IN THE CAMP OF THE CHILCOTINS.
As the echoes of Ned's hoot died away amongst the pines, both he and
Steve became conscious that they were no longer alone. Someone else had
entered the clearing, and a pair of human eyes were intently fixed upon
them. This both the white men knew, not by sight or hearing, but by that
other sense for which we have no better name than instinct. They had not
heard a rustle among the leaves, nor had Steve seen so much as a shadow
upon the grass, and yet both men turned simultaneously towards the same
point, and Ned, in spite of his blindness, said "_Clahowyah_" as
confidently as if he held his visitor by the hand.
"_Clahowyah_" (How do?), repeated a deep guttural voice from the shadow
of the pines, and as he spoke a broad-shouldered wiry redskin stepped
softly over the logs to meet the whites. If he always moved as silently
as he moved then, it was no wonder that the listening deer so often
found themselves looking down the barrel of Anahem's Hudson Bay musket
before their great ears had given them any warning of their danger.
"Thank God, we are saved," whispered Ned, as the chief's words reached
him. "He has traded with whites, or he wouldn't speak Chinook. Lead me
up to him."
But Anahem saw the outstretched hand as soon as Chance, and stepping
quickly forward took it.
"_Mika halo nanitch?_" (You don't see?), he asked.
"_Halo!_" replied Ned, and he pointed to his swollen eyelids.
"_Mika comtax_--by and by _skookum nanitch_" (I understand, by and by
you'll see all right), replied the chief, and then turning he repeated
the owl's call twice, and almost immediately a low answer came to him
from the woods above.
Luckily for Steve and Ned, the chief of the Chilcotins had met many
white men when in his early days he had hunted on the Stikeen river, and
all those whom he had met had been servants of a company which has
always kept good faith with its Indian neighbours and employés. The
honesty and fair dealing of the Hudson Bay Company saved the two white
men's lives from Anahem and his tribesmen, as it has saved many a
hundred lives both of redskins and whites since the day when the two
races first met. Anahem knew that a fresh class of whites had lately
come into his country--whites who cared nothing for skins and trading,
but who spent all their time digging and making mud-pies by the river
banks. He knew it because he had heard of them, had seen their strange
canoes upon the Frazer, bottom upwards sometimes; and once he had found
one of their tin cups, with something scratched upon it, hanging to a
pine-tree, underneath which lay a little pile of bones which the
_coyotés_ had cleaned.
Probably these men, he thought, were gold-diggers, and lost as that
other one had been lost, whose bones he had seen; but at any rate they
were both very weak, and one was blind, so for the sake of that great
Company which was honest, Anahem determined to help these men, who,
within half an hour of their first meeting with the chief, lay warm and
at rest within the glow of his camp-fire.
Then it seemed to Steve that their troubles fell away from them like
the forest shadows before the firelight, and it seemed already years ago
since he and Ned had sat down in the bushes to die. Anahem's tribe was
out for its fall hunt, and Ned and Steve had luckily wandered within the
arms of the great drag-net of men, which was still sweeping the
hillsides for game. As they lay by the camp-fire Ned and his companion
could hear the hunters calling to each other; but the net was broken
now, and the cries were the cries of the owl who has killed, not of the
owl who still seeks his quarry.
Here and there high up amongst the woods Steve could see a little column
of smoke, marking the spot where some belated hunter had made up his
mind to pass the night. The fire would serve to cook his food and keep
him warm; and if any friend chose to come and help him home with his
game, the smoke would guide him. But most of the hunters brought back
their game to camp that night, dragging it along the trails, or packing
it on their backs, so that before Steve slept he had seen fifteen
carcases brought in as the result of this one hunt.
He had often wondered in old days, how men who neither ploughed nor
sowed nor kept cattle could manage to live through the long winter
months: now he wondered no longer. The Chilcotins had been in camp for a
week, and there were only six men amongst them who had muskets, and yet
there were four great stacks of raw hides in their camp already--stacks
as high as a man's head, and on every bough within a hundred yards of
the fires were hanging strips and chunks of deers' meat.
The camp reminded Steve of the appearance of a hawthorn bush, in which a
butcher-bird has built its nest,--the whole place was red with raw
meat, and there were piles of soft gray down and hair, three and four
feet high. These were the scrapings of a hundred hides, roughly cleaned
by the Indian women during the week.
In such a camp as Anahem's hunger is an easy thing to cure, and that and
blindness were Ned's chief complaints; and even the blindness yielded in
a day or two to a certain dressing prepared for Ned by the squaws. But
Steve Chance did not recover as easily as Corbett did. The prostration
from which he suffered was too severe to be cured by a long night's rest
and a couple of square meals. At night he lay and tossed in broken
slumbers, and dreams came to him which wearied him more than if he had
never slept. He saw, so he said, the gold-camp every night of his life,
and Phon the only human being in it; and all the while Phon stood in a
flood of gold dust, which rose higher and higher, until it swelled and
broke over him and ran on a yellow heavy flood like the flood of the
Frazer.
Day after day Ned waited and hoped against hope, until the Chilcotins
were ready to strike their camp and go home for the winter. He had
already done his utmost to persuade Anahem to search for Phon, but the
chief took very little notice of him. Either he thought that Ned like
Steve was rambling in his mind, or he did not understand him (for Anahem
spoke very little Chinook, and Ned spoke less), or, and that is probable
too, he did not think it mattered much what became of a Chinaman; and as
to the gold, if it really was there, it would probably wait until the
white men could go and look for it themselves. If Ned would have gone
with him, Anahem would have gone perhaps to look for the creek; but Ned
could not leave Chance whilst he was ill, and Steve would not get well,
so that ended the matter.
There seemed only one course open to Ned, and he prepared to take it.
Anahem had told him as they talked one night over the camp-fire that he
had seen the smoke of a white man's fire coming from a dug-out on the
banks of the Frazer.
"How long ago was that?" asked Ned.
"On my way up here, about the time of the young moon," answered Anahem.
"Then that may be Rampike," muttered Ned; and the next day he got Anahem
to show him the direction in which the dug-out lay.
"Could I get there in two days?" he asked.
"A _skukum_ (strong) Indian could. The sick white man can be there on
the third day at nightfall."
This was enough for Ned. Next morning he bought some meat and dried
salmon from his Indian friends, and guided by Anahem and followed by
Chance he left the camp. If Chance's strength would hold out until they
could reach the dug-out, he could nurse him there at his leisure, and by
and by, when Steve was stronger, Ned and Rampike could go out together
to look for Phon and Cruickshank. It was not impossible after all that
they should find Phon still alive, though fish and roots and the inner
bark of trees would be all that he could get to live upon. But would
Chance's strength hold out? That was the trouble. He was terribly worn
and weak, and his eyes shone feverishly, and he neither slept well nor
eat well in spite of the fresh keen air. As he followed Anahem up a
steep bluff Steve panted and his knees were unsteady, and when the chief
stopped at last upon a bald ridge overlooking the pine-woods, he lay
back upon his light load saying, "It's as well you've stopped, chief,
at last. Another hundred yards, and I should have bucked my pack off."
Anahem looked surprised that even a sick man should complain of such a
trifling hill. An old squaw would have carried two sacks (a hundred
pounds) of flour up it without a murmur, and Steve's pack did not weigh
half that.
"Your bones," he said, smiling rather contemptuously, "white bone, our
bones wild bone," and then turning to Corbett he pointed out to him
where the deep-bellied Frazer roared along in the valley below the
pine-woods, and to one spot upon its banks, where, so he said, was the
white man's dug-out.
"You see," he said, "where the sun will set."
"_Nawitka_" (Certainly), answered Ned.
"Now, look on the Frazer's banks under there where the sun will set, and
you will see one patch all the same, like blood."
"Yes, I see it."
"Now, look to that side of it," and he waved his hand to the left, "and
you will see one great mud-mountain like this;" and with his stick he
drew in the sandy soil at his feet a picture of a great cathedral organ,
with pipes reaching from the river to the sky.
Ned was startled by the strange likeness which the chief's picture bore
to a thing which the chief could never have seen, but he held his peace
and looked for the mud-mountain.
"Yes, chief," he said. "I see a great mountain of mud, but I cannot see
the shape of it from here."
"Not see the shape of him! Ah, my friend not see well yet," said Anahem
pityingly; and though Ned knew very well that his sight was as good as
it had ever been, he said nothing.
He didn't want Anahem to think that wild sight like wild bone was better
than the civilized samples of the same.
"Well, you see the mountain. By and by you come closer and see his
shape. Under that mountain, in the bank on this side the river, stop one
white man. You keep along this trail," and Anahem pointed to the track
upon which they stood, "along the ridge, and by and by it will go
downhill, and on the night of the third day you will see the white man.
Good-bye," and before they knew that he was going the old chief turned,
and like the shifting shadow of a cloud which the winds blow across the
hillside, he moved away and was gone. There was no sound as he went--no
twig snapped, no overall scraped against the bushes. In silence he had
come, and in silence he had gone. For a moment the two with "parted lips
and straining eyes stood gazing where he sank," for indeed it seemed to
them as if the sea of the woods had opened and swallowed up their
friend. Then Chance spoke:
"A creepy old gentleman, Ned; rather like one of Phon's devils."
"A deuced good devil to us, anyway. If we ever find Phon and the gold we
shall owe our good luck to him, as we owe him our lives."
"Yes, I wish he had stopped. I should like to have given him a
'potlatch.'"
"Just as well that you didn't offer him anything. He might have liked
this rifle, but I really doubt whether he knows enough about gold-dust
to make him value that."
"That's what, Ned. But come on and let us get through this beastly
forest to those open benches below;" and Chance made as if he would
burst his way through the barriers of serried pines which intervened
between him and the Frazer valley.
"What, again, Steve?" cried Ned. "Isn't one lesson enough for you? If
you tried that you would be lost again in ten minutes. No more short
cuts for me. I mean to stick to the trail, and you must follow me;" and
so saying Corbett took up his bundle and went ahead at a quiet steady
pace which, in five or six hours, brought Steve to the land of his
desire, where what trees there were were great bull-pines standing far
apart, and giving men lots of room for their feet below and wide
glimpses of heaven above their heads.
As soon as they reached the open country Chance's spirits improved, and
his strength came back with his spirits, but for all that he was still
so weak that the progress which Ned and he made was very slow, and their
provisions were again at a perilously low ebb when they came in sight of
that strange freak of nature, opposite to which dwelt (so they hoped)
their old friend Rampike. The bluff was exactly as Anahem had drawn it:
an organ cast in some Titanic mould, the pipes of it two hundred feet
from base to summit, and stained with all manner of vivid metallic
colours. At its foot was the gray Frazer, and the dull sky of early
winter hung low about its head; but the organ was dumb from all
eternity, unless those were its voices which ignorant men attributed to
the winds and the fretting foaming river.
For awhile the two wanderers stood staring in wonder at this strange
landmark, and then Steve's weary face lit up with a smile and a mist
came over his eyes.
"Ned, as I hope for heaven, there's smoke!" and he stretched out his
arm and pointed to where a thin blue column curled up against the sky.
Ned saw the smoke as clearly as Steve, but in spite of Steve's
entreaties he absolutely refused to press on towards it.
"No, old fellow, we will camp here for a couple of hours, and you must
eat and sleep. That smoke is a long way from here yet, and we may miss
it to-night after all when we get low down amongst those sand-hills."
From where they stood the column of smoke looked within a stone's-throw,
but Corbett knew well how the clear atmosphere of British Columbia can
deceive eyes unused to measure distance amongst her mountains. So in
spite of Steve's protestations the two men camped, and though he did not
know it, Steve ate Ned's lunch, and Ned carried Steve's away in his
pocket in case they should not be able to reach the river by nightfall.
That slender ration in Ned's pocket was the very last food which the two
men possessed, and Ned was already reproaching himself for his rashness
in starting so poorly provided.
"What if after all Rampike should not be at the dug-out, or, if there,
should be himself short of grub?"
Luckily for Steve and Ned it seemed as if fortune had almost spent her
malice upon them, for that evening as they reached the edge of the last
bench above the Frazer, they saw that they had steered a true course.
Right below them, issuing from a little black funnel in the mud-bank
itself, rose the column of smoke, and in the bed of the river, upon a
sand-bar, they could see a man working a cradle.