FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST
I managed to get that train, and also a half bottle of rye whisky on
the way to it, and sank into a seat in the smoking compartment, where
I sat all soaked and miserable, supping my rye whisky at intervals
and half dozing until two grizzly-bear hunters got in a few stations
down the line. They were very wonderfully arrayed in moccasins and
Arctic socks and turned-up overalls and sweaters and cartridge belts;
and though they were modest enough in their bearing, and did not talk
about their exploits until they were asked questions, the whole
compartment was soon eagerly chatting of nothing but grizzly bears.
The two hunters, who were amateurs of the sport, had been up in the
mountains alone, a three days' portage from the railroad, and had got
three grizzlies, and would have got more, they said, but that heavy
falls of snow had forced them to decamp. They spoke like good
shots--which does not {247} mean that they said they were good
shots--and they seemed very keen on their sport, which they claimed
to be the most dangerous and exacting in the world; nor would they
listen to my meek suggestion that the Bengal tiger would compare
favourably with the grizzly.
'It's a cat,' one of them said sniffily; 'you shoot it off elephants.'
I said that I knew Anglo-Indians who went after tigers on foot, and I
also argued that even in the case of shooting from elephants the
combination of a charging tiger and a restive elephant offered
opportunity of showing one's nerve to be in order such as is not to
be despised, especially if the howdah happens to have been inexpertly
fixed and slides at the critical moment. They allowed that there
might be something in this, but persisted that in any case
tiger-hunting was done at ease, with natives to do all the portering,
whereas grizzly-bear hunters like themselves had to carry everything
with them, and camp in the snow, and shoot on mountain-sides, down
which a grizzly bear would charge at a man quicker than a racehorse.
They gave graphic descriptions of charges of grizzly bears, with
their back legs flying ahead of their front ones. The {248} last
bear they had bagged had dropped, they said, within twenty paces of
them, after being rolled over three times.
I fancy they spoke reasonably enough, and that the pursuit of the
grizzly--certainly if done without a guide--is as good a test of a
man's nerve as any other. As to the merits of the grizzly considered
as a brute likely to do for you if you do not previously do for it,
and compared with such others as the tiger, the buffalo, the
rhinoceros, the elephant, or the lion, there is no arriving at any
final conclusion. African hunters never seem agreed about the
comparative merits of the last three; while one Indian sportsman
supports the buffalo, another will support the tiger. Not having any
experience of the grizzly bear myself, I can only say that, judging
from what I have heard, he must be accounted big enough game for
anybody. There is no doubt that most of the old trappers have a
wholesome respect for him, and the longer they are after him, the
greater, as a rule, their respect grows. His pace, when charging, is
said to be something terrific, and, downhill, it always charges as
soon as hit, its back legs flying out before it at a nightmare speed.
Add that it seems less easy to drop finally than any other animal,
that your fingers {249} may be frozen to the trigger in the intervals
of shooting, and that a single blow from one of its front paws is
strong enough to claw the face out of an ox, and it will be seen that
it is no contemptible foe. On the other hand, experts seem agreed
that it rarely if ever charges uphill, and if shot from above is
therefore comparatively harmless. If a man could always pick his
position for shooting, this would reduce the value of the grizzly
bear as a sporting animal; but obviously the hunter cannot always
choose. Any one who has been on a snowslide will realise that. From
the point of view of an unarmed person, the grizzly bear would seem
to be rather less dangerous than he is sometimes made out to be. You
will often hear that grizzly bears will attack a man at sight. The
truth seems to be that--as is the case with any other bears--attacks
are only to be feared either from female grizzlies with cubs, or from
a grizzly of either sex, if the intruder is so placed as to appear to
the grizzly's eyes to be cutting off its retreat to its lair. Of
course no unarmed man would elect to put himself in either of these
positions, and equally naturally he might unwittingly do so--in which
case it would be better not to be that man, though I believe there is
an {250} authentic story of a lumberman who, returning alone from his
work, was suddenly attacked by two grizzlies, and managed to kill
both of them with his axe, though the second mauled him badly.
Authentic or not, and one grizzly or two, it is pretty certain that
few people would care to try a similar encounter.
Afterwards the conversation shifted to timber-wolves and the Yukon.
One of the passengers scoffed at the notion of a dog being able to
kill a timber-wolf, as happens in one of Mr. Jack London's novels. A
northern timber-wolf, according to this critic, is at least twice the
size of the European wolf, with a disproportionately large and
powerful jaw--a single snap from which would polish off any dog. Two
or three of the biggest dogs known could hardly even hold a
timber-wolf much less kill it. I dare say there was more in this
criticism than in one I heard later, anent Mr. Maurice Hewlett. A
very solemn fruit-rancher was ploughing wearily through one of Mr.
Hewlett's earlier romances, and he looked up presently to say it was
funny the sort of yarns these writing chaps seemed to believe in.
There was a girl in the book who milked a wild deer. He had seen
plenty of deer in his time, but none of them had seemed to fancy
coming close enough to {251} be milked. If a chap wanted to write
about the country he ought to know it right through like Mr. Service.
Had we read Service's poems? Several of the men in the compartment
evidently had read them; and, indeed, Mr. Service's poems concerning
the Yukon seemed to have reached the heights of popularity. I think
it is due in part to the fascination which the north exercises on all
sorts and conditions of Canadians, not only because it stands for
romance and mystery, but because a sort of idea is gaining ground
that these inhospitable and well-nigh polar regions only await a
sufficiently hardy type of colonist to have as great a boom almost as
some of the more southern districts. The idea exists not only among
business-like estate-agents, who see themselves in fancy selling
Arctic blocks to this expected race, but among quite disinterested
and patriotic people, who talk of it, as Mr. Service himself does, as
a strong man's land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive there;
and it is excusable for a poet to regard them as super-men--Canada's
noblest type. As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic to
weave halos about the heads of the crowd that seeks the Yukon country
as it is to make one's heroine milk a wild deer. A certain praise
{252} is always due to pioneers, and the struggle with nature at its
cruellest and most wild is not a bad test of an individual's
character; but for respectable ranchers and fruit-growers (who have
never been to the Yukon themselves, but have struggled with nature
quite as valiantly elsewhere) to talk enthusiastically about the
great lone land as the country for breeding men is absurd. Canadians
may be able to colonise further north than they have done at present,
and their descendants will, no doubt, be a fine and hardy race. But
there is a point in the north just as there is a point in the south
beyond which no white man's country lies. If any strong men are
going to perpetuate their families beyond that northern point, they
are going to be strong Esquimaux--not strong Canadians. Esquimaux
already do quite a lot of grappling with nature in lone lands, but
they are not the heroes of Mr. Service's poems. I don't wish to
labour the point, but this northern strong man business seems to me
entirely overdone. There is always going to be romance attached to
the uninhabitable country, and adventurous young men will get there;
but the theory that these are the people of whom Canada has
peculiarly to be proud will not do. Adam Gordon's bush-riders {253}
had a certain merit; so had Mr. Kipling's gentlemen-rankers; so have
Mr. Service's prospectors; but none of them ever forwarded
civilisation very greatly. The fact is, there are true and admirable
pioneers, men like Hudson and Thompson, of whom Canada has had
plenty; and there are pioneers of doubtful value like those in Mr.
Service's poems. These latter are picturesque enough in verse,
especially in Mr. Service's verse, which catches the fascination of
the north at times admirably, but the others are the men worth
boasting about.
The rain persisted while we sat talking of all these matters, and the
mountains were hung about with a clammy vapour which spoilt the view
from the train. I should like to have stopped at Glacier, which is
the usual centre for the better-known Selkirks, of which many of the
giants have been climbed only within the last six or seven years, but
I had not time, and they all swam by in the mist, which changed into
dusk as we reached Revelstoke. There a number of lumberjacks filled
up the carriage, and were very cheery and conversational all night.
Having slept only two hours the night before, I should not have
minded being able to get a sleeper, but they were all taken; and
{254} indeed there were not even seats enough to go all round, though
it was a first-class carriage. In any case the lumberjacks in my
part of the carriage would have prevented sleep. Sometimes they
would sit down for a few minutes and tell stories, then they would
dart off to have a look at a carriage-load of Doukhobors who were on
in front and seemed rather better than a show to judge by the
lumbermen's guffaws when they came back from these trips. Canadian
trains may not always be restful, but they are generally
entertaining. The distances traversed are so great that people
cannot afford to sit in them in hunched silence. They have to
unbend, and some of them unbend thoroughly. That is why, though the
ordinary traveller has to pass through great tracts of land in the
train, he is not losing local colour to quite the extent one loses it
in an European train. Some one in the carriage is sure to know
something about the district one is passing through and to be ready
to talk about it. The smoking compartment becomes an animated
club-room in which conversation becomes general on any subject.
There is no better place for a discussion of political problems, and
I fancy a great many Canadians reserve their consideration of these
for {255} the time they have to spend in the train. Certainly they
grow very keen in the train, and I have heard the warmest arguments
and the most libellous denunciations of leading Canadian statesmen
hurled freely about among men who had never set eyes on one another
before. And there are plenty of other arguments with which to pass
the time. As we got to Sicamous Junction, for example, we took on
board two fruit-growers, one of whom was a 'wet' grower and the other
a 'dry.' A wet fruit-grower is a man who does not irrigate his
fruit-land, and a dry fruit-grower is one who, having settled in the
dry belt, has to irrigate. As fierce a debate was started between
these two as ever you heard between exponents of wet and dry
fly-fishing.
[Illustration: IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.]
As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the 'dry' men appear to have
the advantage. Their contention is that they can turn off the water
so as to leave their trees dry for the winter when frost at wet roots
is so fatal; while they can turn the water on whenever it is wanted
for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry belt country gets a
longer season of sunshine, which is more favourable for the growth of
the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems curious that none of
our finest-flavoured apples, {256} such as Cox's Orange Pippin or
Ribston Pippin, seem to come to perfection in Canada; and I found
British Columbian fruit-growers very anxious that English people
should appreciate this fact, and also get to know which are the
British Columbian apples most worth asking for in England, as though
some of the older orchards are still growing comparatively worthless
apples, the new ones are being planted only with a few best kinds,
which are as wine to water. One of these best kinds, by the way, is
called Wine-sap; two of the other selectest varieties being Jonathan
and Winter Banana. The latter is said to have a strong banana
flavour. It is worth the English public's while, if it is going in
largely for British Columbian apples, to encourage only the growing
of the best, and that is to be done by demanding only the best from
our own greengrocers by name. It is just as simple to plant a good
apple tree as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no reason why
the world in general should not eat only the best apples. So long as
people are contented to look only at the colour of the fruit, which
is no criterion whatever, and to pay their greengrocers' price for an
unnamed sort, the best apples will not be for sale, and one will go
on being provided with {257} highly-coloured samples that taste like
inferior turnips.
The weather picked up in the morning, and I was able to see some of
the beauties of the great Fraser River, though I somehow missed the
Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spearing salmon, bright red, split
salmon drying on frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages with
their beflagged graveyards, which are said to be visible from the car
windows. Perhaps I was talking too much.
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