SOME NORTHERN PIONEERS
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!--WHITMAN.
In the morning, soon after sunup, we continue our joyous journey on the
Athabasca, but the birds are out and about before us. An occasional
duck rises off the water sharply with a whir of wet wings, but
generally they are self-complacent and play at last across the road
with the ship, just as if they sought trouble and despised it. The
young ducklings, who have only taken to water these few days agone,
form themselves into tiny rafts and one might almost expect to see a
fairy step aboard them. The fish jump out of the water, praying to be
caught. They look like strips of silver ribbon. Mr. Patrick O'Kelly,
who is also watching their come and go, declares this to be a sign of
rain. "When birds fly low, lady, and when fish swim near the surface,
it is well to bring in the clothes off the line." He also says that
the plover's cry indicates rain, even as does its name--the _pluvoir_,
or rain-bird.
There are few birds to be seen, except an occasional hawk, who seems to
have no other object than to curvet about and display his clipper-built
wings for our admiration. Sometimes he soars into the skies in order
to exercise a keen vision that covers half the province, or, again, he
appears to hang in the air with an invisible string, so perfect is his
poise. It is foolish to call hawks ravening birds and to impute evil
motives to them. We only do this because they like chickens and other
gallinaceous fowl whose end we should prefer to be pot-pie. This is
not a reprobate taste on the hawk's part, for, of course, he has never
read the game-laws, nor the Book of Leviticus, and cannot be expected
to know that certain flesh, in certain localities, in certain seasons,
is the particular appurtenance of the _genus homo_. In truth, we are
so uninstructed in these laws ourselves that the government must,
perforce, keep game-wardens and the churches must keep preachers to
educate us more fully.
The Athabasca River, Mr. O'Kelly calculates, is about eight hundred
feet wide and about twelve feet deep. Its current is about five or six
miles an hour. The less said about its colour the better. At
Athabasca Landing they use the water as a top-dressing for the land.
I get on well with Mr. O'Kelly because he does not mind answering
questions, and I am rather stupid and do not understand irony, a fact
now published for the first time.
Mr. Patrick O'Kelly started on "his own" thirty years ago in Manitoba.
His name isn't really O'Kelly, but in this country a name is neither
here nor there. He homesteaded one hundred and sixty statute acres,
but to be a farmer one had to possess a capacity for waiting and he
didn't possess it. After this, he became a prospector. Now, in
prospecting, a man does not have to wait: his money is always
discernible to the eye of faith. Mr. O'Kelly still holds his on this
unnegotiable, spiritualistic plane. In the meanwhile he is boss of a
big lumber camp over Prince Albert way. He used to be a captain on
this river, but he doesn't captain any more. Some of these days he
intends to take a wander back home. He hears that northern folk are
foreigners in the South. This last remark is made with a rising
inflection as if an answer were expected.
Who would have thought such a pathetic fear to be lurking under so
confident and so square-shouldered an exterior? I can see now why Mr.
O'Kelly finds it hard to get away. Without letting him know that his
secret is suspected, I try to explain how it is the northerners who
have changed. We pioneers talk of going home but we really never go
back--that is the person who went away. This may be equally true of
all migrants who go into a far country, whether it be Abraham who went
into Ur of Chaldea, or Reginald of Oxford who goes into Saskatchewan.
There are several scribes on board, and one of them, "a editor in human
form," gives us greeting and joins our company. He is a thin, straight
young fellow with a likeable face, but his hair is shockingly awry.
"So you are an editor," says Mr. O'Kelly. "Your unpeaceable tribe has
committed much damage in this country."
"What do you mean by calling us a tribe? I conceive that you are an
old fool and perhaps a liberal in politics. Although I am an editor,
and by no means proud, I consider myself to be much better than you."
"Young person! you mean you are no worse," answers Mr. O'Kelly, "but,
in faith, I meant no offence and I am not a liberal."
Being thus reassured, the editor proceeds to discuss his difficulties
with us. He has been treated with great unfairness in one of the
northern towns. They gave him a fine mouthful of promises when he went
there, but they gave him nothing else. They failed to pay their
subscriptions and their advertisements, so that he had to leave the
place naked and ashamed. Some day, he is going to write a story in an
American magazine and describe this town as a real-estate office in a
muskeg. It will be marrow to his bones, and he will let the magazine
have the story for nothing.
Or, worse still, he will tell the truth about all the leading citizens;
he will set it down without equivocation or shadow of turning.
"But you wouldn't do this latter," I argue; "only a man with ink for
blood could do so terrible a thing."
"On the contrary, lady," snaps he, "I shall take blood for ink, that is
what I will do."
"But," said I, "you must expect to be beat a few times in your life,
little man, if you live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be
as strong and healthy as you may." This was quite a clever answer, and
I wish Charles Kingsley had not said it first, then it would have been
original with me.
This young editor talks with so much vigor and so many gesticulations
one might think he was acting a picture for a biograph machine. It is
a pity his political heroes do not avail themselves of his services.
As a fighter, the dear lad would have a fine genius if properly
incited; also, he has a marvellous vocabulary of flaming adjectives.
There is an Indian woman on the ship who is married to a white man, who
seems most kind to her. The northern woman who interpreted the Toa
Song for me, says this man believes the world well lost for love, his
heart being very full and his head very empty. You will observe that
this northern woman is a philosopher, probably owing to the fact that
she has had little to read and plenty of time to think. She was born
in this country over fifty years ago but was educated in the South. At
the age of sixteen, she married a Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company,
and is now his widow. This year agone she has been in Europe, but has
returned once more to her native North with its hidden wilds and yet
unhappened things. I tell you that some secret presage lies upon this
land, and one who has sensed it must come back again and again to its
intangible allurement. It may be the strong, austere spirit of the
land that holds one; or the vast voids of the sky, with their blue and
gold, and blue and silver. Or it may be that Tornarsuk, the great
devil of the Arctic, who rides on the wind, steals from their breasts
the midget souls of humans so that they belong to him and must follow
whither he wills. It is not for me to know the reason, or to tell it
to you, for I am southron born and cannot construe aright.
Time was when this woman only tasted flour once a year. It was in New
Year's Day, when her mother baked cakes for the gentlemen who came to
pay their respects to her--the doctor, the missionary, the clerks at
the post, or the visitors from other posts. On the first of these
occasions her mother, with an ill-grounded confidence, passed the plate
of cakes to the earliest visitors so that there were no cakes left for
the callers who came afterwards.
When flour became more plentiful, it was her mother's custom to have
cakes every Sunday evening. A cake was baked for each member of the
family and one for the plate. No one dreamed of taking the last cake.
It would have been accounted a gross breach of etiquette to have done
so, and one not to be thought of.
"But what became of it?" I ask; "who ate it ultimately? Surely some
one knew?"
Apparently no one did, for I am answered by a lift of one shoulder,
suggestive of ignorance and possibly indifference--a little defensive
shrug which precludes further intrusion into the subject. It is unkind
of her to leave me with this worrying problem, for there are fifty-two
cakes a year to be disposed of, and I may never hope to dispose of them
alone.
The Indian woman who has the white husband gives me bon-bons from a box
she purchased in Edmonton last week. Nothing so makes for confidence
in women as to eat sweets together. Authors write much about breaking
bread and the sacredness of salt, but, in actual life, nothing cements
friendship like chocolate drops. This is why the woman opens her heart
to me and says she desires to write a book--a great book about the
white people of whom she knows many things. I have no doubt she does,
and that if she put down all that is in her heart without one glance at
the gallery and without trimming her language to the rules of syntax,
her book would be the literary sensation of the year.
She wants to know if ever I wrote a book. Now, once I did, but it was
a simple book, so that wise people did not care so much as one finger's
fillip for it, but, sometime, I am going to put all their counsel
together and compose a really great one. It will not be disjointed,
but will flow along without a break in the smooth, natural way people
talk when they are alone with their families. It shall concern psychic
phenomena, yearnings, root-causes, the untrammelled life, strange
decadencies, and things like that. It shall be paradoxical,
epigrammatic, erudite, even vitriolic. I will pierce the self-conceit
of these Canadians and tell them they have need to mend their manners;
that they are primitive beasts--even _Diprotodons_.
Now the _Diprotodon_ was a kind of ferocious kangaroo, carnivorous and
predaceous, which lived in the Tertiary Period and had a skull three
feet in length. Those who are not of this species, I shall designate
as fanatics who cling to worn-out shibboleths over which they snarl
like pestilent dogs; or prigs who affect neurotic cults that are
exceedingly false and not native to this country. I will be superior
and insufferably arrogant so that they may be vastly annoyed with me
and rage like the Psalmist's "heathen." I shall not be kindly to any,
nor say them fair words, no matter how much I may desire to, nor how
much it hurts me to tell lies.
Then will the wise people take their pens in hand to say that "This
writer is possessed of the discriminating sense to an extraordinary
degree. She has vision, luminosity, verve, technique, and artistic
self-restraint--these, and other palpable qualities which bid us hope,
in spite of all which has been said to the contrary, that the time is
not so hopelessly remote when Canada may lay some small claim to having
a literature of her own."
Oh Me! Oh Me! This is what they will say, and I will laugh in my
throat and in my sleeves. I win not care the point of one pencil what
they say, so long as they refrain from using the adjective breezy.
When a northern woman goes visiting and the wise people wish to be
kind, they all apply this word to her. When the dubious visitor looks
into the dictionary for the exact meaning of breeze, she finds it
stands for either an uproar or a gentle gale. People have been
murdered for less obvious errors, so that all wise people will please
to be forewarned.
If you were to ask here what the Indian woman wished to write in a book
about the white people, I would not be able to tell you, for, at this
juncture, we all forgot to talk and crowded to the prow of the vessel
to see a moose that swam boldly ahead of us in the river. He kept far
enough away to be out of range, so that no one shot him. I use the
word shot in deference to the untaught urban folk into whose hands this
book may pass. What the men really desired was to "trump" him.
We did not see him take to the bank, for we took to the bank ourselves
in order to load wood for the engine. He is a worthy gentleman, the
moose, and should be well esteemed. Dropped in a thicket, hunted by
wolves, unprotected save by his sharp hoof, which, however, will rip
anything softer than a steel plate, he ranges the forests till his
antlers are full-branched, and then, at the age of three, without
costing the Province or the Indian a cent, he tips the scales at a
thousand pounds of meat.
We are invited to the tent of Mrs. Jack Fish, who receives us seated.
This is not owing to any lack of hospitality on her part, but because
she is very old and quite blind. The Oblate Brothers say she is over a
hundred years old, and truly she might pass for the honourable
great-grandmother of all Canada. Her son, with whom she lives, minds a
wood-pile on the Athabasca, but in the winter he has a house of logs at
Tomato Creek to which he retires. All Indians live in tents from
preference, and not from the sordid reason assigned them by the
would-be poet who declares that "Itchie, Mitchie lives in a tent," for
"He can't afford to pay the rent." There are no rented houses in this
country, and no man has ever heard of a landlord. Every person holds
his house, or his several houses, in fee simple. In Great Britain,
these residences would be designated as "shooting boxes."
Neither would it be a sign of mental superiority on the part of the
traveller to consider Jack Knife's job a menial one. Banking
situations or provincial politics may have an importance in the fence
country, but in boreal regions the prime test of intelligence is a
knowledge of how to handle a boat or an axe.
Madam, our hostess, informs the Factor's widow that she keeps quite
well except for an evil and tormenting spirit in her chest. She
desires to know who are in our company, and when she learns that the
_Okimow_, or Great Chief of the Peace River Country, is one of us, she
asks for tobacco. Ah! the Chief at Fort Edmonton would be generous to
her, but he is dead now and there is no tobacco to soothe her pain.
When she was young, her people fought with the Blackfeet tribe in the
Bear Hills, and many of the Crees were scalped. She fled through the
forests to Fort Edmonton, carrying her two children on her back, but
there was much rain and almost she was drowned crossing the rivers.
That was many, many nesting-moons ago, and now she is old and her pipe
is empty of tobacco.
"Is the kind lady going down the river to find a man?"
No! the kind lady has white hair and her man is dead.
"May be it is the _Okimow_?"
No! the _Okimow_ has a wife in the South with brown hair.
Ah well! Ah well! but it was different when she was young. Then every
woman's skin was full of oil and there were many braves who loved her.
After she has been led into the open, and has had her picture taken
with us, the great _Okimow_ takes her back to her blankets and fills
her lap with a heap of pungent tobacco. It will be many moons before
our honourable great-grandmother requires a fresh supply. "An old
straggler," that is what I call her, after the beggar-woman who asked
Sir Walter Scott for alms.
The religion of the gentle Nazarene has cut the fighting sinews of the
Indians. This was why the Christianized Hurons were brushed off the
earth by the tigerish and unapproachable Iroquois. The Hurons became
soft, and being soft, they became a prey. In some inexplicable way, we
Anglo-Saxons have managed to keep our bumps of veneration and
combativeness well partitioned or estranged and so keep mastery of the
changeling tribes who permit them to commingle. This is why the
Indians are a dying race in a new country. This is why our honourable
great-grandmother whimpers for tobacco instead of hurling us over the
bank and throwing her camp-fire on the top of us. I could almost find
it in my heart to wish that she had.