THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES AND MY FARTHEST NORTH
Camp Musk-Ox provided many other items of interest besides the Great
River, the big Musk-ox, and the Arctic Fox. Here Preble secured a
Groundsquirrel with its cheek-pouches full of mushrooms and shot
a cock Ptarmigan whose crop was crammed with leaves of willow and
birch, though the ground was bright with berries of many kinds. The
last evening we were there a White Wolf followed Billy into camp,
keeping just beyond reach of his shotgun; and, of course, we saw
Caribou every hour or two.
"All aboard," was the cry on the morning of August 19, and once
more we set out. We reached the north arm of the lake, then turned
north-eastward. In the evening I got photos of a Polar Hare, the
third we had seen. The following day (August 20), at noon, we camped
in Sandhill Bay, the north point of Aylmer Lake and the northernmost
point of our travels by canoe. It seems that we were the fourth
party of white men to camp on this spot.
Captain George Back, 1833-34.
Stewart and Anderson, 1855.
Warburton Pike, 1890.
E. T. Seton, 1907.
All day long we had seen small bands of Caribou. A score now appeared
on a sandhill half a mile away; another and another lone specimen
trotted past our camp. One of these stopped and gave us an
extraordinary exhibition of agility in a sort of St. Vitus's jig,
jumping, kicking, and shaking its head; I suspect the nose-worms
were annoying it. While we lunched, a fawn came and gazed curiously
from a distance of 100 yards. In the after-noon Preble returned
from a walk to say that the Caribou were visible in all directions,
but not in great bands.
Next morning I was awakened by a Caribou clattering through camp
within 30 feet of my tent.
After breakfast we set off on foot northward to seek for Musk-ox,
keeping to the eastward of the Great Fish River. The country is
rolling, with occasional rocky ridges and long, level meadows in the
lowlands, practically all of it would be considered horse country;
and nearly every meadow had two or three grazing Caribou.
About noon, when six or seven miles north of Aylmer, we halted
for rest and lunch on the top of the long ridge of glacial dump
that lies to the east of Great Fish River. And now we had a most
complete and spectacular view of the immense open country that we
had come so far to see. It was spread before us like a huge, minute,
and wonderful chart, and plainly marked with the processes of its
shaping-time.
Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand
miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual
succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing,
ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken
hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them
again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region
into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble
and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them
in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this going on
for thousands of years, and we shall have the hills lowered and
polished, the valleys more or less filled with broken rocks.
Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of flood. For another
age all is below water, dammed by the northern ice, and icebergs
breaking from the parent sheet carry bedded in them countless
boulders, with which they go travelling south on the open waters.
As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow share equally
in this age-long shower of erratics. Nor does it cease till the
progress of the warmer day removes the northern ice-dam, sets free
the flood, and the region of archaean rocks stands bare and dry.
It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills
of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock
and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing
in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of
mighty power used only to destroy. A waste of shattered granite
spotted with hundreds of lakes, thousands of lakelets, millions of
ponds that are marvellously blue, clear, and lifeless.
But a new force is born on the scene; it attacks not this hill or
rock, or that loose stone, but on every point of every stone and
rock in the vast domain, it appears--the lowest form of lichen,
a mere stain of gray. This spreads and by its own corrosive power
eats foothold on the granite; it fructifies in little black velvet
spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite,
to help the effect. Soon another kind follows--a pale olive-green
lichen that fruits in bumps of rich brown velvet; then another
branching like a tiny tree--there is a ghostly kind like white
chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and
one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher
and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses
higher still.
In the less exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade,
searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral
reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours
of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt
some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible
sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever
evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange
textures and oriental tones; broad carpets there are of gray and
green; long luxurious lanes, with lilac mufflers under foot, great
beds of a moss so yellow chrome, so spangled with intense red sprigs,
that they might, in clumsy hands, look raw. There are knee-deep
breadths of polytrichum, which blends in the denser shade into a
moss of delicate crimson plush that baffles description.
Down between the broader masses are bronze-green growths that run
over each slight dip and follow down the rock crannies like streams
of molten brass. Thus the whole land is overlaid with a living,
corrosive mantle of activities as varied as its hues.
For ages these toil on, improving themselves, and improving the
country by filing down the granite and strewing the dust around
each rock.
The frost, too, is at work, breaking up the granite lumps; on every
ridge there is evidence of that--low, rounded piles of stone which
plainly are the remnants of a boulder, shattered by the cold. Thus,
lichen, moss, and frost are toiling to grind the granite surfaces
to dust.
Much of this powdered rock is washed by rain into the lakes and
ponds; in time these cut their exits down, and drain, leaving each
a broad mud-flat. The climate mildens and the south winds cease
not, so that wind-borne grasses soon make green meadows of the
broad lake-bottom flats.
The process climbs the hill-slopes; every little earthy foothold
for a plant is claimed by some new settler, until each low hill is
covered to the top with vegetation graded to its soil, and where
the flowering kinds cannot establish themselves, the lichen pioneers
still maintain their hold. Rarely, in the landscape, now, is any of
the primitive colour of the rocks; even the tall, straight cliffs
of Aylmer are painted and frescoed with lichens that flame and
glitter with purple and orange, silver and gold. How precious and
fertile the ground is made to seem, when every square foot of it
is an exquisite elfin garden made by the little people, at infinite
cost, filled with dainty flowers and still later embellished with
delicate fruit.
One of the wonderful things about these children of the Barrens
is the great size of fruit and flower compared with the plant. The
cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any
one of which might outweigh the herb itself.
Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often
happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the
wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly
in beds of a single species. The Lalique jewelry was the sensation
of the Paris Exposition of 1899. Yet here is Lalique renewed and
changed for every week in the season and lavished on every square
foot of a region that is a million square miles in extent.
Not a cranny in a rock but is seized on at once by the eager little
gardeners in charge and made a bed of bloom, as though every inch
of room were priceless. And yet Nature here exemplifies the law
that our human gardeners are only learning: "Mass your bloom, to
gain effect."
As I stood on that hill, the foreground was a broad stretch of old
gold--the shining sandy yellow of drying grass--but it was patched
with large scarlet mats of arctous that would put red maple to its
reddest blush. There was no Highland heather here, but there were
whole hillsides of purple red vaccinium, whose leaves were but a
shade less red than its luscious grape-hued fruit.
Here were white ledums in roods and acre beds; purple mairanias
by the hundred acres, and, framed in lilac rocks, were rich, rank
meadows of golden-green by the mile.
There were leagues and leagues of caribou moss, pale green or lilac,
and a hundred others in clumps, that, seeing here the glory of the
painted mosses, were simulating their ways, though they themselves
were the not truly mosses at all.
I never before saw such a realm of exquisite flowers so exquisitely
displayed, and the effect at every turn throughout the land was
colour, colour, colour, to as far outdo the finest autumn tints of
New England as the Colorado Canyon outdoes the Hoosac Gorge. What
Nature can do only in October, elsewhere, she does here all season
through, as though when she set out to paint the world she began
on the Barrens with a full palette and when she reached the Tropics
had nothing left but green.
Thus at every step one is wading through lush grass or crushing
prairie blossoms and fruits. It is so on and on; in every part of
the scene, there are but few square feet that do not bloom with
flowers and throb with life; yet this is the region called the
Barren Lands of the North.
And the colour is an index of its higher living forms, for this
is the chosen home of the Swans and Wild Geese; many of the Ducks,
the Ptarmigan, the Laplongspur and Snowbunting. The blue lakes echo
with the wailing of the Gulls and the eerie magic calling of the
Loons. Colonies of Lemmings, Voles, or Groundsquirrels are found
on every sunny slope; the Wolverine and the White Wolf find this
a land of plenty, for on every side, as I stood on that high hill,
were to be seen small groups of Caribou.
This was the land and these the creatures I had come to see. This
was my Farthest North and this was the culmination of years of
dreaming. How very good it seemed at the time, but how different
and how infinitely more delicate and satisfying was the realisation
than any of the day-dreams founded on my vision through the eyes
of other men.