BEAR RAVINE.
Late into the night we sat beside our fire discussing the articles which
we would attempt to carry up on the heights, and it was then that Porter
astonished us by saying that he intended, if I agreed, to make an attempt
to carry up the canoe.
This really extraordinary feat he set to work to accomplish on the
morning of August 5th, and it brought about the incident which follows.
Rising very early, he cleared a road with his axe through the undergrowth
near the camp, and carried the canoe across the torrent, finally laying
it down, and turning it over on a steep hummock, quite 100 feet high,
which was situated on the east side of Bear Ravine Torrent. There he left
it, and returned to camp to a very fine breakfast, in the preparation
of which Hardy and I had collaborated. Having eaten our meal we started
again, Hardy and I carrying each 40 lbs. of flour, my rifle, and some
other kit. We passed along the little path Porter had cut, and were
crossing the torrent at a ford, when I, who happened to be walking last,
looked up suddenly and saw, on the high ground above me, not only the
canoe, but a black bear, which stood beside it staring at it intently,
and evidently deeply interested in its appearance. I warned the other
two, and we all sank to the ground where we were—I on a boulder in the
middle of the stream.
The bear was right above, and about 120 yards from me. My rifle was in
its case, but in a minute I had slipped it out, and believing the bear
must see us in another second, I took a hasty aim and fired. The bullet
hit the bear, passing in at the foreleg and coming out behind the ribs.
The animal lost its balance, and came crashing down the cliff, then
regained its feet, and vanished into a patch of alders. At the shot
Porter sprang up, hurled down his pack, and, axe in hand, ran like a
berserk into the underbrush after the bear. Meantime I climbed up the
slope on which it had been standing, and from the top of which I thought
I might command the exit from the patch of alders. For a few minutes I
saw no sign of either Porter or the bear, and then suddenly Porter, still
carrying the axe, and evidently still under the influence of his berserk
fit, emerged from a patch of woods far up the valley. He was obviously on
the trail of the bear, and indeed, a little later I saw the bear break
cover in front of him.
Upon this I began to run up the valley over the screes, and about
three-quarters of a mile away found Porter seated lugubriously upon a
rock. I was inclined to be annoyed with him for following the bear so
quickly, as, left to itself, it must have lain down and been easily
approachable. Porter in defence of his action explained that, though the
bear had lain down two or three times, it soon got up again, and as the
ground tracking was difficult, he had thought it better to keep the brute
in sight. It had eventually entered the cave, which Porter now pointed
out to me. He added that at one time among the alders he was “so handy”
to the bear, that he might have struck it with the axe but did not do
so—wisely, I think.
[Illustration: Black Bear, shot August 5.]
[Illustration: The Bear’s Cave.]
I thereupon went on to the cave, which had a very narrow opening, and,
peering in, saw the bear standing up and growling furiously. It was about
8 feet from me, but the cave being very dark and my own body excluding
all the light from the entrance, I could not see the barrel of my rifle.
I was also much more afraid of the bullet ricochetting from the rock wall
than I was of the bear. As I fired the bear stumbled off a flat rock on
which he had been standing, and moved back deeper into the cave. To the
best of my belief that bullet missed altogether. There was a large rock
at the end of the cave, and the bear retreated to the shelter of this,
and there, as well as I could gather from the sounds, it lay down.
As the brute remained very much alive and vocally resented our intrusion,
Hardy and I decided that he and Porter should go back for their packs
while I stayed to make sure that the bear did not come out and make
off. About half an hour after they had left me, as I no longer heard
the bear move, I crawled into the cave; but not knowing how far the
recess extended, or whether there was a second exit, I began to fear I
might lose the bear after all, and so crawled out again to cut a pole of
alder, to which I lashed my knife. Again entering the cave I began with
my improvised spear to feel about for the bear behind the big rock. To
do this I had to advance several feet inside the cave, and at the first
poke I got a surprise, for the bear—which was by no means dead—crawled
out round the rock, and for the moment actually got between me and the
entrance.
It seemed, however, more frightened of me than I of it—or perhaps it was
too hard hit to show fight—at any rate it backed in again under the rock,
and lay there, growling and snarling. Finding I could not make out in
the darkness how it was lying, and so could not use my knife, I crept
from the cave as hastily as might be, after which, seated on the rocks
among the mosquitoes, I waited for the bear’s wounds to grow stiff. Had I
been able to use my knife I should certainly have tried to put the animal
out of its pain, for it was a disgusting sensation to sit there waiting
for it to die. As fate would have it there was nothing else to do in this
case; thus, after about two hours the groaning and growling grew faint,
and presently the bear was dead.
The only instance within my knowledge of a black bear doing severe injury
to a man occurred in Newfoundland, where Reuben Lewis, the present chief
of the Mic-mac Indians, was badly mauled in an encounter with one.
When my companions returned we dragged the carcase into the daylight. It
proved to be a she-bear, a very old animal, and weighed well over 200
lbs. We set to work at once to gralloch and cut it up; in spite of its
age it was in good condition—and, like the fat boy in “Pickwick” with the
rook—we gloated over its plumpness.
[Illustration: The Canoe 1,000 feet up.]
[Illustration: Hardy and Porter nearing Mosquito Glen.]
We soon finished gralloching the bear and then pushed on up the ravine.
Hardy, on the second relay with Porter, had returned with a load of 80
lbs. of flour. Finding that he could manage to carry it so far he now
insisted on keeping it, feeling, as he afterwards explained, that if he
could get an 80 lb. pack up Bear Ravine he would have proved to his own
satisfaction that he would be equal to whatever packing circumstances
might subsequently necessitate his undertaking during the rest of our
journey. As a second man to steady the canoe and to help Porter in his
self-imposed task was eminently desirable, I raised no objection, and
so we started. Difficult as portaging the canoe would have been in any
circumstances, it was rendered doubly so by the fact that a wind sprang
up, which continually caught and overbalanced it. It is no easy matter
for one man to portage a canoe over really bad ground, but for two men,
especially if there be a marked difference in their heights, it becomes
almost an impossibility. And, in fact, there was little that I could do,
beyond shout to Porter to stand firm and to seize the end of the canoe in
my hand, in order to prevent it swinging round whenever a gust struck it.
In this way we climbed the defile, cutting a path with the axe through
the alders, until, as we rose, the vegetation became more and more scanty
and the incline steeper and steeper. The whole distance was between 3½
to 4 miles, the gradient becoming gradually sharper as we mounted; but
much the worst spot was beside the second waterfall of the torrent, for
here the chaos of rock had only recently fallen from the cliff above,
and had not yet settled. More than once these great fragments slipped
and overbalanced as Porter only just stepped clear with the canoe. First
and last it was the nastiest bit of walking any of us had ever done, and
we were glad enough when late in the afternoon we left the defile behind
us, and laid down the canoe in a little mosquito-haunted glen, from which
the gradient to the level of the plateau was easy. Interested as we were
to see the tableland we did not make any attempt to do so that evening.
Truth to tell, the climb up Bear Ravine with packs and the continual
vigilance necessary when walking over the rock had strained us to the
limit of endurance. Our faces, too, were streaming with blood from the
bites of mosquitoes and black-flies which had preyed upon us to their
hearts’ content as we balanced ourselves upon the boulders. Indeed, we
were most thoroughly tired, when by evening, carrying the bear meat, we
once more threw ourselves down in our camp on the banks of the Fraser.
Hardy’s feat of carrying 80 lbs. of flour up the ravine was hardly second
to that of Porter with the canoe, and for a man unused to packing was
unquestionably a magnificent test of his endurance and pluck. Measured by
aneroid, we rose a little over 1,500 feet in the course of our climb.
The following day being Sunday, we rested, and Hardy made a duff in the
evening with the fat of the bear. He had great culinary pretensions, not
altogether unjustified.
Having been successful in carrying provisions up Bear Ravine, we felt
that we had broken the back of our task, and that we had now finished
with the Fraser Valley. It had helped us straight towards our goal to
an extent we never could have hoped. With nothing worthy to be called a
bend in the valley throughout its entire length, it had carried us in a
direction remarkably little out of a due westerly course, the latitude,
according to our observations, varying only from 56°33.46 at our first
camp near Nunaingoak, to 56°44.23 at the point where we ultimately
left the river. If the country on the plateau proved practicable for
packing, we felt we ought, with over seventy miles to our credit, to be
independent of our canoe as soon as practicable leads of water ceased.
[Illustration: Caribou crossing-place.]
[Illustration: Taking a “spell.”]
On Monday, the 7th, we again packed each his parcel of necessaries up
the ravine. On this day we were portaging provisions, and I tried the
experiment of putting my load in my rucksack instead of carrying it
with a headstrap, as is the custom of the country. I found I could keep
my balance on the precarious footing much better when carrying on the
shoulders, though the strain on the heart was very great. For the rest
of the trip, with the exception of the following day, I always used a
rucksack, a fact that later on had a great effect on our fortunes, as it
allowed of my keeping my eyes open for game, which is quite impossible
for a man encumbered with a headstrap.
On that Monday, as I was climbing up, I came suddenly upon a large
she-bear and her cub. They were within 200 yards of me, but my rifle was
on the top of the cliffs, as I would not risk our only weapon twice over
that appalling medley of treacherous rocks.
Hardy, whose turn it was to shoot (we had made an arrangement to take
alternate shots with the one big rifle left to us) had also seen the
bears on his way up, and it was not a little tantalizing for him to
watch them feed quietly away over the mountain side. This made a total
of six bears—of which four, if not five, were most certainly different
animals—seen by us in ten days in Bear Ravine.
That evening we returned to camp on the Fraser, and, having _cached_ all
that we were leaving behind in a large fir tree, we started on our last
pack up Bear Ravine on August 8th. That day, while packing with the head
strap, I was near to making the last journey of my life, for in jumping
from rock to rock among the loose screes near the head of the valley I
overbalanced a huge fragment, which, although it shifted a bare yard,
only missed crushing my thigh by the fraction of a second.
The nine loads we had carried up comprised 110 lbs. flour, 25 lbs. bacon,
8 lbs. raisins, 3 lbs. tea, thirty packets of McDoddie and Lazenby, and
2 lbs. chocolate food. One ·350 rifle with 65 cartridges, and a ·22 with
two hundred, a fishing rod, two tents, a canoe, a Jaeger bed, and four
blankets, as well as our changes of clothes, instruments, pitch, rope,
canoe poles, paddles, cooking-pots, candles, etc., not forgetting the
Stockholm tar and oil. These all made a very tidy heap in Mosquito Glen
at the head of the ravine.
After a short rest we began our climb to the plateau above, and, at
first, were in difficulties over a large patch of snow which had not yet
been melted by the sun of Labrador’s short summer. Surmounting this after
a time we saw before us a low rocky knoll, on the further side of which
lay our course. Presently we reached it, and were at last free to lay
down our packs and take in the surrounding scene thoroughly.
[Illustration: “Hard lies the path.”]
[Illustration: Bear Ravine.]
[Illustration: Robert Porter.]
[Illustration: Bear Ravine Brook.]
On all sides of us stretched low rolling hills, covered with stones and
moss, lakes rimmed round with sparse grasses lay in the hollows. And
over them all within the circle of sight—save for the mosquitoes, which
hung in clouds over us—was not a sign or sound of life past, present or
to come. So I thought for a moment—but stay, what is that? Leading away
into the south-west were small piles of stones placed at even distances
the one from the other. They dwindled away as far as the eye could see,
finally to lose themselves in the glow of the evening sky. Human hands
had raised them, they were the cairns heaped up by the Eskimo of a far
bygone day, and used for guidance on their spring sledge journeys, after
the deer of the barren ground. At first it seemed that they must be too
low to serve as guiding marks, for in winter the snow would surely cover
these little heaps of stones from sight. But such is not the case, for
they are raised on exposed spots; and up there on the roof of Labrador,
1,700 feet above sea level, the snow does not lie long or deep, for the
wind rules all things and reduces all things—even the snow—to its will.