THE SELKIRKS--A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY
Behind Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which is known only to a
few ranchers in the neighbourhood, and is scarcely accessible except
from this point. We had spent two days in the neighbourhood of Lake
Windermere, and on the third, though each of us was booked to be
hundreds of miles further on our way by the end of the week, and
heaven only knew how we were even going to reach Golden again, for we
had let the rig go back and the boat was reported stuck somewhere on
the Columbia River, we neither of us could resist an offer that was
made us of an opportunity to climb Iron Top Mountain, which was
somewhere at the back of this alluring country.
The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In Canada you will sometimes
find, several hundreds of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and
capable man whom you would think civilisation needed and would
require. But the wilds in {225} Canada are more important. Mr.
Starboard had come to these parts originally as a prospector and
miner, but the mine he had come to had shut down--not for lack of
silver and lead in it, but for lack of transport facilities;
whereupon Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these valleys, had
started horse-breeding there, occupying what time was left from
clearing his land in making roads through the mountains and hunting
big game. Dropping in at Mr. Bruce's casually one morning, he asked
us if we should like to see the best view he knew of in the Selkirks.
We said we should; and each, equipped with a toothbrush and a comb,
was driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.
Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada gives you strange table
companions. You never know quite what company you will meet, though
you can generally count upon its being interesting. While we were
being driven up the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had heard
from various homesteaders that there was 'a big German bug' staying
up in the mountains with his friends, trying for bear. 'They call
him the Land Crab,' our informant would usually add for further
elucidation of the big bug's official position. On arriving at Mr.
Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug {226} in question was, in
the commoner prose of Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two
equerries and a small retinue. For a motley collection, the party
that sat down to lunch that day in the chief room of Starboard's
ranch would be difficult to beat. There was the Landgraf himself and
his German companions, a well-known Canadian official, three
valets--these all neatly dressed--Mrs. Starboard quite wonderfully
frocked, as the fashion papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching
costume, and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for several days.
The waiters were a Japanese and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by
one of the Germans, who had been most successful in their hunting
both of bear and goat.
Bear, by the way, was only one among other delicacies. Its taste is
rather like that of Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose.
Vegetarians would not care about it; but after living on little else
for two days I can answer for its being both appetising and
sustaining, particularly in high altitudes. After lunch, four of us,
Mr. Starboard, the railway man, my friend, and myself started for
Iron Top Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along a trail that
rose steeply most of the way. The ponies were excellent ones, better
even than {227} the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked
them, because he wanted to see if they could be got to carry us to
the top of the mountain, a little over ten thousand feet. He had
never taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the test had ever
been made in Canada, though I fancy ponies have done as much or more
in the Himalayas.
We did fourteen miles that afternoon, following at first the bank of
a blue foaming stream, then turning eastward up a steeper valley
through which a smaller stream flowed. The trail was far better than
many roads in French Canada or on the prairie, and had been
constructed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide access to a silver
and lead mine which had been shut down for some time. It seemed
extraordinary that in a country so wild and remote there should be
any trail at all, but miners go anywhere. A man who has to find his
way into the earth makes no difficulty about finding his way across
it.
It was a day, half sunshine and half mist, and the mountains would
sometimes be shut entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would
reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by the fog below,
sometimes would clear altogether, so that one could see everything on
them, {228} from the snowslides down which the grizzlies travel to
the narrow tracks of the goats. As we mounted, the valley grew
steeper and steeper, and the trail wound more and more. We passed
one place where, earlier in the year, there had been a terrific slide
of snow half a mile in width. The huge firs still lay where they had
fallen, shattered and splintered before it. Half-way down, the
avalanche had met a great pinnacle of rock that had stood the shock
unmoved, and caused the snow to part to left and to right, where it
had hewn two lanes of almost equal breadth through the trees. It was
just near here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's track, and
told me that he had seen no less than seventeen of these bears in the
last fortnight. He said that their numbers were increasing yearly in
that neighbourhood. A little later a porcupine crossed the trail
ahead of us, and lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The trees
grew close together all the way, except where we passed a great
stretch of mountainside where a forest fire had raged, and even there
the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted skeletons of trees.
We put up for the night in a deserted mining camp, almost a village
it was, with wooden shacks likely to be used again when the Kamloops
{229} to Golden Railway is completed and it is worth while getting
the stuff out of the mine.
Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear,
which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough
till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.
It was bitterly chill--the start in the early morning--after a
breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into
snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave
steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and
Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on
the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it
looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he
had been up it.
'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had
struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.
'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a
place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there
was silver and lead there.'
The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two
of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend {230}
getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of
rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed
under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted
from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend
and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily
they fell--and rolled--softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after
that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform
of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand
feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we
accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just
in time.
For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a
long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia
River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains.
I had heard that phrase--a sea of mountains--applied to the Rockies
before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
[Illustration: A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.]
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment
when they had stormed the sky.
For just five minutes we gazed, and then a mist settled down on them,
and, where we were, {231} immediately a bitter wind began to blow and
caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As we rode down the
frozen trail we startled some ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered
above the snow like big white butterflies.
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