COUNTRY DELIGHTS
Sometimes, I go a-fishing and shooting, and even then I carry a
note-book, that if I lose game, I may at least bring home my pleasant
thoughts!--PLINY.
I am fishing for graylings, but so far have caught none, my case being
similar to that of one Chang Chi-Ho, who in the eighth century, "spent
his time angling but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish."
And truth to tell, I have not even the grace of an object, unless it be
to talk to the men folk who are lading the big flat scows called
"Sturgeon-Heads," for the trip down the river.
By these right pleasant waters of the Athabasca, you are no longer
guided by duty but throw a rein on the senses. You do things because
you want to do them, and not because you ought to. This is owing to
the fact that the time-table loses its thrall north of 55 deg. I intend
stopping here a long while.
It is a sun-steeped day, and the river looks like a bed of sequins.
The sun, although it is strong in Alberta, doesn't seem to ripen people
like it does farther south. I can see this from the way people give me
greeting and from how they tell me all that is in their hearts.
Antoine hears that far off in that place called Montreal they dig worms
out of the clay for bait, and that these worms have neither shells nor
fur. This must be "wan beeg lie," for how could the worms keep from
freezing? It is not according to reason. These white men with trails
in the middle of their hair say these things so that the Crees, who are
very shrewd rivermen, will go to live in Montreal.
I heartily concur with Antoine. I have been to Montreal myself and
have never seen so much as the sign of an earth-worm. They tell queer
yarns, those Eastern fellows who come from down North to write books
and buy land, but Antoine and I won't be fooled by them. Indeed, we
won't.
Antoine caught a pike the other day without a line, but he lost it
again. It was the biggest fish he ever caught, but this is only
natural, and is no new thing, for ever since the first slippery fish
slithered through the hands of primeval man, it has always been the
biggest one that got away. Where these biggest fish foregather
ultimately has always been a mystery to me. Some day, we shall
discover a piscatorial paradise with millions of them in it.
Antoine presents me to Captain Shot, an Indian who has been on this
river for forty-eight years. The Captain is seventy-three, and his
name is really Fausennent. He is called "Shot" because he was the
first man to shoot the rapids of the Athabasca. I say that Antoine
"presents me" but I say it advisedly, for the North levels people, by
which is meant the primitive north where they live with nature. In
this environment, the man who builds boats and supplies food or fuel,
is the superior of the man or woman who writes, or pronounces theories.
I may be able to hoodwink the people up south as to my importance in
our community, but it is different here. And this is as it should be.
Captain Shot is engaged in building a boat for the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, and there is even a smoking-room in it. But,
Blessed Mother! it is no trouble to build a boat now--none at all, for
presently the railway will be completed and the boilers and metal
fixings will come in over it, but in the old days--that is to say up
till now--it was different. When the Northern Navigation Co. brought
in the boilers for their boats, they hauled them a hundred miles over
the trail from Edmonton, and it took seventy-two horses on each boiler.
"Didn't the government help any?" I ask.
Oh yes! the late government at Ottawa tried to help transportation by
sending in fifty reindeer; but the Captain has heard tell that some men
swore terrible oaths at the government, and set their dogs about eating
up the deer, for these men hold a kind of an idea it is railways the
country hereabouts needs, but he is not quite sure as to the rights of
the story.
There are four hundred men employed here at the Landing in building
scows and transhipping. Only a few of the scows are brought back, for
they have to be tracked up by power of man. For this reason, a new
flotilla is built each year.
Captain Shot has many estimable sons, all of whom are rivermen and
shipbuilders. They could hardly be expected to disgrace their name by
becoming mere farmers or teamsters after the unwisdom of the white
man's way. Ho! Ho! the idea of any one wishing to become a farmer.
But I was telling you about the scows. Unless you sat here catching
fish, you could never believe how much stuff can be packed into a scow.
As I watch the men at work, I think of Mark Twain's ambitious blue-jay
who tried to fill a house with acorns. Still the men do not seem
lacking in confidence, and keep wading backward and forward through the
water with sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, chests of tea, crates of
hardware, tins of stuff, and treasures in boxes that can only be
guessed at. I am hoping the biggest box contains dolls, ribbons,
work-bags, picture books, peppermint bull's eyes, and things like that,
for a mission school Christmas-tree somewhere down near the Arctic. I
am almost praying that it does.
The smaller boxes are called permits, and each contain six bottles of
whisky. These are for the pioneering gentlemen at the different posts
who are delicate, and who honestly desire to get strong.
Each permit is signed by a doctor so that the liquor must be considered
strictly as medicine. Irritating people who fail to understand that
there are only two licensed hotels between Edmonton and the North Pole,
sneer about there being a thousand delicate men on the rivers; but, for
my part, I am inclined to stand by the doctors, although I have always
held the clinical thermometer to be the only thing about the medical
profession with an integrity beyond question.
If any one should glean from reading these lines that all there is to
loading a scow is to load it, he or she is a much misled person. The
last bale is hardly stowed away till two of the men have disappeared.
No one saw them go, least of all the Boss, but any one can see they are
not here now. The Boss is a creature of steel who seems to forget
there is much to be done in the last hour or two before a boatman
leaves the Landing for the stretched out journey beyond. Various
purchases are to be made; people are to be seen; drinks are to be had
against a long, long thirst, to mention nothing of new vows to Marie,
Babette, and Josephine.
After awhile, the voyageurs are all rounded up with the exception of
Luke. The best the Boss can say for Luke is that he has been given a
Christian name. Jake is sent to fetch him. Luke turns up, but Scotty
must find Jake. Luke isn't drunk either--not he. It's the scow that's
drunk. Who said Luke was "fuller'n a goat," I'd like to know.
Ultimately, the Boss starts off to get Scotty and Jake. He gets them,
and he sits them down in a highly decisive manner, only to find that
Bill, and Jean Baptiste, and One-eyed Pete have gone up town for a
dunnage bag they left at the Grand Union Hotel.... The Boss looks
eight feet tall when he is angry, but, otherwise, to the unseeing eye,
he is only a young factor, or maybe an independent trader, intent on
his work like scores of other ordinary, unaccounted workmen.
Contrawise, the eye of imagination may see in him an adventuring
gentleman launching a craft that is to traverse for hundreds of miles
through many and diverse waterways, carrying with it a veritable cargo
of blessings to the far and lonely outposts of the North which, as yet,
are little else than names.
The rivermen push off from shore with their oars till, in the centre of
the stream, the current catches them and carries them along. This is
their only method of locomotion, to float and float with the stream.
They have a steering-pole in the scow similar to that which may be seen
in pictures of old Roman galleys, and when, because of darkness, the
voyageurs wish to stay their course, they make to shore by its aid,
even as the Romans did more than two thousand years ago. To make the
simile complete, I stand on the bank and repeat the invocation of the
Roman poet: "Oh ship that conveyest Virgil to Greece, duly deliver up
the precious life entrusted to thy care."...
If I hadn't jerked the crown of an old hat out of the river under the
impression that it was a fish, Justine would not have laughed out loud
and I would not have had an excuse to get acquainted with her. She has
been sitting nearby this half-hour. Her name isn't really Justine and
I forget what it is. She is the prettiest breed-girl in the country
and, by the same token, the frailest. "Believe me, Madam," explained
an old officer of the Mounted Police, the other day, "those eyes were
never given her for the good of her soul. She is a little
worth-nothing person like all the other breed-girls."
This man despises breed-women and he has made a sufficiently intimate
study of them to form an opinion. He wishes they were all dead. "For
an absolute truth, Madam, listen to me. For years, these women have
paddled their canoes up this river with kegs of contraband liquor
a-swing from ropes beneath and none of the force ever suspected. They
were so monstrously civil, they would even give us 'a lift' if we
desired it. I was highly surprised when we found them out, and so
disgusted with myself that, for a time, I thought of becoming a
type-setter. By Jove! you know; a fellow doesn't expect to find a keg
outside a canoe. Now does he?"
But I am not one of those who believe there are good women and bad
women. Some are elemental and others are not; that is the only
difference. I will maintain this to the very day my tongue wears out.
Justine's white father must have had a head and shoulders of the most
perfect classical type. As she sits on the beach with a light shawl
drawn down over her head, this girl resembles greatly the Madonna of
Bouguereau. I tell her this, and we talk for a long while. She thinks
my suggestion that she marry a riverman, or a trapper, and have quite a
large family, a wholly foolish suggestion. It causes her to think
little of both my discernment and my knowledge of men. Rivermen, she
would have me understand, hardly ever come home, and when they do, only
to get drunk and beat their wives. A white man won't marry a breed
girl, nowadays, and if he should give her his heart, he expects it to
be returned sometime. Still, Justine considers his transient
affections to be preferable to those of the breed's, in that a white
man seldom strikes his girl. Justine gives me a short lesson in Cree,
and, among other words, I learn that _saky hagen_ is the equivalent of
"one I love," and that _nichimoos_ means "sweetheart." The former is
usually applied to a child, the latter to an adult.
When I ask Justine to tell me a story about the North, she complies
because she has been educated in a mission school and speaks English
well. And then she is not in the least afraid of me since I showed so
lamentable a lack of insight about marriage. Now listen to the story.
Once a mallard who was sick of love asked a blackbird to marry him.
"Marry me," he said, "and I will give you fish to eat and wild rice.
And when the sun is hot, I will hide you in the rushes and keep you
under my wings."
And so they lived together as man and wife and the blackbird bore her
husband three sons, but soon he tired of her and made believe he was
dead so that she went away and left him in peace.
And then the mallard went in search of another wife.... It was a story
I craved of Justine, and lo! she has told me a parable.