Hudson’s Hope.--A lover of literature.--Crossing the Peace.--An
unskilful pilot.--We are upset.--Our rescue.--A strange
variety of arms.--The Buffalo’s Head.--A glorious view.
Dismounting from our tired horses, we loosened saddles and bridles,
hobbled the two fore-legs together, and turned them adrift in the
forest. Then we _cached_ our baggage in the trees, for wolves were
plentiful around, and a grey wolf has about as extensive a bill of
fare in the matter of man’s clothing and appointments as any animal in
creation, except perhaps a monkey.
In my early days, in Burmah and India I once possessed a rare
specimen of the last-named genus, who, when he found the opportunity,
beautifully illustrated his descent from the lower orders of man by
devouring a three-volume novel in less time than any young lady of
the period could possibly accomplish it. He never knew a moment’s
starvation as long as he had a photograph album to appease his
insatiable love of literature. But to proceed:--
By the time we had _cached_ our baggage, two men had come forth from
the house on the other side of the river, and started out upon the ice,
dragging a very small canoe; when they reached the open water at our
side, they launched their craft and paddled across to the shore; then,
ascending the hill, they joined us at the cache.
Their news was soon told; the river was open at the west end of the
portage (ten miles away). Jacques Pardonet, a French miner, who had
been trapping during the winter, was about to start for the mines on
the Ominica River; he was now patching up an old canoe which he had
found stranded on the shore, and when it was ready he would be off: for
the rest, no Indians had come in for a very long time, and moose meat
was at a very low ebb in Hudson’s Hope.
We descended to the river, and Kalder and Charette (a half-breed in
charge of the fort) crossed first in the beaver canoe; it was much too
small to carry us all. When they had disembarked safely on the ice,
they fastened a long line to the bow of the canoe and shoved her off to
our side; as she neared our shore she was caught by an English miner
who had been living with Charette for some days, and whom I had engaged
to accompany me to the mines. He had declared himself a proficient in
the art of canoeing, and I was now about to experience my first example
of his prowess.
We took our places and shoved from the shore. I lay low in the canoe,
with legs stretched under the narrow thwarts to steady her as much as
possible. I took in no baggage, but placed gun and revolver in the
bottom alongside of me. Cerf-vola was to swim for himself.
A----, the miner, took a paddle at the stern. We had scarcely left the
shore when the canoe lurched quickly to one side, shipping water as she
did so. Then came another lurch on the other side, and I knew all was
over. I heard the men on shore shouting to the miner to sit low--to
keep down in the canoe--but all was too late. There came another lurch,
a surge of water, and we were over into the icy quick-running river. I
could not free myself from the thwarts which held me like a vice; the
water gurgled and rushed around, about, and above me; and the horrid
sensation of powerlessness, which the sleeper often experiences in a
nightmare, came full upon my waking senses.
Of struggling I have but a faint recollection; at such times one
struggles with a wild instinct that knows no rule or thought; but I
vividly recollect the prevalent idea of being held head downwards in
the icy current, in a grasp which seemed as strong as that of death.
[Illustration: CLINGING TO THE CANOE.]
I remembered, too, without trouble, all the surroundings of the scene;
the bordering ice which was close below us--for the channel of water
took a central course a little bit lower down the river, and the ice
lay on both sides of it--while the current ran underneath as water can
only run when four feet of solid ice is pressing upon it. Once under
that ice and all was over with us. How it came about I cannot tell,
but all at once I found myself free; I suppose one struggle something
wilder than the rest had set me free, for long afterwards one of my
legs bore tokens of the fight. In another second I was on the surface.
I grasped the canoe, but it was round as a log, and turned like a wheel
in the water, rolling me down each time, half-drowned as I already was.
My companion, the miner, had gone at once clear of the canoe, and,
catching her by the stern, had held himself well above the water. One
look at Kalder and Charette on the ice told me they were both utterly
demoralized: Kalder had got behind Charette, while the latter held the
line without well knowing what to do with it. Perhaps it was better
that he did so, as the line was a miserably frail one, little better
than a piece of twine, and the weight upon it now in this strong
current was very great. Very slowly Charette hauled in the line that
held us to Mother Earth; then Kalder recovered his presence of mind,
and flung a leathern line across the up-turned canoe. I grasped it, and
in another instant the bark grated against the edge of the ice. Numbed
and frozen I drew myself on to the canoe, then on to the crumbling
ice along the edge, and finally to the solid pack itself. Wet,
water-logged, numbed, and frozen, we made our way across the ice to
the shore. My gun and revolver had vanished; they lay somewhere under
twenty feet of water.
Thus, without arms, with watch feebly ticking--as though endeavouring
to paddle itself with its hands through billows of water, with Aneroid
so elevated, I presume, at its escape from beneath the water, that in a
sudden revulsion of feeling it indicated an amount of elevation above
the sea level totally inconsistent with anything short of a Himalayan
altitude, at which excited state it continued to exist during the
remainder of my wandering--we reached the Hope of Hudson. There never
was truer saying than that when things go to the worst they mend. When
I had changed my dripping clothes for a suit of Charette’s Sunday
finery, when Mrs. Charette had got ready a cup of tea and a bit of
moose steak, and when the note-book, letters, and likenesses, which one
carries as relics of civilization into the realms of savagery, had all
been duly dried and renovated, matters began to look a good deal better.
Early on the following morning Charette and Kalder moored a couple
of canoes in the open water, and began to drag for the gun with
a fish-hook fastened to the end of a long pole; the gun was in a
leathern case, and an hour’s work resulted in its recovery, none the
worse for its submersion. My ammunition was still safe, but as the
supply of it available for a breech-loader was limited, we were on the
whole badly off for arms. I armed Kalder with a flint trading-gun--a
weapon which, when he had tried it at a mark, and then hammered the
barrel, first on one side then on the other, he declared to be a good
“beaver gun.” The miner also possessed a gun, but as the hammer of one
barrel hung dangling gracefully down the side, and as he possessed
no percussion-caps for the other barrel (a want he supplied by an
ingenious use of wax vestas), the striking of his match conveyed a
similar idea to the mind of any bird or beast at whose person he
presented the muzzle; and while the gun was thinking about going off,
the bird or beast had already made up its mind to take a similar course.
Now this matter of weapons was a serious item in our affairs, for
numerous are the delays and mishaps of an up-river journey in the wild
land we were about to penetrate. Down stream all is well; a raft can
always be made that will run from four to six miles an hour; but the
best craft that men can build will not go a mile an hour up-stream on
many parts of these rivers, and of this up-river we had some 200 miles
before us.
On the 27th of April I set out from Hudson’s Hope to cross the portage
of ten miles, which avoids the Great Cañon, at the farther end of which
the Peace River becomes navigable for a canoe.
We crossed the river once more at the scene of our accident two days
previously; but this time, warned by experience, a large canoe was
taken, and we passed safely over to the north shore. It took some time
to hunt up the horses, and mid-day had come before we finally got clear
of the Hope of Hudson.
The portage trail curved up a steep hill of 800 or 900 feet; then on
through sandy flats and by small swamps, until, at some eight or nine
miles from the Hope of Hudson, the outer spurs of the mountains begin
to flank us on either side. To the north a conspicuous ridge, called
the Buffalo’s Head, rises abruptly from the plain, some 3000 feet above
the pass; its rock summit promised a wide view of mountain ranges on
one side, and of the great valley of the Peace River on the other. It
stood alone, the easternmost of all the ranges, and the Cañon of the
Peace River flowed round it upon two sides, south and west.
Months before, at the forks of the Athabasca River, a man who had once
wandered into these wilds told me, in reply to a question of mine,
that there was one spot near the mouth of the Peace River pass which
commanded a wide range of mountain and prairie. It was the Buffalo’s
Head.
Nine hundred miles had carried me now to that spot. The afternoon was
clear and fine; the great range had not a cloud to darken the glare of
the sun upon its sheen of snow; and the pure cool air came over the
forest trees fresh from the thousand billows of this sea of mountains.
The two men went on to the portage end; I gave them my horse, and,
turning at right angles into a wood, made my way towards the foot of
the Buffalo’s Head.
Thick with brulé and tangled forest lay the base of the mountain; but
this once passed, the steep sides became clear of forest, and there
rose abruptly before me a mass of yellow grass and soft-blue anemones.
Less than an hour’s hard climbing brought me to the summit, and I was a
thousand times repaid for the labour of the ascent.
I stood on the bare rocks which formed the frontlet of the Buffalo’s
Head. Below, the pines of a vast forest looked like the toy-trees which
children set up when Noah is put forth to watch the animals emerging
from his ark, and where everything is in perfect order, save and
except that perverse pig, who will insist on lying upon his side in
consequence of a fractured leg, and who must either be eliminated from
the procession altogether, or put in such close contact to Mrs. Noah,
for the sake of her support, as to detract very much from the solemnity
of the whole procession.
Alas, how futile is it to endeavour to describe such a view! Not more
wooden are the ark animals of our childhood, than the words in which
man would clothe the images of that higher nature which the Almighty
has graven into the shapes of lonely mountains! Put down your wooden
woods bit by bit; throw in colour here, a little shade there, touch it
up with sky and cloud, cast about it that perfume of blossom or breeze,
and in Heaven’s name what does it come to after all? Can the eye wander
away, away, away until it is lost in blue distance as a lark is lost in
blue heaven, but the sight still drinks the beauty of the landscape,
though the source of the beauty be unseen, as the source of the music
which falls from the azure depths of sky.
That river coming out broad and glittering from the dark mountains, and
vanishing into yon profound chasm with a roar which reaches up even
here--billowy seas of peaks and mountains beyond number away there
to south and west--that huge half dome which lifts itself above all
others sharp and clear cut against the older dome of heaven! Turn east,
look out into that plain--that endless plain where the pine-trees are
dwarfed to spear-grass and the prairie to a meadow-patch--what do you
see? Nothing, poor blind reader, nothing, for the blind is leading
the blind; and all this boundless range of river and plain, ridge and
prairie, rocky precipice and snow-capped sierra, is as much above my
poor power of words, as He who built this mighty nature is higher still
than all.
Ah, my friend, my reader! Let us come down from this mountain-top to
our own small level again. We will upset you in an ice-rapid; Kalder
will fire at you; we will be wrecked; we will have no food; we will
hunt the moose, and do anything and everything you like,--but we cannot
put in words the things that we see from these lonely mountain-tops
when we climb them in the sheen of evening. When you go into your
church, and the organ rolls and the solemn chant floats through the
lofty aisles, you do not ask your neighbour to talk to you and tell
you what it is like. If he should do anything of the kind, the beadle
takes him and puts him out of doors, and then the policeman takes him
and puts him indoors, and he is punished for his atrocious conduct;
and yet you expect me to tell you about this church, whose pillars are
the mountains, whose roof is the heaven itself, whose music comes from
the harp-strings which the earth has laid over her bosom, which we
call pine-trees; and from which the hand of the Unseen draws forth a
ceaseless symphony rolling ever around the world.