, adventurous stock, and they loved the free roving
life of the trapper and hunter. Fitted out by the merchants of Canada,
they would pursue the waterways which there cut up the wilderness in
every direction, their canoes laden with goods to tempt the savages, and
their guns or traps forming part of their burden. They would be gone the
greater part of a year, and always returned with a store of furs to be
converted into money, which was, in turn, dissipated in the cities with
devil-may-care jollity. These were the _coureurs du bois_, and theirs
was the stock from which came the _voyageurs_ of the next era, and the
half-breeds, who joined the service of the rival fur companies, and who,
by-the-way, reddened the history of the North-west territories with the
little bloodshed that mars it.