Our Winter Home.--A Welcome.--I start again.--The Hunter’s
Camp.--In quest of Buffalo on the Plains.--“Lodge-poling”
leads to Love.
At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of the two
Saskatchewans, deep in pines and poplars, through which vistas had
been cut to give glimpses along the converging rivers, stood the
winter hut of which I have already spoken. From its chimney blue smoke
curled up amongst the trees into the lower atmosphere, and the sound
of wood-cutting came ringing from below, a token of labour not yet
completed in our wild and secluded resting-place.
I stood for a moment looking down on this scene--a home in the great
wilderness--and then a loud shout echoed into the valley to carry
tidings of our arrival to the inmates of the hut. In an instant it
was answered from below, and the solitudes rang with many a note of
welcome, while half a dozen dogs bayed furious defiance at my pack,
already become boisterously jubilant on the ridge above. When friends
meet thus, after long travel and separation, there are many questions
to ask and to answer, and the autumn evening had worn to midnight ere
the pine-log fire threw its light upon a silent hut.
The winter season was now at hand; our house was nearly completed, our
stores put away, our dogs kennelled; but one most pressing want had yet
to be supplied--our winter stock of meat had to be gathered in, and
there was no time to lose about obtaining it.
It was the last of October, just one day after my arrival at the Forks,
when we turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. They were
said to be a long way off--200 miles nearer to the setting sun--out
somewhere on that great motionless ocean, where no tree, no bush breaks
the vast expanse of prairie; land to which the wild men of the West and
those who lead wild lives there have turned for many an age in search
of that food which nature once so generously scattered over the plains
of Central North America.
Journeying slowly towards the west--for already the snow had begun to
fall in many storms, and the landscape had become wrapt in its winter
mantle--we reached in five days one of those curious assemblages of
half-breed hunters which are to be found in winter on the borders of
the great plains.
Huts promiscuously crowded together; horses, dogs, women, children,
all intermixed in a confusion worthy of Donnybrook Fair; half-breed
hunters, ribboned, tasselled, and capôted, lazy, idle, and, if there is
any spirit in the camp, sure to be intoxicated; remnants and wrecks of
buffalo lying everywhere around; robes stretched and drying; meat piled
on stages; wolf-skins spread over framework; women drawing water and
carrying wood; and at dusk from the little hut the glow of firelight
through parchment windows, the sound of fiddle scraped with rough
hunter hand, and the quick thud of hunter heel as Louison, or Bâtiste,
or Gabriel foot it ceaselessly upon the half-hewn floors.
Unquestionably these French half-breeds are wild birds--hunters,
drinkers, rovers, rascals if you will--yet generous and hospitable
withal; destined to disappear before the white man’s footprint, and ere
that time has come owing many of their vices to the pioneer American,
whose worst qualities the wild man, or semi-wild man, has been ever too
sure to imitate.
After a delay of three days in this hunter’s camp, which by some
strange anomaly was denominated “la mission,” its sole claim to that
title being the residence of a French priest in the community, we
started on our journey further west.
The winter had now regularly set in; the broad South Saskatchewan
was rolling thick masses of ice down its half-closed channel, the
snow-covering had deepened on the landscape, the wind blew keenly over
the prairie. Many of our horses had been too poor to take upon this
journey, and the half-breed whom I had brought from Red River, dreading
the exposure of the plains, had taken advantage of the hunter’s camp
to desert our service; so another man had been engaged, and, with
three fresh horses and an urchin attendant in the shape of a little
half-breed, designated by our new man as “l’homme capable,” and for
whose services he demanded only the moderate sum of five shillings per
diem, we held our course along the South Saskatchewan towards the Great
Prairie.
Xavier Bâtoche was a fair sample of his class. The blood of four
nationalities mingled in his veins. His grandfather had been a
French Canadian, his grandmother a Crow squaw; English and Cree had
contributed to his descent on his mother’s side. The ceremony of
taking a wife in the early days of the north-west fur trade was not an
elaborate performance, or one much encumbered by social or religious
preliminaries. If it did not literally fulfil the condition of force
implied by the word “taking,” it usually developed into a question
of barter; a horse, a flint gun, some white cloth and beads, could
purchase the hand and heart of the fairest squaw in Prairie land.
If she did not love after one of these valuable “presents” had been
made to her father, the lodge-poles were always handy to enforce
that obedience necessary to domestic happiness--admirable idea, the
roof-tree contributed to the peace of the hearth-stone, and jealousy
fled before a “lodge-poling.” To return to Bâtoche; Crow and Cree,
French and English, had contrived to produce a genial, good-humoured,
handsome fellow; the previous year had been one of plenty, buffalo had
once more appeared in vast herds on the prairies of the Saskatchewan;
wolf-skins, robes, and pemmican had fetched high prices, and Bâtoche
was rich and prosperous.
Two days’ journeying brought us to the edge of the great prairie;
silent, vast, and desolate it spread away into unseen space; the snow
but scantily covered the yellow grass, and the November wind sighed
mournfully through the wrecks of summer vegetation as it sped along its
thousand leagues of unmeasured meadow. At the last copse of poplar and
willow we halted for a day, to bake bread and cut wood sufficient for
a week’s food and fuel, and then we launched our ocean ships--horses
and sleds--out into the great meadow.