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Title: The Story of the Trapper
Author: A. C. Laut
Illustrator: Arthur Heming
Release Date: May 3, 2010 [EBook #32236]
Language: English
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[Illustration: With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on. (_See
page 105._)]
_THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES_
_EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK_
THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
* * * * *
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+The Story of the Trapper.+
By A. C. LAUT, Author of "Heralds of Empire." Illustrated by Hemment.
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D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
* * * * *
THE STORY
OF THE TRAPPER
BY
A. C. LAUT
AUTHOR OF HERALDS OF EMPIRE
AND LORDS OF THE NORTH
_ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR HEMING
AND OTHERS_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
* * * * *
TO ALL WHO KNOW
THE GIPSY YEARNING FOR THE WILDS
* * * * *
EDITOR'S PREFACE
The picturesque figure of the trapper follows close behind the Indian in
the unfolding of the panorama of the West. There is the explorer, but
the trapper himself preceded the explorers--witness Lewis's and Clark's
meetings with trappers on their journey. The trapper's hard-earned
knowledge of the vast empire lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by
later comers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occasional
records in the documents of fur companies, or reports of military
expeditions, or here and there in the name of a pass, a stream, a
mountain, or a fort. His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the
woods and streams was the expression of a primitive instinct old as the
history of mankind. The development of the motives which led the first
pioneer trappers afield from the days of the first Eastern settlements,
the industrial organizations which followed, the commanding commercial
results which were evolved from the trafficking of Radisson and
Groseillers in the North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,
and the American enterprise which led, among other results, to the
foundation of the Astor fortunes, would form no inconsiderable part of a
history of North America. The present volume aims simply to show the
type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch in a series of
pictures the checkered life of this adventurer of the wilderness.
The trapper of the early West was a composite figure. From the Northeast
came a splendid succession of French explorers like La Vérendrye, with
_coureurs des bois_, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders
pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard, illustrated in
figures like Garces and others, held out hands which rarely grasped the
waiting commerce. From the north and northeast there was the steady
advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in the deeds of the
Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the leaders of the organized fur trade,
explorers, traders, captains of industry, carrying the flags of the
Hudson's Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern America to the
Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast the Russian appeared as fur
trader in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the close of the
century saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of the fur
traffic of that coast. The American trapper becomes a conspicuous figure
in the early years of the nineteenth century. The emporium of his
traffic was St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance and
prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase and continued for
forty years. The complete history of the American fur trade of the far
West has been written by Captain H. M. Chittenden in volumes which will
be included among the classics of early Western history. Although his
history is a publication designed for limited circulation, no student or
specialist in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his
faithful and comprehensive work.
In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for the general reader a
vivid picture of an adventurous figure, which is painted with a
singleness of purpose and a distinctness impossible of realization in
the large and detailed histories of the American fur trade and the
Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the various special relations
and journals and narratives. The author's wilderness lore and her
knowledge of the life, added to her acquaintance with its literature,
have borne fruit in a personification of the Western and Northern
trappers who live in her pages. It is the man whom we follow not merely
in the evolution of the Western fur traffic, but also in the course of
his strange life in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his
craft against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most picturesque figure
which is sketched in these pages with the etcher's art that selects
essentials while boldly disregarding details. This figure as it is
outlined here will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and
the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own appeal. A strange
chapter in history is outlined for those who would gain an insight into
the factors which had to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft,
exemplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is painted in
pictures which breathe the very atmosphere of that life of stream and
forest which has not lost its appeal even in these days of urban
centralization. The flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the
stealthy tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man against
brute and savage, may be followed throughout a narrative which is
constant in its fresh and personal interest.
The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and there is still an
American fur trade; but the golden days are past, and the heroic age of
the American trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even more
than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly realized by his
successors. It is time to tell his story, to show what manner of man he
was, and to preserve for a different age the adventurous character of a
Romany of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesqueness and daring
of his primeval life, and also, judged by more practical standards, a
figure of serious historical import in his relations to exploration and
commerce, and even affairs of politics and state.
If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure in the early
exploitation of an empire, his larger significance may be held of far
more consequence to us than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in
his life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple. The record of his
dealings with the red man and with white competitors is darkened by many
stains. His return from his lonely journeys afield brought an outbreak
of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the range, but with all
this the stern life of the old frontier bred a race of men who did their
work. That work was the development of the only natural resources of
vast regions in this country and to the Northward, which were utilized
for long periods. There was also the task of exploration, the breaking
the way for others, and as pioneer and as builder of commerce the
trapper's part in our early history has a significance which cloaks the
frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden wilds.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS 1
II.--THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 8
III.--THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 22
IV.--THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 28
V.--MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 38
VI.--THE FRENCH TRAPPER 50
VII.--THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 65
VIII.--THE MOUNTAINEERS 81
IX.--THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 102
X.--THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 117
XI.--THE INDIAN TRAPPER 128
XII.--BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 144
XIII.--JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER 160
XIV.--THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 181
XV.--KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 206
XVI.--OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT 222
XVII.--THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES THEM 240
XVIII.--UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN 258
XIX.--WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 275
APPENDIX 281
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
WITH EYE AND EAR ALERT THE MAN PADDLES SILENTLY ON _Frontispiece_
INDIAN _VOYAGEURS_ "PACKING" OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ 30
TRADERS RUNNING A MACKINAW OR KEEL-BOAT DOWN THE RAPIDS 57
THE BUFFALO-HUNT 78
THEY DODGE THE COMING SWEEP OF THE UPLIFTED ARM 143
CARRYING GOODS OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED
RED RIVER OX-CARTS 198
FORT MACPHERSON, THE MOST NORTHERLY POST OF THE
HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY 228
TYPES OF FUR PRESSES 250
THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER
PART I
CHAPTER I
GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS
Fearing nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no law, ruling his
stronghold of the wilds like a despot, checkmating rivals with a
deviltry that beggars parallel, wassailing with a shamelessness that
might have put Rome's worst deeds to the blush,
fighting--fighting--fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew
no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever stand as a type of
the worst and the best in the militant heroes of mankind.
Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon won victories that
upset the geography of earth. The fur traders never at any time exceeded
a few thousands in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sallied
out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent that has bred a new
race.
Like John Colter,[1] whom Manuel Lisa met coming from the wilds a
hundred years ago, the trapper strapped a pack to his back, slung a
rifle over his shoulder, and, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped
into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else, like Williams of
the Arkansas, the trapper left the moorings of civilization in a canoe,
hunted at night, hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding
down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-current screened by the
branches of driftwood, and if a sudden halloo of marauders came from the
distance, cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got away
under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert
set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often
compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the
Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who
brought down their pelts to the mountain _rendezvous_ of Pierre's Hole,
or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur
Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling cañon walls
where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too
sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the
haft.[2] Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur
traders clubbed together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of
the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.
Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted
antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day
think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut
off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland
route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at
all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,
Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.
The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence--to go ahead
without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's
life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of
the most thrilling pages in history.
* * * * *
About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart
Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed
the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward
to the region of Hudson Bay.[3] Returning with tales of fabulous wealth
to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by
members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence
secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and
honourable body--as the company was called--reaped enormous profits from
the bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,
half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and
Severn Rivers, or at York Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of
Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number
of licenses for the fur trade in Canada; and the old English company had
no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but
waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts
on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville[4] might march overland from
Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the
stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off
like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient
company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable
adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost
furs.
But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously
in all parts of the east.
This resulted from two events--England's victory over France at Quebec,
and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of
French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which
limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army
of some two thousand men--_voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs de
lard_,[5] famous hunters, traders, and trappers--on their own resources.
The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and
MacTavishes--Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal--were quick to
seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company
and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off
Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to
the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old
French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against
all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the
larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor'
Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous
ubiquity.
But at that stage came the other factor--American Independence. Locked
in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could
France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles
and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and
Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the
Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase,
and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its
fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours
had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the
west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for
furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report
of the north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had
stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty
Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.
Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its
eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,[6]
Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river
named after him,[7] and forced his way across the northern Rockies to
the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's
lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At
Michilimackinac--one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur
posts--was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old
French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes
to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily
pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado--the fur
country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by
the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.
Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get
possession first.
Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at
the same time and in the same light. And the war began.
The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the
Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out
of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent
state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening
that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were
not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what
was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America
and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of
New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes,
was not asleep.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired
to make immortal.]
[Footnote 2: While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the
former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a
voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw
Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right
arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff.
With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his
moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a
monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.]
[Footnote 3: Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this
trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.]
[Footnote 4: 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana
after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for
France--one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur
trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in
a network irrespective of flag.]
[Footnote 5: The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in
contradistinction to the trappers and _voyageurs_.]
[Footnote 6: This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay
Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne,
unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his
too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La
Perouse's campaign of 1782.]
[Footnote 7: To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the
Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.]
CHAPTER II
THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT
If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur
country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become
international history; but three companies were at strife for possession
of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was
"beaver"--not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all
means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth
company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own
existence.
From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the
Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the
mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York,
Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory
west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur
trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues
to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company
lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling
heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in
the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not
yet come.
Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and
Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,
Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as
interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the
spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the
full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or
"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by
means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.
Where the water was shallow the _voyageurs_ poled single file, facing
the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars
were used.
Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the
wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they
were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring
the deserter back dead or alive--orders that were filled to the letter,
for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.
Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this
lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their
return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine
the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for
three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.
Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been
buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit
might see the canoes of the French _voyageurs_ going up and down the
river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,[8] whose death, like that of many
a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of
empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in
vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from
rival traders;[9] past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;
past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank with weapons
ready; up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn--went Lisa,
stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those thieves and pirates
and marauders of the western wilderness. Stockades were hastily stuck in
the ground, banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the two
usual bastions that could send a raking fire along all four walls; and
Lisa was ready for trade.
In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded to the water-line
with furs. The Missouri Company was formally organized,[10] and yearly
expeditions were sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks of
the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of the two hundred and
fifty men employed, fifty were trained riflemen for the defence of the
trappers; but this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their
lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years. Among the victims
was Drouillard, struck down wheeling his horse round and round as a
shield, literally torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten
according to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a brave man
imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing, ammunition, and peltries
were carried to the Nor' Westers' trading posts north of the
boundary.[11] Not if the West were to be baptized in blood would the
traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Missouri men under Andrew
Henry's leadership moved south-west over the mountains into the region
that was to become famous as Pierre's Hole.
* * * * *
Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor remained idle. The same
year that Lisa organized his Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a
charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. To
lessen competition in the great scheme gradually framing itself in his
mind, he bought out that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade[12] which
was within the United States, the posts in the British dominions falling
into the hands of the all-powerful Nor' Westers. Intimate with the
leading partners of the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid
rivalry on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third interest in
his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.
Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected Mr. Astor's proposal
with a scorn born of unshaken confidence, and at once prepared to
anticipate American possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor countered
by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' Westers for his Pacific
Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall, a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with
a bumptious idea of authority which was always making other eyes smart,
was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to round the Horn and at the
headquarters of the company on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a
relative of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have left the
northern traders from some momentary pique; for he soon went back to the
Canadian companies, became chief factor at Fort Garry,[13] the
headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time governor of
Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied Sir Alexander MacKenzie on
his famous northern trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor
with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a rollicking winterer
from The Labrador, with the hail-fellow-well-met-air of an equal among
the mercurial French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the game,
independent spirit that made Nor' Westers famous.
Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn--with its crew of twenty, and
choleric Captain Thorn, and four[14] partners headed by the fussy little
MacDougall in mutiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks
always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sailors' way, and
thirteen _voyageurs_ ever grumbling at the ocean swell that gave them
qualms unknown on inland waters--little need be said. Washington Irving
has told this story; and what Washington Irving leaves untold, Captain
Chittenden has recently unearthed from the files of the Missouri
archives.
The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6, 1810. The captain had
been a naval officer, and cursed the partners for their easy familiarity
with the men before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot of
scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick _voyageurs_ for a set of
fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's amiable feelings were
reciprocated by every Nor' Wester on board.
Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii sighted in February, some
thirty Sandwich Islanders engaged for service in the new company, and
the Columbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives were lost
attempting to run small boats against the turbulent swell of tide and
current. The place to land, the site to build, details of the new fort,
Astoria--all were subjects for the jangling that went on between the
fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain Thorn, till the Tonquin
weighed anchor on the 1st of June and sailed away to trade on the north
coast, accompanied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay, and one clerk,
James Lewis.
The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn continued to dictate a
wrong-headed course. In spite of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians
off the ship and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were
treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over his decks. Once,
when MacKay was on shore, Thorn lost his temper, struck an impertinent
chief in the face with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from
the ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had happened, he
warned the captain of Indian vengeance and urged him to leave the
harbour. These warnings the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians,
and no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost servile.
One morning, when Thorn, and MacKay were yet asleep, a pirogue with
twenty Indians approached the ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held
up furs to trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe glided near
and another band mounted the ship's ladder. Soon the vessel was
completely surrounded with canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs,
the squaws laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the ship's
side. This day the Indians were neither pertinacious nor impertinent in
their trade. Matters went swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew
noticed with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and other
weapons in exchange for their furs and that groups were casually
stationing themselves at positions of wonderful advantage on the deck.
MacKay and Thorn were quickly called.
This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.
MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation and again warned the
captain. Again Thorn slighted the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The
Indians thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade. Then the
dour-headed Thorn understood. With a shout he ordered the decks cleared.
His shout was answered by a counter-shout--the wild, shrill shriekings
of the Indian war-cry! All the newly-bought weapons flashed in the
morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first, bending over a pile of goods,
and rolled down the companion-way with a mortal stab in his back.
MacKay was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club and
pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws received him on their
knives. Thorn had been roused so suddenly that he had no weapon but his
pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms
of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the
wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard
to the knives of the squaws.
While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and
Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men
who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell
down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the
cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This
sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The
survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which
drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.
All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;
but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the
Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians
launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man--one of
those who had fallen down the hatch wounded--staggered up to the deck,
waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of
booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of
carrion-birds. Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with
a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to
atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants
of what had been living men but a moment before.
The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,[15] had
determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to
escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a
match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better
have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where
they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty
that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this
disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of
the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri
and Columbia.
Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men building a fort
on the Upper Columbia. If these had been the overland party, they would
have come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who had himself been
a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador
was preparing to go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific
Company; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the apparition of nine
white men in a canoe flying a British flag.
The North-West Company arrived just three months too late!
David Thompson, the partner at the head of the newcomers, had been
delayed in the mountains by the desertion of his guides. Much to the
disgust of Labrador Stuart, who might change masters often but was loyal
to only one master at a time, MacDougall and Thompson hailed each other
as old friends. Every respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to
the Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading rivalry, he
should have been nothing more than a North-West spy, to be guardedly
received in a Pacific Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed
with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with a supply of
Astoria provisions.
History is not permitted to jump at conclusions, but unanswered
questions will always cling round Thompson's visit. Did he bear some
message from the Nor' Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an
honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon that he shook free of
Thompson's company on their way back up the Columbia? Why did MacDougall
lose his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness? How could the
next party of Nor' Westers take him back into the fold and grant him a
partnership _ostensibly_ without the knowledge of the North-West annual
council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?
Early in August wandering tribes brought news of the Tonquin's
destruction, and Astoria bestirred itself to strengthen pickets, erect
bastions, mount four-pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's
North-West training now came out, and he entered on a policy of
conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his marrying Comcomly's
daughter. He also perpetrated the world-famous threat of letting
small-pox out of a bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained
good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the schooner Dolly was
built, and New Year's Day of 1812 ushered in with a firing of cannon and
festive allowance of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of the
overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale of blundering and
mismanagement that must have been gall to MacKenzie, the old Nor' Wester
accompanying them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria in February,
and two other detachments later.
The management of the overlanders had been intrusted to Wilson Price
Hunt of New Jersey, who at once proceeded to Montreal with Donald
MacKenzie, the Nor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-West Company
was first felt. Rum, threats, promises, and sudden orders whisking them
away prevented capable _voyageurs_ from enlisting under the Pacific
Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged, which explains in part
why these empty braggarts so often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the
Ottawa in a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake to
Michilimackinac.
Here the hand of the North-West Company was again felt. Tattlers went
from man to man telling yarns of terror to frighten _engagés_ back. Did
a man enlist? Sudden debts were remembered or manufactured, and the bill
presented to Hunt. Was a _voyageur_ on the point of embarking? A swarm
of naked brats with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt
finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr. Ramsay Crooks, a
distinguished Nor' Wester, who afterward became famous as the president
of the American Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay and the
Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where the machinations of another
rival were put to work.
Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part in the Pacific
Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Missouri traders did not propose to see
his field invaded. The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis
in engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was finally ready in
March, 1811, to set out with his sixty men up the Missouri, Lisa
resurrected a liquor debt against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter,
with the fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten dollars a
quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going overland through the woods
and meeting Hunt's party farther up-stream, beyond the law.
Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a search party of twenty
picked _voyageurs_ to go up the Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew
Henry who had fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake River.
Traders too often secured safe passage through hostile territory in
those lawless days by giving the savages muskets enough to blow out the
brains of the next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by Crooks
and MacLellan.[16] Perhaps that was his reason for pushing ahead at all
speed to overtake Hunt before either party had reached Sioux territory.
Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa came, the harder Hunt
fled. This curious race lasted for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa
coming up with the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Spaniard
tampered with Dorion. Had not two English travellers intervened, Hunt
and Lisa would have settled their quarrel with pistols for two.
Thereafter the rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping
to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the mountains.
That overland journey was one of the most pitiful, fatuous, mismanaged
expeditions in the fur trade. Why a party of sixty-four well-armed,
well-provisioned men failed in doing what any two _voyageurs_ or
trappers were doing every day, can only be explained by comparison to a
bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild prairie creature the bit, and
it will carry its rider through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left,
east, and west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as
helpless as the rider. So with the _voyageur_. Crossing the mountains
alone in his own way, he could evade famine and danger and attack by
lifting a brother trader's cache--hidden provisions--or tarrying in
Indian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the daughter of a
hostile chief, or creeping so quietly through the woods neither game
nor Indian scout could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of
sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into detachments, weak,
emaciated, stripped naked, on the verge of dementia and cannibalism, now
shouting to each other across a roaring cañon, now sinking in despair
before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached Astoria after
nearly a year's wanderings.
Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with re-enforcements of men
and provisions. More posts were established inland. After several futile
attempts, despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under direction of
Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska to trade with the Russians. Word
came from the North-West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with
England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was wrecked. Astoria was now
altogether in the hands of men who had been Nor' Westers.
And what was the alert North-West Company doing?[17]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.]
[Footnote 9: Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
were not yet so far south.]
[Footnote 10: In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern
continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full
particulars.]
[Footnote 11: This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander
Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.
Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the
corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.]
[Footnote 12: Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction
to the North-West.]
[Footnote 13: The modern Winnipeg.]
[Footnote 14: MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.]
[Footnote 15: Franchère, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering
the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchère, says
Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all
accounts--Franchère's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's--are from
the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the
massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him
on account of his race. Franchère became prominent in Montreal, Cox in
British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where
the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old
settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part
in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth
century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.]
[Footnote 16: A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost
everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.]
[Footnote 17: Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of
late from the daily journals of two North-West partners--MacDonald of
Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,
and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.]
CHAPTER III
THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP
"_It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should
send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had
established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William
(overland) to meet the ship on the coast_," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a
North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.
This was decided at the North-West council of 1812, held annually on the
shores of Lake Superior. It was just a year from the time that Thompson
had discovered the American fort in the hands of former Nor' Westers. At
this meeting Thompson's report must have been read.
The overland party was to be led by the two partners, John George
MacTavish and Alexander Henry, the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by
Donald MacTavish, who had actually been appointed governor of the
American fort in anticipation of victory. On the Isaac Todd also went
MacDonald of Garth.[18]
The overland expedition was to thread that labyrinth of water-ways
connecting Lake Superior and the Saskatchewan, thence across the plains
to Athabasca, over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through
Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the Columbia through
Kootenay plains to Astoria. One has only to recall the roaring cañons of
the northern Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless
precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this route was than that
followed by Hunt from St. Louis to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the
plains and the width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did this,
but passed down the middle of the Rockies for nearly a thousand miles.
Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to
England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naïve assurance of
victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger,
difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the
terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's
mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their
ship. "_A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew_," writes
MacDonald of Garth, "_a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and
a rascally crew_." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British
convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay
barmaid Jane[19] drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the
rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency.
"_We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were
driven half-way to the Cape of Good Hope; ... at last doubled the cape
under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our
sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale_,"
wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.
It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months
after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness
were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the
Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a
month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the
Isaac Todd.
And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army
of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself
into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the
Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving
rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not
decamp.
Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor'
Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the
bragging _voyageurs_ told those quaking Astorians terrible things of
what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and
captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne
alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns,
knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant
courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran
up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above
Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at
forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his conscience with the
excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the
Raccoon.
At the end of November a large ship was sighted standing in over the bar
with all sails spread but no ensign out. Three shots were fired from
Astoria. There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost Mr. Hunt
coming back from Alaskan trade on the Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers
hastily packed their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their
_voyageurs_ scampering up-stream to hide and await a signal. But
MacDougall was equal to the emergency. He launched out for the ship,
prepared to be an American if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'
Wester if it were the Raccoon with a company partner.
It was the Raccoon, and the British captain addressed the Astorians in
words that have become historic: "_Is this the fort I've heard so much
about? D---- me, I could batter it down in two hours with a
four-pounder!_"
Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above Astoria, with traders
and marines drawn up under arms to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira
was broken against the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British
possession by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired from the
bastions.
At this stage all accounts, particularly American accounts, have rung
down the curtain on the catastrophe, leaving the Nor' Westers
intoxicated with success. But another act was to complete the disasters
of Astoria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift judgment
on the revelling Nor' Westers.
The Raccoon left on the last day of 1813. MacDougall had been appointed
partner in the North-West Company, and the other Canadians re-engaged
under their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the Pedler, which he
had chartered after the wreck of Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it
was too late to do more than carry away those Americans still loyal to
Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence he made his way to
Europe. The others were captured off California and they afterward
scattered to all parts of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of
Nor' Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger MacTavish, set
out for the long journey across the mountains and prairie to the
company's headquarters at Port William. In the flotilla of ten canoes
went many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came the belated
Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white flag at its foretop and the
dissolute old Governor MacTavish holding a high carnival of riot in the
cabin.
No darker picture exists than that of Astoria--or Fort George, as the
British called it--under Governor MacTavish's _régime_. The picture is
from the hand of a North-West partner himself. _"Not in bed till 2 A.
M.; ... the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... famous fellows for
grog they are; ... diced for articles belonging to Mr. M.,"_ Alexander
Henry had written when the Raccoon was in port; and now under Governor
MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to decency was discarded.
"_Avec les loups il faut hurler_" was a common saying among Nor'
Westers, and perhaps that very assimilation to the native races which
contributed so much to success also contributed to the trader's undoing.
White men and Indians vied with each other in mutual debasement. Chinook
and Saxon and Frenchmen alike lay on the sand sodden with corruption;
and if one died from carousals, companions weighted neck and feet with
stones and pushed the corpse into the river. Quarrels broke out between
the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the
underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the
gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; _seven hours
rowing one mile_, innocently states the record of another day, _the tide
running seven feet high past the fort_.
The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled
horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running
its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of
countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.
Governor MacTavish[20] and Alexander Henry had embarked with six
_voyageurs_ to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A
tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of
the fort.
So perished the conquerors of Astoria!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
in the American War of Independence.]
[Footnote 19: Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
white woman on the Columbia.]
[Footnote 20: In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be
distinguished from others of blameless lives.]
CHAPTER IV
THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP
Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their
ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many
dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort
George.
Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed
the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their
towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia
where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial
sediment, now raving through a narrow cañon, now teased into a white
whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,
and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.
"_A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille_," wrote the mighty
MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old
trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "_Nearing the mountains we
got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here_ (at the
Great Bend) _we left canoes and began a mountain pass_ (Yellow Head
Pass).... _The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding
by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in,
frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in,
... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four
days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the
Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires
we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the
morning."_
They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled
down-stream to the _portage_ between Athabasca River and the
Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus
(Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and
the _voyageurs_ launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand
miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort
William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.
Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a
million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed
guard of three hundred men.[22] Coasting along the north shore of Lake
Superior, the _voyageurs_ came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's
establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the
greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the
Lakes.
"_Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four
Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps_," writes MacDonald, showing
to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were
overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The
strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had
been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore
bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich
prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under
the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to
Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River.
William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence
of the furs.
Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was hovering about the
Sault, the other cruising into the countless recesses of the north
shore. Against the latter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces,
boarding her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness, "_pinning
the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck_." Lying snugly at anchor, the
victors awaited the coming of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her
cast anchor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and took both
schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all apprehension of capture, the
North-West brigade proceeded eastward to the Ottawa River, and without
further adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confusion from
another cause.
At the very time when war endangered the entire route of the Nor'
Westers from Montreal to the Pacific, the Hudson's Bay Company awakened
from its long sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in the
United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans for the control of all
Canada's fur trade. Like Mr. Astor, he too had been the guest at the
North-West banquets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard fabulous
things from those magnates of the north about wealth made in the fur
trade. Returning to England, Lord Selkirk bought up enough stock of the
Hudson's Bay Company to give him full control, and secured from the
shareholders an enormous grant of land surrounding the mouths of the Red
and Assiniboine rivers.
Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were situated Fort Douglas
(later Fort Garry, now Winnipeg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay
Company, and Fort Gibraltar, the North-West post whence supplies were
sent all the way from the Mandans on the Missouri to the Eskimo in the
arctics.
Not satisfied with this _coup_, Lord Selkirk engaged Colin Robertson, an
old Nor' Wester, to gather a brigade of _voyageurs_ two hundred strong
at Montreal and proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca,
MacKenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy, blustering,
bragging company of gaily-bedizened fellows that had turned the streets
of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end
of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy revellers! Eighteen of
them died of starvation in the far, cold north, owing to the conflict
between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.
Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his
newly-acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson
Bay. These people were given lands, and in return expected to defend
the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers. The Nor' Westers struck back
by discouraging the colonists, shipping them free out of the country,
and getting possession of their arms.
Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regiment, New York,
governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Douglas, at once issued
proclamations forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers and
ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the strength of these
proclamations two or three outlying North-West forts were destroyed and
North-West fur brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,[23] the North-West
partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his _Bois-Brûlés_, a
ragged half-breed army of wild plain rangers under Cuthbert Grant,
canter across the two miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a
volley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To save the post for the
Hudson's Bay Company, Miles MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped
out of the country.
But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time till the valiant
North-West defenders had scattered to their winter posts. Then an armed
party seized Duncan Cameron not far from the North-West fort, and with
pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the Nor' Wester.
Afterward, when Semple, the new Hudson's Bay governor, was absent from
Fort Douglas and could not therefore be held responsible for
consequences, the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson who
had brought the large brigade from Montreal, marched across the prairie
to Fort Gibraltar, captured Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers'
stores, and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retaliation for
MacDonell's expulsion, the North-West partner was shipped down to Hudson
Bay, where he might as well have been on Devil's Island for all the
chance of escape.
One company at fault as often as the other, similar outrages were
perpetrated in all parts of the north fur country, the blood of rival
traders being spilt without a qualm of conscience or thought of results.
The effect of this conflict among white men on the bloodthirsty
red-skins one may guess. The _Bois-Brûlés_ were clamouring for Cuthbert
Grant's permission to wipe the English--meaning the Hudson's Bay
men--off the earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux under Chief
Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let them defend the Hudson's
Bay--meaning kill the Nor' Westers.
The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of Fort Gibraltar. That
post had sent all supplies to North-West forts. If Fort Douglas of the
Hudson's Bay Company, past which North-West canoes must paddle to turn
westward to the plains, should intercept the incoming brigade of Nor'
Westers' supplies, what would become of the two thousand North-West
traders and _voyageurs_ and _engagés_ inland? Whether the Hudson's Bay
had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers were determined to prevent
the possibility.
Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms, scouts went
scouring across the plains to rally the _Bois-Brûlés_ from Portage la
Prairie and Souris and Qu'Appelle.[24] Led by Cuthbert Grant, they
skirted north of the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies
above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers to mistake this
armed cavalcade, red with paint and chanting war-songs, for hostiles.
Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the alarm. Ordering a
field-piece to follow, Governor Semple marched out with a little army of
twenty-eight Hudson's Bay men. The Nor' Westers thought that he meant to
obstruct their way till his other forces had captured their coming
canoes. The Hudson's Bay thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the
Selkirk settlers.
It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two parties met at the edge
of a swamp beside a cluster of trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor'
Westers say that Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and
tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay say that the
governor had no sooner got within range than the half-breed scout leaped
down and fired from the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.
It is well known how the first blood of battle has the same effect on
all men of whatever race. The human is eclipsed by that brute savagery
which comes down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In a trice
twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead. While Grant had turned to
obtain carriers to bear the wounded governor off the field, poor Semple
was brutally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who ran from body
to body, perpetrating the crimes of ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to
expostulate. The wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft
velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds crooning the sad
monotone of a limitless sea, closed over a scene of savages drunk with
slaughter, of men gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors
thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the slain.
Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them down-stream to Lake
Winnipeg, where dwelt the friendly Chief Peguis. On the river they met
the indomitable Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He
brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved by the expelled
governor's account of disorders, Lord Selkirk was hastening north, armed
with the authority of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in
full regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted on his barges
and stores of munition that ill agreed with the professions of a
peaceful justice.
The time has gone past for quibbling as to the earl's motives in pushing
north armed like a lord of war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with
his army of Des Meurons[25] at the Sault. In August Lord Selkirk
appeared before Port William with uniformed soldiers in eleven boats.
The justice of the peace set his soldiers digging trenches opposite the
Nor' Westers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had enough of
blood. They capitulated without one blow. Selkirk took full possession.
Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the rivers, he sent Captain
d'Orsennens overland westward to Red River, where Fort Douglas was
captured back one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the fort
walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had been just as ruthless on
the Saskatchewan. Nor' Westers were captured as they disembarked to pass
Grand Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where Franklin the
explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreated. One of them was the same John
George MacTavish who had helped to capture Astoria; another, Frobisher,
a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse. The Deschamps
murderers of Seven Oaks fled south, where their crimes brought terrible
vengeance from American traders.
Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay Company were in a
curious quandary. Suits enough were pressing in the courts to ruin both
companies; and for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hudson
Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth told and the crimes
probed. There was only one way out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the
companies amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In April,
1822, a new fort was built half-way between the sites of Gibraltar and
Fort Douglas, and given the new name of Fort Garry by Sir George
Simpson, the governor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thousand
men thrown out of employment by the union at once crossed the line and
enlisted with American traders.
The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength that comes from
victorious conflict--so strong, indeed, that it not only held the
Canadian field, but in spite of the American law[26] forbidding British
traders in the United States, reached as far south as Utah and the
Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with lusty rivals.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: Some say seventy-four.]
[Footnote 22: The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria
capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of
1812.]
[Footnote 23: An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New
York.]
[Footnote 24: More of the _voyageurs'_ romance; named because of a voice
heard calling and calling across the lake as _voyageurs_ entered the
valley--said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover,
though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the _voyageurs'_ song
among the hills.]
[Footnote 25: Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.]
[Footnote 26: A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to
the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's
enforcement.]
CHAPTER V
MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS
That Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when he pursued the Astorians up
the Missouri continued to be dogged by misfortune on the west side of
the mountains. Game was scarce and his half-starving followers were
scattered, some to the British posts in the north, some to the Spaniards
in the south, and some to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry
forced his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Aricara country.
The British war broke out and the Missouri Company were compelled to
abandon the dangerous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase
arms from the British traders, raid the Americans, and scurry back to
Canada.
When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred Missouri men were again
in the mountains; but they suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's
party were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who succeeded to
Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed over to the Columbia, had all
his supplies stolen, reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville,
almost destitute. The British rivals received him with that hospitality
for which they were renowned when trade was not involved, and gave him
escort up the Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to Red
River, thence overland to the Mandan country and St. Louis.
These two disasters marked the wane of the Missouri Company.
But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on land than he must to
sea again, the indomitable Andrew Henry linked his fortunes with General
Ashley of St. Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell, Bridger,
Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sublettes--men who made the Rocky
Mountain trade famous--Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to the
mountains the first year and two hundred the next. In that time not less
than twenty-five lives were lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts
were obtained and the expeditions were a loss.
But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's Bay trappers loaded with
beaver pelts in the Columbia basin, west of the Rockies. They had become
separated from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian. Details of
this bargain will never be known; but when Smith came east he had the
Hudson's Bay furs. This was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men
and the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.
Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met their supplies
annually at a _rendezvous_ in the mountains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad
valley below the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or
Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been
massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin; but that did not
deter General Ashley himself from going up the Platte, across the divide
to Salt Lake. Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper, with an
enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hudson's Bay man left Salt
Lake, he had no furs; and when General Ashley came away, his packers
were laden with a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This was
the second brush between Rocky Mountain and Hudson's Bay, and again the
mountaineers scored.
The third encounter was more to the credit of both companies. After
three years' wanderings, Smith found himself stranded and destitute at
the British post of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,
his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay sent a punitive
force to recover his property, gave him a $20,000 draft for the full
value of the recovered furs, and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth
Rocky Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each other's rights
in the valley of the Columbia, but southward the old code prevailed.
Fitzpatrick, a Rocky Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogden
at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once plied the argument of
whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the
mountains to St. Louis.
The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution
seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.
Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down
before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of
their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of
Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the
Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
rank outrage--particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West
partners were seized, manacled, and sent to a wilderness--and now the
Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain
trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival
that could outcheat their cheatery.
In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of
America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who
have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to
the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.
In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for
their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away
from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild
Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off
civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with
the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were
lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong
of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long
beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from
ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his
luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet
weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,
tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every
trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best
hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed,
and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of
the hunt.
Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the
valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each
party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky
Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even
now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's
Bay hunters.
The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance
gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of
comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky
Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.
No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never
lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers
sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with
Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a
kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the
clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The
powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the
Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches,
and shot from cover.
All the trappers at the _rendezvous_ spurred to the fight, priming guns,
casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle
lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew,
twelve men lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded;
and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe
exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of
Pierre's Hole.
Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky
fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds
than the strangers who had shadowed them at the _rendezvous_ came up.
Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and
unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by
tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing
packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on
persistently for three months.
Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a
dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers
the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become
serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the
dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into
the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this
escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs
and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated
by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of
the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.
The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to
through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks
and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in
Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to
enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company
all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing
the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in
1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the
American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown
out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the
Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American
to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.
This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing
MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and
became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his
ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,
"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,
for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.
Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the
artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion
Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur
company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union
in MacKenzie's reign.
Once a free trapper came floating down the Missouri with his canoe full
of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be
obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a
French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately
vain. Strutting about the court-yard, feeling himself a very prince of
importance, he saw MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the
other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than it was wise. The
_dénouement_ was a vision of the flaxen-haired Siegfried sprinting at
the top of his speed through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie
flourishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here. The
outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on sight, and haunted the
fort gates with a loaded rifle till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a
mulatto servant to "wing" the fellow with a shot in the shoulder, when
he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and sent away.
At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built an opposition fort
just below Union and lay in wait for the coming of the Blackfeet to
trade with the American Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his
bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out sallied from Fort
Union a band in full regalia, with drum and trumpet and piccolo and
fife--wonders that would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.
Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages, and what was not
supposed to be in the Indian country--liquor. When these methods failed
to outbuy rivals, MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for a
beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain trappers were forced to
capitulate, and their post passed over to the American Fur Company.
In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting _finale_ to the
turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The Deschamps family, who
had perpetrated the worst butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the
fight between Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as interpreters
for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boastful of their murderous record in
Canada, the father, mother, and eight grown children were usually so
violent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English gentleman, used to
quiet their outrage and prevent trouble by dropping laudanum in their
cups. Once they slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest
their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came to life defiant
as ever. At Union was a very handsome young half-breed fellow by the
name of Gardepie, whose life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take
from sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free trappers,
Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one morning at breakfast with all
the gruesome mutilation of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a
younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and nerved to the deed with
alcohol, the Deschamps undertook to avenge their father's death by
killing all the whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the
alarm was carried to Fort Union.
Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union. Many trappers had been
assassinated by a Deschamps. Indians had been flogged by them for no
other purpose than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort
Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the Deschamps were
on the war-path.
The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands and took an oath to
exterminate the murderous clan. The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's
control. Seizing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the prairie
to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain trappers, where the
murderers were intrenched. All valuables were removed from the fort.
Time was given for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns were
turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of crime, the mother,
rushed out, holding forward the Indian pipe of peace and begging for
mercy.
She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and fell shot through the
heart.
At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter and learn if the
Deschamps were all dead? Treachery was feared. The assailants set fire
to the fort. In the light of the flames one man was espied crouching in
the bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot the last of the
Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion sent him leaping five feet into
the air to fall back dead, and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the
burning tower.[29]
Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the
fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found François Deschamps
backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all
ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and
his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without
shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally
wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union.
This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict
among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were
rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the
militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured
furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander
through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a
year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers
who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper
Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast
hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the
fences of settlers.
In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the
seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis
against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and
again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the
Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the
Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the
conflict waged round their forts.
In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort
Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in
savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In
the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort
Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.
MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could
not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing
old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the
friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in
all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of
the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young
children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of
defence till all were safely back among the whites.
This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway
of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the
Saskatchewan.
Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks
only at the black spot.
In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the
trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a
thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.]
[Footnote 28: Chittenden.]
[Footnote 29: Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more
circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.]
CHAPTER VI
THE FRENCH TRAPPER
To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the
town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the
most picturesque figure in America's history.
Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of
Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was
the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you
may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper.
Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to
freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the
young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom
from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living
all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the
farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.
Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with
provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to
$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade
enough for two years.
At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the
value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original
investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when
twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see
a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only
beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from
Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.
Two partners[30] have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from
the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the
Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.
The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship
was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even
death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of
the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in
the wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off punishment, or till
he had lost taste for civilized life and remained in the wilderness,
_coureur des bois_, _voyageur_, or leader of a band of half-wild
retainers whom he ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious
connecting link between the savagery of the New World and the _noblesse_
of the Old.
Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mississippi; Le Moyne
d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana to Hudson Bay; La Mothe Cadillac in
Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Louisiana; La Vérendrye exploring from
Lake Superior to the Rockies; Radisson on Hudson Bay--all won their fame
as explorers and discoverers in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred
years before any English mind knew of the Missouri, French _voyageurs_
had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the regions now called
Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin were known to New Englanders, the
French were trapping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two
centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went to New Mexico to
spy on Spanish trade.
East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom the French trapper
shunned--the English colonists and the Iroquois. North of the St.
Lawrence was a power that he shunned still more--the French governor,
who had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded and
trapped without license. But between St. Louis and MacKenzie River was a
great unclaimed wilderness, whence came the best furs.
Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the French trapper.
There were four ways by which he entered his hunting-ground: (1) Sailing
from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, he ascended the river in
pirogue or dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with means
to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit overland to the Illinois,
or Ohio, which he rafted down to the Mississippi, and then taking to
canoe turned north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always a grand
_rendezvous_ for the French and Indian hunters, to Green Bay on Lake
Michigan, thence up-stream to Fox River, overland to the Wisconsin, and
down-stream to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the Soo" to
Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-ground. Whichever way he went
his course was mainly up-stream and north: hence the name _Pays d'en
Haut_ vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay between the
Missouri and the MacKenzie River.
* * * * *
The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as
the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the
Missouri to St. Louis, or from the _Pays d'en Haut_ to Montreal, few
escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves
his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the
fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to
exist to the opening of the next hunting season.
It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the
preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,
whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the
green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down
each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great
things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the
proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the
inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the
bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.
It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw--for the Pierre
adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an
Indian wife--design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the
French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay
moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu
of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned
head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made
of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or
musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.
None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to
the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of
the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.
He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that
he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,
while he attends to the trapping that is _gain_ rather than _game_. For
clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,
like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly
deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the
marriage means that he has cast off the last vestige of civilization and
henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.
After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of
Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,
he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,
he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed
out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to
Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of peltries on his rafts and
canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,
two, and three hundred dollars a year.
It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,
with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become _coureur des
bois_ and _voyageur_, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the
Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four
companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the
Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and
the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the
American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers
and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English
Hudson's Bay Company.
* * * * *
Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the
French trapper still saw life through the glamour of _la gloire_ and
_noblesse_, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at
hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his _chansons_ brought
over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a
prayer to Sainte Anne, the _voyageurs'_ saint, just before his canoe
took the plunge.
Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of
figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value
of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded
banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of
wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,
clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between
like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the
_voyageurs_ hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze
like a seagull.
Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and
racing leaps each _voyageur_ knows what to expect. No man asks
questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod
pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the
green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It
vaults--springs--bounds, with a shiver of live waters under the keel and
a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as
wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push
of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the
danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another
lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.
[Illustration: Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids
of Slave River without unloading.]
But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar
becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The
lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;
and the _voyageurs_ are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.
Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to _sauter
les rapides_, as the _voyageurs_ say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps,
some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the crew, got
his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.
One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.
Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a _portage_. Coming back this
way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.
If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high
above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the
water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is
"tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all
dangerous, each _voyageur_ lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps
across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long _portage_ is
measured by the number of pipes the _voyageur_ smokes, each lighting up
meaning a brief rest; and a _portage_ of many "pipes" will be taken at a
running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine
miles is the length of one famous _portage_ opposite the Chaudière Falls
on the Ottawa.
In winter the _voyageur_ becomes _coureur des bois_ to his new masters.
Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests
wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or
rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow
steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick;
sometimes to the _marche donc! marche donc!_ of the driver, with crisp
tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled
to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the
northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a
belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping
his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.
These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.
At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining--the
Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two
important centres of trade in furs which are not imported--St. Paul and
St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the
Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for
the great companies a hundred years ago.
The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and
Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes
seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class
who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor
like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber
ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a
by-word.
And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something
of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer
going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound
from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the
captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as
usual!"
As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those _chansons populaires_, which
have been sung by every generation of _voyageurs_ since Frenchmen came
to America, _A La Claire Fontaine_, a song which the French trappers'
ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle
lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then--was it
possible?--these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were
singing--what? A song of the _Grand Monarque_ which has led armies to
battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern
wilds--
"Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre
Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"
Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was
from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival
traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself
more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in
doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known
outside the range of human criminals.
Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered
fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carcass. He
recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to
bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The
man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of
approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of
man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across
the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He
may even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.
Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager;
so the man sets a circle of traps round the carcass.
The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer
remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been
there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up,
sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and
dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had
been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind
and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.
Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full
stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length
away.
The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on _le sacré carcajou_.
Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes
grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved
himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and
spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer
but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again
he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the
deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.
Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or
wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is
nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine
will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had been scented.
Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on
doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which
characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much
fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the
badger's or the fox's.
Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker
and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to
save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
wounded, weaklings, and laggards--the wolverine has the nose of a fox,
with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for
tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one
trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,
he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,
but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout
of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was
more than he could stand.
In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one
design--destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock
yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the
musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and
buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to
the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached
provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees
and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the
wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,
like a shark behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there
will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the
lodge when the man is at the traps.
But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be
snared--gluttony and curiosity.
After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds that the wolverine has
been making as regular rounds of the traps as he has himself. It is then
a question whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the
hunting-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on James Bay, of
an Indian hunter and his wife who were literally brought to the verge of
starvation by a wolverine that nightly destroyed their traps. The
contest ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred miles from
the haunts of that "bad devil--oh--he--bad devil--carcajou!" Remembering
the curiosity and gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest
steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon or fish, and
places it where the wolverine tracks run. Around this he sets a circle
of his traps, tying them securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In
all likelihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which will cover
traces of the man-smell.
Night passes. In the morning the man comes to his traps. The meat has
been taken. All else is as before. Not a track marks the snow; but in
midwinter meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels for the
hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the stakes has been pulled up
and carried off. That is a sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is
as he thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolverine; but the
cunning beast had pulled with all his strength, snapped the attached
sapling, and escaped. A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned
limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth and hobbles as
hard as three legs will carry him to the hiding of a bush, or better
still, to the frozen surface of a river, hidden by high banks, with
glare ice which will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds
only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper shape, with the
spring opened to release the imprisoned leg.
The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the river to study out
the problem of unclinching the spring.
One more device remains to the man. It is a gun trick. The loaded weapon
is hidden full-cock under leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel
is the bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger. The first
pull will blow the thief's head off.
The trap experience would have frightened any other animals a week's run
from man's tracks; but the wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows
he will find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.
Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have the cord gnawed
through and the bait stolen. A wolverine is not to be easily tricked;
but its gluttony and curiosity bring it within man's reach.
The man watches until he knows the part of the woods where the wolverine
nightly gallops. He then procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough
to balance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off. The gun is
suspended from some dense evergreen, which will hide the weapon. The
bait hangs from the trigger above the wolverine's reach.
Then a curious game begins.
One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks round and round the
tree as if determined to ferret out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.
The next morning the tracks have come to a stand below the meat. If the
wolverine could only get up to the bait, one whiff would tell him
whether the man-smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his
mark is deep printed in the snow.
The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.
The rascal may become so bold in his predatory visits that the man may
be tempted to chance a shot without waiting.
But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of the cord. There comes a
night when the wolverine's curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A
quick clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke blows the
robber's head into space.
The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.
He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a solitary man ever had;
but for the consolation of those whose sympathies are keener for the
animal than the man, it may be said that in the majority of such
contests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 30: Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of
Duluth.]
[Footnote 31: Especially the Château de Ramezay, where great underground
vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New
Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under Château de
Ramezay.]
CHAPTER VII
THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS
If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived
lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a
snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his
quest and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was the great
staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended.
Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for wartime, sinew for bows,
bone for the shaping of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and
saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most
important of all, food that could be kept in any climate for any length
of time and combined the lightest weight with the greatest
nourishment--all these were supplied by the buffalo.
From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and from the Alleghanies to
the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter what wheat is to the farmer.
Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of a
favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass the buffalo could thrive
in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open
ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the
herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.
Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the animal
world, the buffalo had strength to defy all enemies. Of all the
creatures that prey, only the full-grown grisly was a match against the
buffalo; and according to old hunting legends, even the grisly held back
from attacking a beast in the prime of its power and sneaked in the wake
of the roving herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance
of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling some
poor old king worsted in battle and deposed from the leadership of the
herd, or snapping up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of
a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that
made for the persistence of the species. When attacked by a beast of
prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and
trample life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excelling all
foes, wonderful sagacity against attack--these were factors that partly
explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roaming this continent.
Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not
be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in
the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri,
fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between
the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west
and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where
the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places--trails
trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth
of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel. At fording-places on
the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri,
Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo
have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot,
virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.
Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only
running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes
in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the
calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring
hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and
their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who
had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death
ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another
occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm
the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a
howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer
forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a
wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the
fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the
salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring,
dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster
cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths
as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and
ploughed as if for ramparts.
The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has
become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense. From
Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the
Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd
exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen.
What are the facts regarding the buffalo?
In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its
power, there were sent from St. Louis alone in a single year one hundred
thousand robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. The hunter
usually kept an ample supply for his own needs; so that for every robe
bought by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains.
St. Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quantities of robes were
being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million
would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for
three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on
the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night
to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers
related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the
Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove
of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the
Santa Fé trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of
thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward
the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West
Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a herd
stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the
ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo
drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to
seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And
the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.
To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United
States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord
Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the
buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in
the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could
have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time
immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds
only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of
another.
Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;
and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter
who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the
valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless
quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man--who is the true
type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the
odds a hundred to one against himself, and the only advantages over
brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.
Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was
worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the
leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild
stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on
the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd
overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was
fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering
over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw,
and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench.
In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth.
Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror
as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first
intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of
maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their
existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a
rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range
of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for
the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the
point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a
quick rip meant torture and death.
Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to
the rear! Then one of the boldest braces himself, circling and guarding
and wheeling and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head of the
older rival. That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows
a bellowing like the rumbling of distant thunder, each keeping his eye
on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's moves,
like fencers with foils. When one charges, the other wheels to meet the
charge straight in front; and with a crash the horns are locked. It is
then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against
dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury from sheer
amazement at the younger's presumption. His guarded charges become blind
rushes, and he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of piercing
horns. As soon as the rumbling and pawing began, Colonel Bedson used to
send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the
contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does
not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight no more; and if
he is not killed, is likely to be mangled, a deposed king, whipped and
broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he
drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled.
Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow
of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is
off. There is a stampede--myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the
ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking
dust of the far horizon--nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too
weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,
leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.
After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact
as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded
the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a
fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those
vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to
the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through
the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill,
always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down,
scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a
drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would
not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But
he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He
invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last
stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.
But the end is inevitable.
While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear;
and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink
powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he
still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the
rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till
death comes to the victim.
Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd
half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo
leader?
Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains
region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick
death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's
end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were
always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the
sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.
In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On
Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several
hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than
elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in
shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this
appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city
parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,
with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.
* * * * *
Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful
enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the
hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured
two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to
the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of
idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores
had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.
In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June
before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;
fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate
perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds
many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual
hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer--by still-hunting; for
though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except
sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long
as he did not see its cause.
Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper
might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a
moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.
Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he
could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too
slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on
snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A
wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly;
and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which
the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.
The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where
hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a
pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.
But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound
were a sort of _cheval-de-frise_ or corral converging at the inner end,
it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming
of the spring brigades.
When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of
the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field--not the
indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest
buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The greatest of
these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where
hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.
Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort
Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which
barred out Canadian traders.
At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used
to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of
the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field
on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed
away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned
muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.
The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led
north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on
their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them
westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the
captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as
prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had
closed near enough for the wild rush.
At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to
saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led
through the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight
usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces
upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where
the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with
the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,
vague, whitish forms--the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless
as death.
The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd
scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the
grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the
roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the
spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only
emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh
feeding-ground.
Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered
the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with
leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;
in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,
marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop
that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen
water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and
fringed dewlaps dripping--on and on and on--till the tidal wave of life
had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there
in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured
buffalo, freaks in the animal world.
The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a
sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life
one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the
thermometer at forty below--a combination that is sufficient to set the
teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo
spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the
worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,
you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and
fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon
in August.
* * * * *
Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to ride for the herd.
There was the trail to the watering-place. There were the salt-licks and
the wallows and the crushed grass where two young fellows had been
smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength. There were the bones
of the poor old deposed king, picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps,
the lonely outcast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened, a
picture of dumb woe! To such the hunter's shot was a mercy stroke. Or,
most interesting of all signs and surest proof that the herd was near--a
little bundle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat under
hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound, precisely the colour of
its own hide.
Poke it! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens! It is a buffalo calf
left cached by the mother, who has gone to the watering-place or is
pasturing with the drove. Lift it up! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let
it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door-mat. The mother has
told it how to escape the coyotes and wolverines; and the little rascal
is "playing dead." But if you fondle it and warm it--the Indians say,
breathe into its face--it forgets all about the mother's warning and
follows like a pup.
At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws parted from the
cavalcade and all impedimenta remained behind. The best-equipped man was
the man with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest buffalo
from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that galloped swift as wind
in pursuit, that jerked to a stop directly opposite the brute's
shoulders and leaped from the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No
sound came from the hunters till all were within close range. Then the
captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved his hand, or fired a
shot, and the hunters charged.
Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered with the fusillade of
artillery volleys. Bullets fell to earth with the dull ping of an aim
glanced aside by the adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of
the buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of "Ah--oh, ah--oh!" Here
and there French voices screamed "Voilà! Les boeufs! Les boeufs!
Sacré! Tonnerre! Tir--tir--tir--donc! By Gar!" And Missouri traders
called out plain and less picturesque but more forcible English.
Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the herd; but the second
volley with the smell of powder and smoke and men started the stampede.
Then followed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals of any other
kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through
sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to
carry riders in a boundless land!
[Illustration: The buffalo-hunt.
After a contemporary print.]
Riders were unseated and went down in the _mêlée_; horses caught on the
horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown
high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with
dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; unwary
hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo
turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued
and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.
A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a
Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the
time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of
fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the
thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same
gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian
hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give
him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly
unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and
buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and
fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast
covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding--closer and
closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.
"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the
officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they
went over the bluff."
The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals--a
persistent vindictiveness.
In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.
After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was
first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every
buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin,
tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the
Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo
sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.
The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the
buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a
death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along
the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting
stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the
wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a
great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.
"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his
rifle.
The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled
pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they
stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.
The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The
colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened
next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run
till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.
And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a
stone.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MOUNTAINEERS
It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax
of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.
The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from
both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,
and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of
another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the
first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific
in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of
the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a
rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the
American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the
Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew
Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor
sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,
and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the
mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria
captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of
the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew
Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free
trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.
Their captain came.
Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British
fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay
and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's
American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the
Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond
the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his
force came a tremendous accession--all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers
thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the
Hudson's Bay.
If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have
been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.
Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been
jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had
refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard
chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of
nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley
and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger--subsequently
known as the Rocky Mountain traders--swept up the Missouri with brigades
of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning
the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending
line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was
bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field
which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.
The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.
It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It
was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for
supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
_rendezvous_, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole
farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with
plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians
met at the annual camp.
Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be
carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for
canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain cañons with
sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to
interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide
obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a
blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.
Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,
noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting
especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is
black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and
where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one
for the trapper to shun.
One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers
found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the
lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty
years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before
the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the
Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first
two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile
Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of
the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost
to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would
not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.
* * * * *
Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of
trapping.
Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"
or _Pays d'en Haut_ as the French called it. The French trappers, for
the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to
the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the
smug, indolent, laughing, chattering _voyageur_. The great silences of a
life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man
had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and
elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.
In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,
carrying supplies enough for the season in a canoe, and drifting
down-stream with a canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the
mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies
had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which
Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to
accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to
the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack
rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such
party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen
to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.
That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last
century.
* * * * *
All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and
Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like
foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one
mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass
much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all
the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the
fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,
and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and
the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till
the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music--the voice of many
waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool
heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began
retracing their way from valley to valley, gathering the furs cached
during the winter hunt.
Then the cavalcade set out for the _rendezvous_: grizzled men in
tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,
men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;
long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a
zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs
barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened
bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half
a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for
mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to
right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the
collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after
the bolters with her ears laid flat.
Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling
torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that
stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky
green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in
summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced
masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of
that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that
little indurated line running up the side of the cliff--just a
displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that
winds in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and
mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?
"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says
the mountaineer.
Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been
enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that
track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has
the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above
tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long
grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.
Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where
a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is
a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.
Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at
such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper
saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when
she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up
the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as
pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it
up, out of very sympathy went away.
Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but
as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead"--the thing jumped from
side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and
away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men
hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."
Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like
stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are
tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every
climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at
every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,
or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.
Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching
themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the
mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as
wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden
chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading
ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--!
Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous
enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often
followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like
banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?
A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain
by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line
rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the
inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand
feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was
nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail
from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen
to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to
regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.
But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing
as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no
larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer
looked back over his shoulder.
"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the
trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his
words.
"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?"
"Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw
bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the
sound."
"And when no sound comes back?"
"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!
People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the
sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you
chills!"
So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon
riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the
lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on
men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.
If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the
trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by
the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar
prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the
hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle
lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.
Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley
the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of
bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
tinkling.
The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They
seldom reached their _rendezvous_ before July or August. Three months
travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a
day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an
hour--a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would
make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.
Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced
together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious
little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream
often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the
unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding
mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a
trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them afloat, and
overlaying with moss to save the horses' feet.
But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of
enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable
_cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush
higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg
where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses
could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to
force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,
there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.
And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the
bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men
leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company
was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,
and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders
was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant
of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for
the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that
created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because
produced by purely American conditions.
Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to
Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the
Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came
the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable
valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for
transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white
hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or
Oriental fair.
French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo
down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the
Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia
to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America
from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General
Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from
Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous
gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or
Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediæval lords--found
themselves hobnobbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indian sachems,
Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.
Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and
daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress
occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.
The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction
to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the
partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps,
planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh
information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all
sections of the mountains for the different brigades.
This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty
to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On
the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the
Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were
Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the
Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew
the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of
life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the
Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as
successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.
Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips
had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in
friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than
rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger
who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept
over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had
made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the
newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when
hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.
When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the
region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on
the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the
valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder
River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to
trap all through the valley.
But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily
foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in
the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.
beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be
misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the
hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the
mountaineers to their secret retreats.
Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.
Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,
Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the
Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with
their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River
Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping
from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the
_rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle
the spies by trapping from west to east.
Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing
southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom
they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward
on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in
time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.
Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at
Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been
notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;
possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.
Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers
Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals
could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the
mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer
dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten
the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,
explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under
him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the _rendezvous_.
But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain passes like cats at
a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he
knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to
the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.
The Indians still guarded the passes. They must have come upon him at a
night camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the
defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a
single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged
declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got
across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of
the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless--for his hat had
been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the
rocks--and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also
bound for the _rendezvous_.
The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.
The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's
Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry
between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain
men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and
not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers
for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great
companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter
confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur
Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly
Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got
away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American
Company.
What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected
the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what
was done.
Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked
body of horsemen northward from Pierre's Hole.
If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their
hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the
Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up
somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay[34] had been so often
"relieved" of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west,
their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went
north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.
Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper
swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the
Three Forks of the Missouri.
There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region; and Blackfeet hated
Vanderburgh with deadly venom because he had once defeated them and
slain a great warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the
fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.
But if the Rocky Mountain men could go unscathed among the Blackfeet,
why, so could the American Fur Company!
And Vanderburgh and Drips went!
Rival traders might not commit murder. That led to the fearful ruin of
the lawsuits that overtook Nor' Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only
fifteen years before.
But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet hated Henry Vanderburgh!
Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long file of pack-horses had
passed, fresh-chopped logs to make a way through blockades of fallen
pine, the green moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at
cloudline broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed that way,
grazed bark where the pack-saddle had brushed a tree-trunk, muddy
hoof-marks where the young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,
scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged boot had
stepped--all these told which way Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led their
brigade.
Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail! Here the ashes of a
camp-fire! There a pile of rock placed a deal too carefully for nature's
work--the cached furs of the fleeing rivals! Besides, what with cañon
and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by which a cavalcade can pass
through mountains that the simplest novice could have trailed
Fitzpatrick and Bridger.
Doubtless between the middle of August when Vanderburgh and Drips set
out on the chase and the middle of September when they ran down the
fugitives the American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at their own
cleverness.
They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in the valley of the
Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds with game enough for two lines of
traps, which Vanderburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight by
forced marches this time! The mountaineers sat still for almost a week.
Then they casually moved down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.
The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the mountaineers leaving a
trifle too soon? Should the Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh
remained, moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his traps
along the Madison. Drips followed the mountaineers.
Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground probably suggested to
Drips that even an animal will lead off on a false scent to draw the
enemy away from the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the
Jefferson.
Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once turned back too, up the
farthest valley, the Gallatin, then on the way to the first
hunting-ground westward over a divide to the Madison, where--ill
luck!--they again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!
How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may guess!
Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers!
Should Vanderburgh stay or follow? Certainly the enemy had been bound
back for the good hunting-grounds when they had turned to retrace their
way up the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Vanderburgh
would forestall the move. He crossed over to the valley where he had
first found them.
Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunting-grounds, a dead
buffalo, from which the hunters had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh! If
Vanderburgh laughed, his laugh was short; for there were signs that the
buffalo had been slain by an Indian.
The trappers refused to hunt where there were Blackfeet about.
Vanderburgh refused to believe there was any danger of Blackfeet.
Calling for volunteers, he rode forward with six men.
First they found a fire. The marauders must be very near. Then a dead
buffalo was seen, then fresh tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians.
But buffalo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There could not be
many Indians.
Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vanderburgh pushed on, entered
a heavily wooded gulch, paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent,
descried nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, followed by the
six volunteers.
Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hundred hostiles sprang
from ambush. Vanderburgh's horse went down. Three others cleared the
ditch at a bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aiming his
gun, and coolly calling out: "Don't run! Don't run!" Two men sent their
horses back over the ditch to his call, a third was thrown to be slain
on the spot, and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest Indian,
when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted deadly vengeance for the
warrior Vanderburgh had slain years before.
Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the waiting brigade. Refuge
was taken in the woods, where sentinels kept guard all night. The next
morning, with scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously
towards some of their caches. A second night was passed behind barriers
of logs; and the third day a band of friendly Indians was encountered,
who were sent to bury the dead.
The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had been torn to pieces and his
bones thrown into the river.
So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.
As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares;
for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet,
the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows
from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade,
which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own
trickery.
Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the
Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he
possessed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 32: This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were
scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew
Henry's party--had all been such wide-ranging foresters.]
[Footnote 33: Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this
year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fé.]
[Footnote 34: By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from
the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.
But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs,
which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.]
PART II
CHAPTER IX
THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER
All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting
for the signs.
And now the signs had come.
Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy
with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward,
leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant
pools like layers of mica.
Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a
new presence--the trapper.
Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress
him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.
Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
of winter woods.
This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
training does not stop here.
When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means
that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.
And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.
One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of
its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
book of forest-lore.
It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man,
that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the
forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and
the Upper Missouri.
His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, splits and seams,
where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must be filled with rosin and
pitch. A light sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to haul
the canoe over still water, where the ice first forms. Sled, provisions,
blanket, and fish-net are put in the canoe, not forgetting the most
important part of his kit--the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
point to point all winter, travelling light and taking nothing but
absolute necessaries, or builds a central lodge, where he leaves full
store and radiates out to the hunting-grounds, at least four things must
be in his tool-bag: a woodman's axe; a gimlet to bore holes in his
snow-shoe frame; a crooked knife--not the sheathed dagger of fiction,
but a blade crooked hook-shape, somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one
end--to smooth without splintering, as a carpenter's plane; and a small
chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden contrivances that
stretch the pelts.
If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack, the hunter may take
more tools; but the old trapper prefers to travel light. Fire-arms,
ammunition, a common hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
a large sheet of canvas, locally known as _abuckwan_, for a shed tent,
complete the trapper's equipment. His dog is not part of the equipment:
it is fellow-hunter and companion.
From the moose must come the heavy filling for the snow-shoes; but the
snow-shoes will not be needed for a month, and there is no haste about
shooting an unfound moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and beaver
are waiting to be trapped. With the dog showing his wisdom by sitting
motionless as an Indian bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and
pushes out.
Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-place, where traps would
be effective, the man paddles silently on. If he travels after
nightfall, the chances are his craft will steal unawares close to a
black head above a swimming body. With both wind and current meeting the
canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches the scent of the sharp-nosed
swimmer. Otter or beaver, it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over
bow or stern--over his master's shoulder if necessary, but never
sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset--the dog brings back his
quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
bales.
While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.
Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows--knows, perhaps,
from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
very act.
All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
found?
Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
self-protection. When cold weather comes the beaver is fair game to the
trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
strength, a gun, and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes are
not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that familiarity with the
woods to enable him to pursue, which the beaver has to enable it to
escape. And he can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies off
the scent, the way the beaver does.
Now, as he paddles along the network of streams which interlace Northern
forests, he will hardly be likely to stumble on the beaver-dam of last
summer. Beavers do not build their houses, where passers-by will stumble
upon them. But all the streams have been swollen by fall rains; and the
trapper notices the markings on every chip and pole floating down the
full current. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. He knows that the
rains have floated it over the beaver-dam. Beavers never cut below their
houses, but always above, so that the current will carry the poles
down-stream to the dam.
Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guardedly advances within
sight of the dam. If any old beaver sentinel be swimming about, he
quickly scents the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow of
his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs danger to the whole
community. He swims with his webbed hind feet, the little fore paws
being used as carriers or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the
faintest bit in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted question.
The only definitely ascertained function of that bat-shaped appendage is
to telegraph danger to comrades. The beaver neither carries things on
his tail, nor plasters houses with it; for the simple reason that the
joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only slight sidelong
wigglings and a forward sweep between his hind legs, as if he might use
it as a tray for food while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his
fore paws.
Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the trapper may proceed in
different ways. He may, after the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake
the stream across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lowering the
water, break the conical crowns of the houses on the south side, which
is thinnest, and slaughter the beavers indiscriminately as they rush
out. But such hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some
years. In the confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind
clubbing of heads there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor
and in prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed; and
if one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under water
or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
from that country. Only the degenerate white man practises bad hunting.
The skilled hunter has other methods.
If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the beavers
have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent pools. The
trapper gets one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and drown him, he
places the trap a few inches under water at the end of a runway or in
one of the channels. He then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a
substance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all traces of the
man-smell. For it the beavers have a curious infatuation, licking
everything touched by it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into
a crazy stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own
foot-tracks.
Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the bank, he
may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the beaver is still
taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
and bark--usually covered with snow--slanting to the ground on one side,
the ends either posts or logs, and the front an opening between two logs
wide enough to admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a
rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the front log, is the
bait. All traces of the hunter are smeared over with the elusive
castoreum. One tug at the bait usually brings the front log crashing
down across the animal's back, killing it instantly.
But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly satisfactory. When
the poor beaver comes sniffing along the castoreum trail to the
steel-trap and on the first splash into the water feels a pair of iron
jaws close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the shelter of
his house. The log plunges after him, holding him down and back till he
drowns; and his whereabouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.
But several chances are in the beaver's favour. With the castoreum
licks, which tell them of some other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate
or lost cub, they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of the
trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap, they may retreat back up
the bank and amputate the imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a
mutilated paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver may have
gone entirely inside the snare before the front log falls; and an animal
whose teeth saw through logs eighteen inches in diameter in less than
half an hour can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap. Other
things are against the hunter. A wolverine may arrive on the scene
before the trapper and eat the finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper
may discover that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for three or four years.
* * * * *
All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the ice is thick enough
for the trapper to cut trenches. Then he returns with a woodman's axe
and his dog. By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes have
been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives stakes to prevent the
beaver taking refuge in the shore vaults. The runways and channels,
where the beaver have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
over; but the man and his dog will presently find them.
The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough not to be frozen solid,
and shallow enough for it to make a mud foundation for the house without
too much work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would carry away
any house the beaver could build. A trench across the upper stream or
stakes through the ice prevent escape that way.
The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling water warns the
terrified colony that an enemy is near. It may be their greatest foe,
the wolverine, whose claws will rip through the frost-hard wall as
easily as a bear delves for gophers; but their land enemies cannot
pursue them into water; so the panic-stricken family--the old parents,
wise from many such alarms; the young three-year-olds, who were to go
out and rear families for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old
cubbies, big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and the baby
kittens, just able to forage for themselves and know the soft alder rind
from the tough old bark unpalatable as mud--pop pell-mell from the high
platform of their houses into the water. The water is still falling.
They will presently be high and dry. No use trying to escape up-stream.
They see that in the first minute's wild scurry through the shallows.
Besides, what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there by any
beaver; for there is no bark on. If they only had time now they might
cut a passage through; but no--this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has
ditched the ice across.
They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from above--a low,
exultant, devilish whining. The man has left his dog on guard above the
dam. At that the little beavers--always trembling, timid fellows--tumble
over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way of the flowing water
below the dam. But there a new terror assails them. A shadow is above
the ice, a wraith of destruction--the figure of a man standing at the
dam with his axe and club--waiting.
Where to go now? They can't find their bank shelters, for the man has
staked them up. The little fellows lose their presence of mind and their
heads and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up the remaining
open runway. It is a _cul-de-sac_. But what does that matter? They run
almost to the end. They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes
away. Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on. He will come
to them afterward.
The old beavers make no such mistake. They have tried the hollow-log
trick with an enemy pursuing them to the blind end, and have escaped
only because some other beaver was eaten.
The old ones know that water alone is safety.
That is the first and last law of beaver life. They, too, see that
phantom destroyer above the ice; but a dash past is the last chance. How
many of the beaver escape past the cut in the dam to the water below,
depends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But certainly, for the
most, one blow is the end; and that one blow is less cruel to them than
the ravages of the wolf or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat
before they kill.
A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above the dam. Where is the
runway in which the others are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly,
but begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whimper. The man
sees that the dog is on the trail of sagging snow, and the sag betrays
ice settling down where a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole
across the river end of the runway and drives down stakes. The young
beavers are now prisoners.
The human mind can't help wondering why the foolish youngsters didn't
crouch below the ice above the dam and lie there in safe hiding till the
monster went away. This may be done by the hermit beavers--fellows who
have lost their mates and go through life inconsolable; or sick
creatures, infested by parasites and turned off to house in the river
holes; or fat, selfish ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a
family. Whatever these solitaries are--naturalists and hunters
differ--they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor little beavers
rush right into the jaws of death. Why do they? For the same reason
probably, if they could answer, that people trample each other to death
when there is an alarm in a crowd.
* * * * *
They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing at all about their hides
being valued all the way from fifty cents to three dollars, according to
the quality; nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm in
the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets the value for mink,
otter, marten, bear, and all other skins, one pound of tobacco, one
kettle, five pounds of shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth;
nothing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty of their
hides for a scrap of iron and a great company sending one hundred
thousand beaver-skins in a single year to make hats and cloaks for the
courtiers of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding the
killing of beaver till their number increase.
All the little beaver remembers is that it opened its eyes to daylight
in the time of soft, green grasses; and that as soon as it got strong
enough on a milk diet to travel, the mother led the whole family of
kittens--usually three or four--down the slanting doorway of their dim
house for a swim; and that she taught them how to nibble the dainty,
green shrubs along the bank; and then the entire colony went for the
most glorious, pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass like a
goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water all day, diving for the
roots of the lily-pads. But the old mother is always on guard, for the
wolves and bears are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their two-year-old
brothers; and the wonderful thing is--if a tooth breaks, it grows into
perfect shape inside of a week.
By August the little fellows are great swimmers, and the colony begins
the descent of the stream for their winter home. If unmolested, the old
dam is chosen; but if the hated man-smell is there, new waterways are
sought. Burrows and washes and channels and retreats are cleaned out.
Trees are cut and a great supply of branches laid up for winter store
near the lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just before the
frost they begin building or repairing the dam. Each night's frost
hardens the plastered clay till the conical wattled roof--never more
than two feet thick--will support the weight of a moose.
All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and not the tail. This has
been finally determined by observing the Marquis of Bute's colony of
beavers. If the family--the old parents and three seasons' offspring--be
too large for the house, new chambers are added. In height the house is
seldom more than five feet from the base, and the width varies. In
building a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay, mixing
this with stones and sticks for the walls, and hollowing out the dome as
it rises, like a coffer-dam, except that man pumps out water and the
beaver scoops out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer of clay
till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have one door or two is
disputed; but the door is always at the end of a sloping incline away
from the land side, with a shelf running round above, which serves as
the living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below water, two
doors instead of one, platforms like an oven instead of a shelf, are
probably explained by the continual abrasion of the current. By the time
the ice forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the winter,
only coming out to feed on their winter stores and get an airing.
But this terrible thing has happened; and the young beavers huddle
together under the ice of the canal, bleating with the cry of a child.
They are afraid to run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with a glee that is
fiendish to the little beavers. Then a gust of cold air comes from the
rear and a pole prods forward.
The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding beavers are, and with
little terrified yelps they scuttle to the very end of the runway. By
this time the dog is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent by scratching with
a zeal that would burrow to the middle of earth.
The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind end of the channel,
and cuts a hole above the prison of the beaver. He puts down his arm.
One by one they are dragged out by the tail; and that finishes the
little beaver--sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rabbits of
bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities of man. Only, this
death is swifter and less painful. A prolonged death-struggle with the
beaver would probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very often
the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If the dog attempts to
capture the frightened runaways by catching at the conspicuous appendage
to the rear, that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
tail, while the beaver runs off with two.
Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kittens which they take
home as pets. When young they are as easily domesticated as a cat, and
become a nuisance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to the
hunter, comes what the Indians call "the-sickness-of-long-thinking," the
gipsy yearning for the wilds. Then extraordinary things happen. The
beaver are apt to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trapper
of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers became so restless, he
feared their escape and put them in cages. They bit their way out with
absurd ease.
He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole through in a night.
Thinking to get wire caging, he took them into his lodge, and they
seemed contented enough while he was about; but one morning he wakened
to find a hole eaten through the door, and the entire round of
birch-bark, which he had staked out ready for the gunwales and ribbing
of his canoe--bark for which he had travelled forty miles--chewed into
shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream, which is their habit in
spring.
CHAPTER X
THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS
It is a grim joke of the animal world that the lazy moose is the moose
that gives wings to the feet of the pursuer. When snow comes the trapper
must have snow-shoes and moccasins. For both, moose supplies the best
material.
Bees have their drones, beaver their hermits, and moose a ladified
epicure who draws off from the feeding-yards of the common herd, picks
out the sweetest browse of the forest, and gorges herself till fat as a
gouty voluptuary. While getting the filling for his snow-shoes, the
trapper also stocks his larder; and if he can find a spinster moose, he
will have something better than shredded venison and more delicately
flavoured than finest teal.
Sledding his canoe across shallow lakelets, now frozen like rock, still
paddling where there is open way, the trapper continues to guide his
course up the waterways. Big game, he knows, comes out to drink at
sunrise and sunset; and nearly all the small game frequents the banks of
streams either to fish or to prey on the fisher.
Each night he sleeps in the open with his dog on guard; or else puts up
the cotton tepee, the dog curling outside the tent flap, one ear awake.
And each night a net is set for the white-fish that are to supply
breakfast, feed the dog, and provide heads for the traps placed among
rocks in mid-stream, or along banks where dainty footprints were in the
morning's hoar-frost. Brook trout can still be got in the pools below
waterfalls; but the trapper seldom takes time now to use the line,
depending on his gun and fish-net.
During the Indian's white-fish month--the white man's November--the
weather has become colder and colder; but the trapper never indulges in
the big log fire that delights the heart of the amateur hunter. That
would drive game a week's tracking from his course. Unless he wants to
frighten away nocturnal prowlers, a little, chip fire, such as the
fishermen of the Banks use in their dories, is all the trapper allows
himself.
First snow silences the rustling leaves. First frost quiets the flow of
waters. Except for the occasional splitting of a sap-frozen tree, or the
far howl of a wolf-pack, there is the stillness of death. And of all
quiet things in the quiet forest, the trapper is the quietest.
As winter closes in the ice-skim of the large lakes cuts the bark canoe
like a knife. The canoe is abandoned for snow-shoes and the cotton tepee
for more substantial shelter.
If the trapper is a white man he now builds a lodge near the best
hunting-ground he has found. Around this he sets a wide circle of traps
at such distances their circuit requires an entire day, and leads the
trapper out in one direction and back in another, without retracing the
way. Sometimes such lodges run from valley to valley. Each cabin is
stocked; and the hunter sleeps where night overtakes him. But this plan
needs two men; for if the traps are not closely watched, the wolverine
will rifle away a priceless fox as readily as he eats a worthless
musk-rat. The stone fire-place stands at one end. Moss, clay, and snow
chink up the logs. Parchment across a hole serves as window. Poles and
brush make the roof, or perhaps the remains of the cotton tent stretched
at a steep angle to slide off the accumulating weight of snow.
But if the trapper is an Indian, or the white man has a messenger to
carry the pelts marked with his name to a friendly trading-post, he may
not build a lodge; but move from hunt to hunt as the game changes
feeding-ground. In this case he uses the _abuckwan_--canvas--for a shed
tent, with one side sloping to the ground, banked by brush and snow, the
other facing the fire, both tent and fire on such a slope that the smoke
drifts out while the heat reflects in. Pine and balsam boughs, with the
wood end pointing out like sheaves in a stook, the foliage converging to
a soft centre, form the trapper's bed.
The snow is now too deep to travel without snow-shoes. The frames for
these the trapper makes of ash, birch, or best of all, the
_mackikwatick_--tamarack--curving the easily bent green wood up at one
end, canoe shape, and smoothing the barked wood at the bend, like a
sleigh runner, by means of the awkward _couteau croche_, as the French
hunter calls his crooked knife.
In style, the snow-shoe varies with the hunting-ground. On forested,
rocky, hummocky land, the shoe is short to permit short turns without
entanglement. Oval and broad, rather than long and slim, it makes up in
width what it lacks in length to support the hunter's weight above the
snow. And the toe curve is slight; for speed is impossible on bad
ground. To save the instep from jars, the slip noose may be padded like
a cowboy's stirrup.
On the prairie, where the snowy reaches are unbroken as air, snow-shoes
are wings to the hunter's heels. They are long, and curved, and narrow,
and smooth enough on the runners for the hunter to sit on their rear
ends and coast downhill as on a toboggan. If a snag is struck midway,
the racquets may bounce safely over and glissade to the bottom; or the
toe may catch, heels fly over head, and the hunter land with his feet
noosed in frames sticking upright higher than his neck.
Any trapper can read the story of a hunt from snow-shoes. Bound and
short: east of the Great Lakes. Slim and long: from the prairie. Padding
for the instep: either rock ground or long runs. Filling of hide strips
with broad enough interspaces for a small foot to slip through: from the
wet, heavily packed, snow region of the Atlantic coast, for trapping
only, never the chase, small game, not large. Lace ties, instead of a
noose to hold the foot: the amateur hunter. _Atibisc_, a fine filling
taken from deer or caribou for the heel and toe; with _askimoneiab_,
heavy, closely interlaced, membraneous filling from the moose across the
centre to bear the brunt of wear; long enough for speed, short enough to
turn short: the trapper knows he is looking at the snow-shoe of the
craftsman. This is the sort he must have for himself.
The first thing, then--a moose for the heavy filling; preferably a
spinster moose; for she is too lazy to run from a hunter who is not yet
a Mercury; and she will furnish him with a banquet fit for kings.
* * * * *
Neither moose call nor birch horn, of which wonders are told, will avail
now. The mating season is well past. Even if an old moose responded to
the call, the chances are his flesh would be unfit for food. It would be
a wasted kill, contrary to the principles of the true trapper.
Every animal has a sign language as plain as print. The trapper has
hardly entered the forest before he begins to read this language. Broad
hoof-marks are on the muskeg--quaking bog, covered with moss--over which
the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where a horse would sink to the
saddle. Park-like glades at the heads of streams, where the moose have
spent the summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water holes to get
rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and stripped twigs and rubbed
bark.
Coming suddenly on a grove of quaking aspens, a saucy jay has fluttered
up with a noisy call--an alarm note; and something is bounding off to
hiding in a thicket on the far side of the grove. The _wis-kat-jan_, or
whisky jack, as the white men call it, who always hangs about the moose
herds, has seen the trapper and sounded the alarm.
In August, when the great, palmated horns, which budded out on the male
in July, are yet in the velvet, the trapper finds scraps of furry hair
sticking to young saplings. The vain moose has been polishing his
antlers, preparatory to mating. Later, there is a great whacking of
horns among the branches. The moose, spoiling for a fight, in moose
language is challenging his rivals to battle. Wood-choppers have been
interrupted by the apparition of a huge, palmated head through a
thicket. Mistaking the axe for his rival's defiance, the moose arrives
on the scene in a mood of blind rage that sends the chopper up a tree,
or back to the shanty for his rifle.
But the trapper allows these opportunities to pass. He is not ready for
his moose until winter compels the abandoning of the canoe. Then the
moose herds are yarding up in some sheltered feeding-ground.
It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard. There is the
tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There are the cast-off antlers
after the battles have been fought--the female moose being without horns
and entirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for protection.
There is the stripped, overhead twig, where a moose has reared on hind
legs and nibbled a branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then held down with his
feet while he browsed. This and more sign language of the woods--too
fine for the language of man--lead the trapper close on the haunts of a
moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary moose. He is keen for the
solitary track of a haughty spinster. And he probably comes on the print
when he has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one of the herd
below the hill, where he hides. He knows the trail is that of a
spinster. It is unusually heavy; and she is always fat. It drags
clumsily over the snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she loiters to feed
and dawdle out of pure indolence.
And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot scent feels. He may win
his prize with the ease of putting out his hand and taking it--sighting
his rifle and touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a week and come back
empty at his cartridge-belt, empty below his cartridge-belt, empty of
hand, and full, full of rage at himself, though his words curse the
moose. He may win his prize in one of two ways: (1) by running the game
to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or by a still hunt.
The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the man than the moose. Even
a fat spinster can outdistance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his
perseverance lasts longer than her strength--for though a moose swings
out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily tired--the exhausted
moose is a moose at bay; and a moose at bay rears on her hind legs and
does defter things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than an
exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a cleft hoof means
something sharply split, wherever that spreading hoof lands. And if the
something wriggles on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon it
with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she goes on her way
with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair bristling.
The contest was even and the moose won.
Apart from the hazard, there is a barbarism about this straightaway
chase, which repels the trapper. It usually succeeds by bogging the
moose in crusted snow, or a waterhole--and then, Indian fashion, a
slaughter; and no trapper kills for the sake of killing, for the simple
practical reason that his own life depends on the preservation of game.
A slight snowfall and the wind in his face are ideal conditions for a
still hunt. One conceals him. The other carries the man-smell from the
game.
Which way does the newly-discovered footprint run? More flakes are in
one hole than the other. He follows the trail till he has an idea of the
direction the moose is taking; for the moose runs straightaway, not
circling and doubling back on cold tracks like the deer, but marching
direct to the objective point, where it turns, circles slightly--a loop
at the end of a line--and lies down a little off the trail. When the
pursuer, following the cold scent, runs past, the moose gets wind and is
off in the opposite direction like a vanishing streak.
Having ascertained the lie of the land, the trapper leaves the line of
direct trail and follows in a circling detour. Here, he finds the print
fresher, not an hour old. The moose had stopped to browse and the
markings are moist on a twig. The trapper leaves the trail, advancing
always by a detour to leeward. He is sure, now, that it is a spinster.
If it had been any other, the moose would not have been alone. The rest
would be tracking into the leader's steps; and by the fresh trail he
knows for a certainty there is only one. But his very nearness increases
the risk. The wind may shift. The snowfall is thinning. This time, when
he comes back to the trail, it is fresher still. The hunter now gets his
rifle ready. He dare not put his foot down without testing the snow,
lest a twig snap. He parts a way through the brush with his hand and
replaces every branch. And when next he comes back to the line of the
moose's travel, there is no trail. This is what he expected. He takes
off his coat; his leggings, if they are loose enough to rub with a
leathery swish; his musk-rat fur cap, if it has any conspicuous colour;
his boots, if they are noisy and given to crunching. If only he aim
true, he will have moccasins soon enough. Leaving all impedimenta, he
follows back on his own steps to the place where he last saw the trail.
Perhaps the saucy jay cries with a shrill, scolding shriek that sends
cold shivers down the trapper's spine. He wishes he could get his hands
on its wretched little neck; and turning himself to a statue, he stands
stone-still till the troublesome bird settles down. Then he goes on.
Here is the moose trail!
He dare not follow direct. That would lead past her hiding-place and she
would bolt. He resorts to artifice; but, for that matter, so has the
moose resorted to artifice. The trapper, too, circles forward, cutting
the moose's magic guard with transverse zigzags. But he no longer walks.
He crouches, or creeps, or glides noiselessly from shelter to shelter,
very much the way a cat advances on an unwary mouse. He sinks to his
knees and feels forward for snow-pads every pace. Then he is on
all-fours, still circling. His detour has narrowed and narrowed till he
knows she must be in that aspen thicket. The brush is sparser. She has
chosen her resting-ground wisely. The man falls forward on his face,
closing in, closing in, wiggling and watching till--he makes a horrible
discovery. That jay is perched on the topmost bough of the grove; and
the man has caught a glimpse of something buff-coloured behind the
aspens. It may be a moose, or only a log. The untried hunter would fire.
Not so the trapper. Hap-hazard aim means fighting a wounded moose, or
letting the creature drag its agony off to inaccessible haunts. The man
worms his way round the thicket, sighting the game with the noiseless
circling of a hawk before the drop. An ear blinks. But at that instant
the jay perks his head to one side with a curious look at this strange
object on the ground. In another second it will be off with a call and
the moose up.
His rifle is aimed!
A blinding swish of aspen leaves and snow and smoke! The jay is off with
a noisy whistle. And the trapper has leather for moccasins, and heavy
filling for his snow-shoes, and meat for his larder.
* * * * *
But he must still get the fine filling for heel and toe; and this comes
from caribou or deer. The deer, he will still hunt as he has still
hunted the moose, with this difference: that the deer runs in circles,
jumping back in his own tracks leaving the hunter to follow a cold
scent, while it, by a sheer bound--five--eight--twenty feet off at a new
angle, makes for the hiding of dense woods. No one but a barbarian would
attempt to run down a caribou; for it can only be done by the shameless
trick of snaring in crusted snow, or intercepting while swimming, and
then--butchery.
The caribou doesn't run. It doesn't bound. It floats away into space.
One moment a sandy-coloured form, with black nose, black feet, and a
glory of white statuary above its head, is seen against the far reaches
of snow. The next, the form has shrunk--and shrunk--and shrunk, antlers
laid back against its neck, till there is a vanishing speck on the
horizon. The caribou has not been standing at all. It has skimmed out of
sight; and if there is any clear ice across the marshes, it literally
glides beyond vision from very speed. But, provided no man-smell crosses
its course, the caribou is vulnerable in its habits. Morning and
evening, it comes back to the same watering-place; and it returns to the
same bed for the night. If the trapper can conceal himself without
crossing its trail, he easily obtains the fine filling for his
snow-shoes.
* * * * *
Moccasins must now be made.
The trapper shears off the coarse hair with a sharp knife. The hide is
soaked; and a blunter blade tears away the remaining hairs till the skin
is white and clean. The flesh side is similarly cleaned and the skin
rubbed with all the soap and grease it will absorb. A process of beating
follows till the hide is limber. Carelessness at this stage makes
buckskin soak up water like a sponge and dry to a shapeless board. The
skin must be stretched and pulled till it will stretch no more. Frost
helps the tanning, drying all moisture out; and the skin becomes as soft
as down, without a crease. The smoke of punk from a rotten tree gives
the dark yellow colour to the hide and prevents hardening. The skin is
now ready for the needle; and all odd bits are hoarded away.
Equipped with moccasins and snow-shoes, the trapper is now the winged
messenger of the tragic fates to the forest world.
CHAPTER XI
THE INDIAN TRAPPER
It is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.
In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with
a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the
gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists
of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like
clouds of steam, will have cleared; and there will be nothing from
sky-line to sky-line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.
The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid-day. Then the sun
casts no man-shadow to scare game from his snares. Black is the flag of
betrayal in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye, glistening
on the snow like a black marble, that the trapper detects the white
hare; and a jet tail-tip streaking over the white wastes in dots and
dashes tells him the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts and diving
below the snow with the forward wriggling of a snake under cover. But
the moving man-shadow is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's
eye or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out in the gray
darkness of morning and must reach his hunting-grounds before high
noon.
With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts in swift, coasting
strides, he swings out in that easy, ambling, Indian trot, which gives
never a jar to the runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
beneath his tread.
The old musket, which he got in trade from the fur post, is over his
shoulder, or swinging lightly in one hand. A hunter's knife and
short-handled woodman's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy musk-rat gantlets are
attached to the cord about his neck; so without losing either he can
fight bare-handed, free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And
somewhere, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
_skipertogan_--a skin bag with amulet against evil, matches, touchwood,
and a scrap of pemmican. As he grows hot, he throws back his hood,
running bareheaded and loose about the chest.
Each breath clouds to frost against his face till hair and brows and
lashes are fringed with frozen moisture. The white man would hugger his
face up with scarf and collar the more for this; but the Indian knows
better. Suddenly chilled breath would soak scarf and collar wet to his
skin; and his face would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the keenest cold; so he
loosens his coat and runs the faster.
As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in the gray haze. Pine
groves emerge from the dark, wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and
domes and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spreading larch
boughs. Evergreens are edged with white. Naked trees stand like limned
statuary with an antlered crest etched against the white glare. The
snow stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that seem to
heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.
When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
the Northern Lights. He does not _see_ these things with the gabbling
exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist like a
sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.
Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
has seen; though he has not understood.
But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
of the Great Lakes, in the cañons of the Rockies, and across that
northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay regions that the
Indian trapper will find his last hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes
the white man, and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring
before Columbus opened the doors of the New World to the hordes of the
Old; and here Indian trappers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When
there is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed; but that day is far
distant for the Hudson Bay region.
* * * * *
The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is midwinter; and by
December there is a curious lull in the hunting. All the streams are
frozen like rock; but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some foolish fish
always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice shuts them in. Then a strange
thing is seen--a kettle of living fish; fish gasping and panting in
ice-hemmed water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost freezes
another layer to the ice walls of their prison. The banks of such a pond
hole are haunted by the otter and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when
the pond is exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank and
forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.
The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and fastidious
choosing--for in trapper vernacular the bear takes a long time to please
himself--bruin found an upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes and went to sleep
under a snow blanket of gathering depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too,
have gone off to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by a
wolf-pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to move till this
ground is eaten over. Nor are many beaver seen now. They have long since
snuggled into their warm houses, where they will stay till their winter
store is all used; and their houses are now hidden under great depths of
deepening snow. But the fox and the hare and the ermine are at run; and
as long as they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx and
the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from the scarcity of other
game and greedy as spring crows.
That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's heels. The pelt of a
coyote--or prairie wolf--would scarcely be worth the taking. Even the
big, gray timber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot, except
for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic wolf would bring better
price. The enormous black or brown arctic wolf would be more valuable;
but the value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all these
worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps as keenly as the
trapper does; and would eat up a silver fox, that would be the fortune
of any hunter.
The Indian comes to the brush where he has set his rabbit snares across
a runway. His dog sniffs the ground, whining. The crust of the snow is
broken by a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit fur is
fluffed about. The game has been rifled away. The Indian notices several
things. The rabbit has been devoured on the spot. That is unlike the
wolverine. He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a guzzle
in his own lair. The footprints have the appearance of having been
brushed over; so the thief had a bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There
is no trail away from the snare. The marauder has come with a long leap
and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his dog make a circuit of the
snare till they come on the trail of the intruder; and its size tells
the Indian whether his enemy be fox or wolf.
He sets no more snares across that runway, for the rabbits have had
their alarm. Going through the brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a
new snare.
Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the drifts to the next trap. It
is a deadfall. Nothing is in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left
undisturbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to atoms from very
wickedness, chewed the bait in two, and spat it out lest there should be
poison. The fox would have gone in and had his back broken by the front
log. And there is the same brush work over the trampled snow, as if the
visitor had tried to sweep out his own trail; and the same long leap
away, clearing obstruction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
scent. This time the Indian makes two or three circuits; but the snow is
so crusted it is impossible to tell whether the scratchings lead out to
the open or back to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal had
followed the line of the traps by running just inside the brush, the
Indian would know. But the midwinter day is short, and he has no time to
explore the border of the thicket.
Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that number he hardly
expects game in more than a dozen. If six have a prize, he has done
well. Each time he stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with castoreum, or
pomatum, or bears' grease; sweeping the snow over every spot touched by
his hand; dragging the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.
Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and the Indian trapper has
found not a thing in his traps. He only knows that some daring enemy has
dogged the circle of his snares. That means he must kill the marauder,
or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt about swift vengeance for
the loss of a rabbit, he has none when he comes to the next trap. He
sees what is too much for words: what entails as great loss to the poor
Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white man. One of his best
steel-traps lies a little distance from the pole to which it was
attached. It has been jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained and covered with
gray fur as soft and silvery as chinchilla. In the trap is a little paw,
fresh cut, scarcely frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of
which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and speculators of stocks,
and actors of fame. But the wolves, the great, black wolves of the Far
North, with eyes full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not an hour before the
trapper came.
He knows now what his enemy is; for he has come so suddenly on their
trail he can count four different footprints, and claw-marks of
different length. They have fought about the little fox; and some of the
smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the blood-marks, he can
tell they have got under cover of the shrub growth to the right.
The Indian says none of the words which the white man might say; but
that is nothing to his credit; for just now no words are adequate. But
he takes prompt resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
which somehow is written on the very face of the wilderness as one of
its necessities, he decides that only life for life will compensate such
loss. The danger of hunting the big, brown wolf--he knows too well to
attempt it without help. He will bait his small traps with poison; take
out his big, steel wolf traps to-morrow; then with a band of young
braves follow the wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting
season.
But the animal world knows that old trick of drawing a herring scent
across the trail of wise intentions; and of all the animal world, none
knows it better than the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the same pricking
forward of sharp, erect ears, the same crouching trot, the same
sneaking, watchful green eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to
brush out every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop of the
gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among wolves.
* * * * *
The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keeping to the open, where
he can travel fast on the long snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap.
The man-shadow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then all the
shadows merge into the purple gloom of early evening; but the Indian
travels on; for the circuit of traps leads back to his lodge.
The wolf thief may not be far off; so the man takes his musket from the
case. He may chance a shot at the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves
run under cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward. The wind
carries scent of danger from the open, and the brush forms an ambuscade.
Man tracks, where man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if he can; and if he
can't, crouches low till he has passed the exposure.
The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides, wasting not an
inch of ground, deviating neither to right nor left by as much space as
a white man takes to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog
utters a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward towards the
brush. At the same moment the Indian, who has been keeping his eyes on
the woods, sees a form rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is
not surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and the fox trap
could not have been robbed more than an hour ago. The man thinks he has
come on the thieves going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means
him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as he looks the form
fades into the gloom, and he decides to run on parallel to the
brushwood, with his gun ready. Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery.
At the clearing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he is
heading home there is little danger.
But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes off to the woods
with wild barking, and the trapper scans the long, white stretch leading
back between the bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
grays of twilight.
Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward route of his traps, a
wolfish figure looms black against the snow--and stands! The dog prances
round and round as if he would hold the creature for his master's shot;
and the Indian calculates--" After all, there is only one."
What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has approached his
traps! The stars are already pricking the blue darkness in cold, steel
points; and the Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the still, white,
wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.
One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the Indian flitting
through the underwoods like a hunted partridge. The sharp barkings of
the dog increase in fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther. That was the
meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back to cover, the hunter again
advances. But the wolf keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man
sights his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned musket.
The man runs faster now, determined to get abreast of the wolf and
utterly heedless of the increasing danger, as each step puts greater
distance between him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
front and shoot.
But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get his aim, there is no
wolf, and the dog is barking furiously at his own moonlit shadow. The
wolf, after the fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into the
ground, just as he always seems to rise from the earth. The trapper
thinks of the "loup-garou," but no wolf-demon of native legend devoured
the very real substance of that fox.
The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks to his master's feet,
while the trapper becomes suddenly aware of low-crouching forms gliding
through the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash of green
lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding, but the moon is shining
with a silvery clearness that throws moving wolf shadows on the snow to
the trapper's very feet.
Then the man knows that he has been tricked.
The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to attempt flight from these
sleuths of the forest. He knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest
and prairie hold in deadly fear--fire. Two or three shots ring into the
darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells him there is one wolf
less, and the others will hold off at a safe distance. Contrary to the
woodman's traditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian whips
out his axe and chops with all his might till he has wood enough for a
roaring fire. That will keep the rascals away till the pack goes off in
full cry, or daylight comes.
Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the Indian hastily makes a
bow, and shoots arrow after arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air,
hoping to signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear. The sky
is silver with stars, and moonlight and reflected snowglare, and the
Northern Lights flicker and wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy
that dims the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising from his
fire in a straight column falls at the height of the trees, for the
frost lies on the land heavy, palpable, impenetrable. And for all the
frost is thick to the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air seems to become
absolutely compressed with the cold; but that same cold freezes out and
precipitates every particle of floating moisture till earth and sky,
moon and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.
A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a gale, comes
through the tightening silence. The intelligent half-breed says this is
from the Northern Lights. The white man says it is electric activity in
compressed air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter the
words of the braves in death chant:
"If I die, I die valiant,
I go to death fearless.
I die a brave man.
I go to those heroes who died without fear."
Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire arrows into the air. He
heaps his fire and watches, musket in hand. The light of the moon is
white like statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-edged trees
are chiselled clear like statuary; and the silence is of stone. Only
the snap of the blaze, the crackling of the frosted air, the break of a
twig back among the brush, where something has moved, and the little,
low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.
* * * * *
By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases; and the dog at last
lowers his ears and lies quiet. The trapper throws a stick into the
woods and sends the dog after it. The dog comes back without any
barkings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have drawn off. Will he
wait out that long Northern night? He has had nothing to eat but the
piece of pemmican. The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run will carry him
home; but to make speed with the snow-shoes he must run in the open,
exposed to all watchers.
When an Indian balances motives, the motive of hunger invariably
prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting in the caribou coat and kicking
up the dog, the trapper strikes out for the open way leading back to the
line of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been built for
shelter against wind. There is another reason for building lodges in a
hollow. Sound of the hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
sound of the game carry to the hunter.
And if the game should turn hunter and the man turn hunted! The trapper
speeds down the snowy slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over
hummocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping rather than
running. The frosty air acts as a conductor to sound, and the frost
films come in stings against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and
touch are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the first
breath of peril, uttering a smothered "_woo! woo!_" The trapper tries to
persuade himself the alarm was only the far scream of a wolf-hunted
lynx; but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a dome. One
glance over his shoulder shows him black forms on the snow-crest against
the sky.
He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox feels before the dogs
in full cry.
The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted thing with terror crazing
his blood and the sleuth-hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something
goes wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-strings, he
sees that the dog's feet have been cut by the snow crust and are
bleeding. It is life for life now; the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law,
that has no new dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.
One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.
The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exultant bay. The wolf-pack
are in full cry. The man has rounded the open alley between the trees
and is speeding down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the pack
pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite. The moon is behind,
and the man-shadow flits before on the snow like an enemy heading him
back. The deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer! He
feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause. A great drift thrusts
across his way and the shadow in front runs slower. They are gaining on
him. He hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings for breath
are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest of the drift he braces
himself and goes to the bottom with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.
The slant moonlight throws another shadow on the snow at his heels.
It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and tosses up his arms--an
Indian trick to stop pursuit. Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man
that has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with a piercing
howl.
The man is off and away.
If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men and a body-guard of
guides hunt down a single quarry, he would be safe enough now. But the
old musket is slow loading, and speed will serve him better than another
shot.
Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his instep to his ankle,
throwing the racquet on edge and clogging him back. Before he can right
it they are upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face and fight
to the last breath. His hood falls back, and he wheels with the
moonlight full in his eyes and the Northern Lights waving their mystic
flames high overhead. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-wreathed trees, like
funeral watchers--watchers of how many brave deaths in a desolate,
lonely land where no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
without fear!
The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by burying the red-gummed
fangs in the victim's throat; in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the
runner's legs--called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teaches the Indian to be
as merciless as he is brave--hunger!
[Illustration: They dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted arm.]
Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the snapping red mouths
with the butt of his weapon; and the foremost beasts roll under.
But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase now, as much as from
hunger. Leaping over their dead fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of
the uplifted arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching for
the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks to the rear of the
hunter's fighting shadow. When the man swings his arm and draws back to
strike, this miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.
Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf has bitten the knee
sinews to the bone. The pack leap up, and the man goes down.
* * * * *
And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the heavy snow that fell
over the northland that night, the Indians travelling to their summer
hunting-grounds found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones of
three dead wolves; and farther up the hill were the bleaching remains of
a fourth.[35]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 35: A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay
occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few
years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the
dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt--which
tells its own story.]
CHAPTER XII
BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER
The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a body-guard of armed guides in
a field where the hunted have been on the run from the hunter for a
century, gets a very tame idea of the natural bear in its natural state.
Bears that have had the fear of man inculcated with longe-range
repeaters lose confidence in the prowess of an aggressive onset against
invisible foes. The city man comes back from the wilds with a legend of
how harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild
animal ever attacks unless it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear
would go on its life-long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not
compel it, or if repeated assault and battery from other animals did not
teach the poor bear the art of self-defence.
Grisly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the Western
States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the forts of the
Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, tell a different tale.
Their hunting is done in a field where human presence is still so rare
that it is unknown and the bear treats mankind precisely as he treats
all other living beings from the moose and the musk-ox to mice and
ants--as fair game for his own insatiable maw.
Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns--"liars" the city man calls
them--but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round the fur company
forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in the artificial ridge of
a deformed nose that the bear which he slew was a real one with an
epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.[36] And the Kootenay
hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
girls through fairy books.
That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
and weaving at the grasses--weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
mat--without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
frill of a sun-bonnet, coming over the face as well as the neck--"to
keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
never lifting the thick frill.
* * * * *
It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
when they made a long overland _portage_, they were three weeks north of
the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
travelling light-handed. That is, they were carrying only a little salt
and tea and tobacco. For the rest, they were depending on their muskets.
Game had not been plentiful.
Between the prairie and "the Mountains of the Setting Sun"--as the
Indians call the Rockies--a long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled
sinuously over the crests of the foothills; and all game--bird and
beast--will shun a prairie fire. There was no wind. It was the dead hazy
calm of Indian summer in the late autumn with the sun swimming in the
purplish smoke like a blood-red shield all day and the serpent line of
flame flickering and darting little tongues of vermilion against the
deep blue horizon all night, days filled with the crisp smell of
withered grasses, nights as clear and cold as the echo of a bell. On a
windless plain there is no danger from a prairie fire. One may travel
for weeks without nearing or distancing the waving tide of fire against
a far sky; and the four trappers, running short of rations, decided to
try to flank the fire coming around far enough ahead to intercept the
game that must be moving away from the fire line.
Nearly all hunters, through some dexterity of natural endowment,
unconsciously become specialists. One man sees beaver signs where
another sees only deer. For Ba'tiste, the page of nature spelled
_B-E-A-R_! Fifteen bear in a winter is a wonderfully good season's work
for any trapper. Ba'tiste's record for one lucky winter was fifty-four.
After that he was known as the bear hunter. Such a reputation affects
keen hunters differently. The Indian grows cautious almost to cowardice.
Ba'tiste grew rash. He would follow a wounded grisly to cover. He would
afterward laugh at the episode as a joke if the wounded brute had treed
him. "For sure, good t'ing dat was not de prairie dat tam," he would
say, flinging down the pelt of his foe. The other trappers with Indian
blood in their veins might laugh, but they shook their heads when his
back was turned.
Flanking the fire by some of the great gullies that cut the foothills
like trenches, the hunters began to find the signs they had been
seeking. For Ba'tiste, the many different signs had but one meaning.
Where some summer rain pool had dried almost to a soft mud hole, the
other trappers saw little cleft foot-marks that meant deer, and prints
like a baby's fingers that spelled out the visit of some member of the
weasel family, and broad splay-hoof impressions that had spread under
the weight as some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
grasses thinned.
Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things--stories of many bears,
of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great slabs
of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
cliffs.
Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
thorny brush.
The hawk soaring and dropping--lilting and falling and lifting
again--might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.
These things might interest the others. They did not interest Ba'tiste.
Ba'tiste's eyes were for lairs of grass crushed so recently that the
spear leaves were even now rising; for holes in the black mould where
great ripping claws had been tearing up roots; for hollow logs and
rotted stumps where a black bear might have crawled to take his
afternoon siesta; for punky trees which a grisly might have torn open to
gobble ants' eggs; for scratchings down the bole of poplar or cottonwood
where some languid bear had been sharpening his claws in midsummer as a
cat will scratch chair-legs; for great pits deep in the clay banks,
where some silly badger or gopher ran down to the depths of his burrow
in sheer terror only to have old bruin come ripping and tearing to the
innermost recesses, with scattered fur left that told what had happened.
Some soft oozy moss-padded lair, deep in the marsh with the reeds of the
brittle cat-tails lifting as if a sleeper had just risen, sets
Ba'tiste's pulse hopping--jumping--marking time in thrills like the
lithe bounds of a pouncing mountain-cat. With tread soft as the velvet
paw of a panther, he steals through the cane-brake parting the reeds
before each pace, brushing aside softly--silently what might
crush!--snap!--sound ever so slight an alarm to the little pricked ears
of a shaggy head tossing from side to side--jerk--jerk--from right to
left--from left to right--always on the listen!--on the listen!--for
prey!--for prey!
"Oh, for sure, that Ba'tiste, he was but a fool-hunter," as his comrades
afterward said (it is always so very plain afterward); "that Ba'tiste,
he was a fool! What man else go step--step--into the marsh after a
bear!"
But the truth was that Ba'tiste, the cunning rascal, always succeeded in
coming out of the marsh, out of the bush, out of the windfall, sound as
a top, safe and unscratched, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, the
head swinging pendant to show what sort of fellow he had mastered.
"Dat wan!--ah!--diable!--he has long sharp nose--he was thin--thin as a
barrel all gone but de hoops--ah!--voilà!--he was wan ugly garçon, was
dat bear!"
Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage brush, bits of skin on
the spined cactus, the others might vow coyotes had worried a badger.
Ba'tiste would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. The
cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant bear; for the bear is an
epicure that would have meat gamey. To that the others would agree.
And so the shortening autumn days with the shimmering heat of a crisp
noon and the noiseless chill of starry twilights found the trappers
canoeing leisurely up-stream from the northern tributaries of the
Missouri nearing the long overland trail that led to the hunting-fields
in Canada.
One evening they came to a place bounded by high cliff banks with the
flats heavily wooded by poplar and willow. Ba'tiste had found signs that
were hot--oh! so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so fresh
that it had not yet dried. This was not a region of timber-wolves. What
had dug that hole? Not the small, skulking coyote--the vagrant of
prairie life! Oh!--no!--the coyote like other vagrants earns his living
without work, by skulking in the wake of the business-like badger; and
when the badger goes down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands
nearby and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to escape the
invading badger.[37] What had dug the hole? Ba'tiste thinks that he
knows.
That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is another kind of
hole--a roundish pit dug between moss-covered logs and earth wall, a
pit with grass clawed down into it, snug and hidden and sheltered as a
bird's nest. If the pit is what Ba'tiste thinks, somewhere on the banks
of the stream should be a watering-place. He proposes that they beach
the canoes and camp here. Twilight is not a good time to still hunt an
unseen bear. Twilight is the time when the bear himself goes still
hunting. Ba'tiste will go out in the early morning. Meantime if he
stumbles on what looks like a trail to the watering-place, he will set a
trap.
Camp is not for the regular trapper what it is for the amateur hunter--a
time of rest and waiting while others skin the game and prepare supper.
One hunter whittles the willow sticks that are to make the camp fire.
Another gathers moss or boughs for a bed. If fish can be got, some one
has out a line. The kettle hisses from the cross-bar between notched
sticks above the fire, and the meat sizzling at the end of a forked twig
sends up a flavour that whets every appetite. Over the upturned canoes
bend a couple of men gumming afresh all the splits and seams against
to-morrow's voyage. Then with a flip-flop that tells of the other side
of the flap-jacks being browned, the cook yodels in crescendo that
"Sup--per!--'s--read--ee!"
Supper over, a trap or two may be set in likely places. The men may take
a plunge; for in spite of their tawny skins, these earth-coloured
fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.
On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering V lines, wing
geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.
Unless it is raining, the _voyageurs_ do not erect their tent; for they
will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
care. When the hunter came suddenly on them, over the old hen went,
flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
for shelter--when--lo!--of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
they died of starvation and their bones bleached in the rusted steel.
That story has such small relish for Ba'tiste that he hitches farther
away from the others and lies back flat on the ground close to the
willow under-tangle with his head on his hand.
"For sure," says Ba'tiste contemptuously, "nobody doesn't need no tree
to climb here! Sacré!--cry wolf!--wolf!--and for sure!--diable!--de beeg
loup-garou will eat you yet!"
Down somewhere from those stars overhead drops a call silvery as a
flute, clear as a piccolo--some night bird lilting like a mote on the
far oceans of air. The trappers look up with a movement that in other
men would be a nervous start; for any shrill cry pierces the silence of
the prairie in almost a stab. Then the men go on with their yarn telling
of how the Blackfeet murdered some traders on this very ground not long
ago till the gloom gathering over willow thicket and encircling cliffs
seems peopled with those marauding warriors. One man rises, saying that
he is "goin' to turn in" and is taking a step through the dark to his
canoe when there is a dull pouncing thud. For an instant the trappers
thought that their comrade had stumbled over his boat. But a heavy
groan--a low guttural cry--a shout of "Help--help--help Ba'tiste!" and
the man who had risen plunged into the crashing cane-brake, calling out
incoherently for them to "help--help Ba'tiste!"
In the confusion of cries and darkness, it was impossible for the other
two trappers to know what had happened. Their first thought was of the
Indians whose crimes they had been telling. Their second was for their
rifles--and they had both sprung over the fire where they saw the third
man striking--striking--striking wildly at something in the dark. A low
worrying growl--and they descried the Frenchman rolling over and over,
clutched by or clutching a huge furry form--hitting--plunging with his
knife--struggling--screaming with agony.
"It's Ba'tiste! It's a bear!" shouted the third man, who was attempting
to drive the brute off by raining blows on its head.
Man and bear were an indistinguishable struggling mass. Should they
shoot in the half-dark? Then the Frenchman uttered the scream of one in
death-throes: "Shoot!--shoot!--shoot quick! She's striking my
face!--she's striking my face----"
And before the words had died, sharp flashes of light cleft the
dark--the great beast rolled over with a coughing growl, and the
trappers raised their comrade from the ground.
The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
fore paw.
Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.
"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done
to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"
Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
fainted because of what his hands felt.
* * * * *
Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
how many others whose treachery will never be known.
But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.
Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:
"S--s--sz!--" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear--it is an
animal!--the bear!--it is a beast!--toujours!--the bear!--it is a
beast!--always--always!" And his hands clinch.
Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.
Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbé Dugast, of St. Boniface,
Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
overdrawn, I quote the Abbé's words:
"At a little distance Madame Lajimoniere and the other women were
preparing the tents for the night, when all at once Bouvier gave a cry
of distress and called to his companions to help him. At the first
shout, each hunter seized his gun and prepared to defend himself against
the attack of an enemy; they hurried to the other side of the ditch to
see what was the matter with Bouvier, and what he was struggling with.
They had no idea that a wild animal would come near the fire to attack a
man even under cover of night; for fire usually has the effect of
frightening wild beasts. However, almost before the four hunters knew
what had happened, they saw their unfortunate companion dragged into the
woods by a bear followed by her two cubs. She held Bouvier in her claws
and struck him savagely in the face to stun him. As soon as she saw the
four men in pursuit, she redoubled her fury against her prey, tearing
his face with her claws. M. Lajimoniere, who was an intrepid hunter,
baited her with the butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as
he dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while trying to save
him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being choked, cried with all his
strength: 'Shoot; I would rather be shot than eaten alive!' M.
Lajimoniere pulled the trigger as close to the bear as possible,
wounding her mortally. She let go Bouvier and before her strength was
exhausted made a wild attack upon M. Lajimoniere, who expected this and
as his gun had only one barrel loaded, he ran towards the canoe, where
he had a second gun fully charged. He had hardly seized it before the
bear reached the shore and tried to climb into the canoe, but fearing no
longer to wound his friend, M. Lajimoniere aimed full at her breast and
this time she was killed instantly. As soon as the bear was no longer to
be feared, Madame Lajimoniere, who had been trembling with fear during
the tumult, went to raise the unfortunate Bouvier, who was covered with
wounds and nearly dead. The bear had torn the skin from his face with
her nails from the roots of his hair to the lower part of his chin. His
eyes and nose were gone--in fact his features were indiscernible--but he
was not mortally injured. His wounds were dressed as well as the
circumstances would permit, and thus crippled he was carried to the Fort
of the Prairies, Madame Lajimoniere taking care of him all through the
journey. In time his wounds were successfully healed, but he was blind
and infirm to the end of his life. He dwelt at the Fort of the Prairies
for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
time during the last years of his life in making crosses and crucifixes
blind as he was, but he never made any _chefs d'oeuvre_."
Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
country--and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not--whether, in a word, it
is altogether _humane to hunt bears_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 36: In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
the pelt.]
[Footnote 37: This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
badgers are running.]
CHAPTER XIII
JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER
Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.
The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.
The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.
Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
ice, the rush of whirlpools through the blackness of some far cañon, the
crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
startling the silences--these things filled the Indian with
superstitious fears.
The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"--great pillars of
sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
floods--were to the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.
Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.
Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
white man's language, mystery.
Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
in safety.
Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so sharp that French
_voyageurs_ gave this queer craft the name "_canot à bec
d'esturgeon_"--that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed cañons of the mountain
streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
other light timber, with such an angular narrow prow that it could take
the sheerest dip and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat
would fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men pushed
out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now on that, using
the reversible double-bladed paddles which only an amphibious boatman
can manage. The two men shot out in mid-stream, where the mists would
hide them from each shore; a moment later the white fog had enfolded
them, and there was no trace of human presence but the trail of dimpling
ripples in the wake of the canoe.
No talking, no whistling, not a sound to betray them. And there were
good reasons why these men did not wish their presence known. One was
Potts, the other John Colter. Both had been with the Lewis and Clark
exploring party of 1804-'05, when a Blackfoot brave had been slain for
horse-thieving by the first white men to cross the Upper Missouri.
Besides, the year before coming to the Jefferson, Colter had been with
the Missouri Company's fur brigade under Manuel Lisa, and had gone to
the Crows as an emissary from the fur company. While with the Crows, a
battle had taken place against the Blackfeet, in which they suffered
heavy loss owing to Colter's prowess. That made the Blackfeet sworn
enemies to Colter.
Turning off the Jefferson, the trappers headed their canoe up a side
stream, probably one of those marshy reaches where beavers have formed a
swamp by damming up the current of a sluggish stream. Such quiet waters
are favourite resorts for beaver and mink and marten and pekan. Setting
their traps only after nightfall, the two men could not possibly have
put out more than forty or fifty. Thirty traps are a heavy day's work
for one man. Six prizes out of thirty are considered a wonderful run of
luck; but the empty traps must be examined as carefully as the
successful ones. Many that have been mauled, "scented" by a beaver scout
and left, must be replaced. Others must have fresh bait; others, again,
carried to better grounds where there are more game signs.
Either this was a very lucky morning and the men were detained taking
fresh pelts, or it was a very unlucky morning and the men had decided to
trap farther up-stream; for when the mists began to rise, the hunters
were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver meadow, they continued
paddling up-stream away from the Jefferson. A more hidden water-course
they could hardly have found. The swampy beaver-runs narrowed, the
shores rose higher and higher into rampart walls, and the dark-shadowed
waters came leaping down in the lumpy, uneven runnels of a small cañon.
You can always tell whether the waters of a cañon are compressed or not,
whether they come from broad, swampy meadows or clear snow streams
smaller than the cañon. The marsh waters roll down swift and black and
turbid, raging against the crowding walls; the snow streams leap clear
and foaming as champagne, and are in too great a hurry to stop and
quarrel with the rocks. It is altogether likely these men recognised
swampy water, and were ascending the cañon in search of a fresh
beaver-marsh; or they would not have continued paddling six miles above
the Jefferson with daylight growing plainer at every mile. First the
mist rose like a smoky exhalation from the river; then it flaunted
across the rampart walls in banners; then the far mountain peaks took
form against the sky, islands in a sea of fog; then the cloud banks were
floating in mid-heaven blindingly white from a sun that painted each
cañon wall in the depths of the water.
How much farther would the cañon lead? Should they go higher up or not?
Was it wooded or clear plain above the walls? The man paused. What was
that noise?
"Like buffalo," said Potts.
"Might be Blackfeet," answered Colter.
No. What would Blackfeet be doing, riding at a pace to make such thunder
so close to a cañon? It was only a buffalo herd stampeding on the annual
southern run. Again Colter urged that the noise _might_ be from Indians.
It would be safer for them to retreat at once. At which Potts wanted to
know if Colter were afraid, using a stronger word--"coward."
Afraid? Colter afraid? Colter who had remained behind Lewis and Clark's
men to trap alone in the wilds for nearly two years, who had left Manuel
Lisa's brigade to go alone among the thieving Crows, whose leadership
had helped the Crows to defeat the Blackfeet?
Anyway, it would now be as dangerous to go back as forward. They plainly
couldn't land here. Let them go ahead where the walls seemed to slope
down to shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an elbow of
rock into the narrow course of a creek. Instantly out sprang five or six
hundred Blackfeet warriors with weapons levelled guarding both sides of
the stream.
An Indian scout had discovered the trail of the white men and sent the
whole band scouring ahead to intercept them at this narrow pass. The
chief stepped forward, and with signals that were a command beckoned the
hunters ashore.
As is nearly always the case, the rash man was the one to lose his head,
the cautious man the one to keep his presence of mind. Potts was for an
attempt at flight, when every bow on both sides of the river would have
let fly a shot. Colter was for accepting the situation, trusting to his
own wit for subsequent escape.
Colter, who was acting as steersman, sent the canoe ashore. Bottom had
not grated before a savage snatched Potts's rifle from his hands.
Springing ashore, Colter forcibly wrested the weapon back and coolly
handed it to Potts.
But Potts had lost all the rash courage of a moment before, and with one
push sent the canoe into mid-stream. Colter shouted at him to come
back--come back! Indians have more effective arguments. A bow-string
twanged, and Potts screamed out, "Colter, I am wounded!"
Again Colter urged him to land. The wound turned Pott's momentary fright
to a paroxysm of rage. Aiming his rifle, he shot his Indian assailant
dead. If it was torture that he feared, that act assured him at least a
quick death; for, in Colter's language, man and boat were
instantaneously "made a riddle of."
No man admires courage more than the Indian; and the Blackfeet
recognised in their captive one who had been ready to defend his comrade
against them all, and who had led the Crows to victory against their own
band.
The prisoner surrendered his weapons. He was stripped naked, but neither
showed sign of fear nor made a move to escape. Evidently the Blackfeet
could have rare sport with this game white man. His life in the Indian
country had taught him a few words of the Blackfoot language. He heard
them conferring as to how he should be tortured to atone for all that
the Blackfeet had suffered at white men's hands. One warrior suggested
that the hunter be set up as a target and shot at. Would he then be so
brave?
But the chief shook his head. That was not game enough sport for
Blackfeet warriors. That would be letting a man die passively. And how
this man could fight if he had an opportunity! How he could resist
torture if he had any chance of escaping the torture!
But Colter stood impassive and listened. Doubtless he regretted having
left the well-defended brigades of the fur companies to hunt alone in
the wilderness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gambler's
vice--the more a man has, the more he wants. Had not Colter crossed the
Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
coming up the Missouri with a brigade of hunters, and for the third
time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
things--to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.
* * * * *
The free trappers formed a class by themselves.
Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
but the one that paid the highest prices. For the _mangeurs de lard_, as
they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.
The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
Indian--whisky--among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame,
might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the
term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day--before they joined
the Astorians--and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
the true type of free trapper.
The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
years before the Astorians came in 1811.
One crime the free trappers may be charged with--a reckless waste of
precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest game while the mothers
were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
game.
Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the company,
was able to say only two years ago, "the fur trade is quite as large as
ever it was."
Among free hunters, Canada had only one commanding figure--John Johnston
of the Soo, who settled at La Pointe on Lake Superior in 1792, formed
league with Wabogish, "the White Fisher," and became the most famous
trader of the Lakes. His life, too, was almost as eventful as Colter's.
A member of the Irish nobility, some secret which he never chose to
reveal drove him to the wilds. Wabogish, the "White Fisher," had a
daughter who refused the wooings of all her tribe's warriors. In vain
Johnston sued for her hand. Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his
Irish estates and prove his devotion by buying as vast estates in
America. Johnston took the old chief at his word, and married the
haughty princess of the Lake. When the War of 1812 set all the tribes by
the ears, Johnston and his wife had as thrilling adventures as ever
Colter knew among the Blackfeet.
Many a free trapper, and partner of the fur companies as well, secured
his own safety by marrying the daughter of a chief, as Johnston had.
These were not the lightly-come, lightly-go affairs of the vagrant
adventurer. If the husband had not cast off civilization like a garment,
the wife had to put it on like a garment; and not an ill-fitting garment
either, when one considers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted
the wilderness like oases in a desert almost contemporaneous with the
fur trade. If the trapper had not sunk to the level of the savages, the
little daughter of the chief was educated by the nuns for her new
position. I recall several cases where the child was sent across the
Atlantic to an English governess so that the equality would be literal
and not a sentimental fiction. And yet, on no subject has the western
fur trader received more persistent and unjust condemnation. The heroism
that culminated in the union of Pocahontas with a noted Virginian won
applause, and almost similar circumstances dictated the union of fur
traders with the daughters of Indian chiefs; but because the fur trader
has not posed as a sentimentalist, he has become more or less of a
target for the index finger of the Pharisee.[38]
North of the boundary the free trapper had small chance against the
Hudson's Bay Company. As long as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself
chiefly recruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the
Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of the Mississippi;
but after the Mackinaw was absorbed by the aggressive American Fur
Company, the free hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Missouri
competition raged from 1810, so that circumstances drove the free
trapper westward to the mountains, where he is hunting in the twentieth
century as his prototype hunted two hundred years ago.
In Canada--of course after 1870--he entered the mountains chiefly by
three passes: (1) Yellow Head Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the
narrow gap where the Bow emerges to the plains--that is, the river where
the Indians found the best wood for the making of bows; (3) north of the
boundary, through that narrow defile overtowered by the lonely
flat-crowned peak called Crows Nest Mountain--that is, where the
fugitive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet.
In the United States, the free hunters also approached the mountains by
three main routes: (1) Up the Platte; (2) westward from the Missouri
across the plains; (3) by the Three Forks of the Missouri. For instance,
it was coming down the Platte that poor Scott's canoe was overturned,
his powder lost, and his rifles rendered useless. Game had retreated to
the mountains with spring's advance. Berries were not ripe by the time
trappers were descending with their winter's hunt. Scott and his
famishing men could not find edible roots. Each day Scott weakened.
There was no food. Finally, Scott had strength to go no farther. His men
had found tracks of some other hunting party far to the fore. They
thought that, in any case, he could not live. What ought they to do?
Hang back and starve with him, or hasten forward while they had
strength, to the party whose track they had espied? On pretence of
seeking roots, they deserted the helpless man. Perhaps they did not come
up with the advance party till they were sure that Scott must have died;
for they did not go back to his aid. The next spring when these same
hunters went up the Platte, they found the skeleton of poor Scott sixty
miles from the place where they had left him. The terror that spurred
the emaciated man to drag himself all this weary distance can barely be
conceived; but such were the fearful odds taken by every free trapper
who went up the Platte, across the parched plains, or to the head waters
of the Missouri.
The time for the free trappers to go out was, in Indian language, "when
the leaves began to fall." If a mighty hunter like Colter, the trapper
was to the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant of woods
and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.
Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
squaw all the pemmican white men could use.
Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
piece of string--_babiche_ (leather cord, called by the Indians
_assapapish_)--fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher--a
hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for his next year's
canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood--some man wanted this tree
for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
beaver-marsh--some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
the inside of a punky trunk and the shooting flames were a rallying
call.
In the most perilous regions the trapper travelled only after nightfall
with muffled paddles--that is, muffled where the handle might strike the
gunwale. Camp-fires warned him which side of the river to avoid; and
often a trapper slipping past under the shadow of one bank saw hobgoblin
figures dancing round the flames of the other bank--Indians celebrating
their scalp dance. In these places the white hunter ate cold meals to
avoid lighting a fire; or if he lighted a fire, after cooking his meal
he withdrew at once and slept at a distance from the light that might
betray him.
The greatest risk of travelling after dark during the spring floods
arose from what the _voyageurs_ called _embarras_--trees torn from the
banks sticking in the soft bottom like derelicts with branches to
entangle the trapper's craft; but the _embarras_ often befriended the
solitary white man. Usually he slept on shore rolled in a buffalo-robe;
but if Indian signs were fresh, he moored his canoe in mid-current and
slept under hiding of the driftwood. Friendly Indians did not conceal
themselves, but came to the river bank waving a buffalo-robe and
spreading it out to signal a welcome to the white man; when the trapper
would go ashore, whiff pipes with the chiefs and perhaps spend the night
listening to the tales of exploits which each notch on the calumet
typified. Incidents that meant nothing to other men were full of
significance to the lone _voyageur_ through hostile lands. Always the
spring floods drifted down numbers of dead buffalo; and the carrion
birds sat on the trees of the shore with their wings spread out to dry
in the sun. The sudden flacker of a rising flock betrayed something
prowling in ambush on the bank; so did the splash of a snake from
overhanging branches into the water.
Different sorts of dangers beset the free trapper crossing the plains to
the mountains. The fur company brigades always had escort of armed guard
and provision packers. The free trappers went alone or in pairs,
picketing horses to the saddle overlaid with a buffalo-robe for a
pillow, cooking meals on chip fires, using a slow-burning wormwood bark
for matches, and trusting their horses or dog to give the alarm if the
bands of coyotes hovering through the night dusk approached too near. On
the high rolling plains, hostiles could be descried at a distance,
coming over the horizon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or
emerging from the "coolies"--dried sloughs--like wolves from the earth.
Enemies could be seen soon enough; but where could the trapper hide on
bare prairie? He didn't attempt to hide. He simply set fire to the
prairie and took refuge on the lee side. That device failing, he was at
his enemies' mercy.
On the plains, the greatest danger was from lack of water. At one season
the trapper might know where to find good camping streams. The next year
when he came to those streams they were dry.
"After leaving the buffalo meadows a dreadful scarcity of water
ensued," wrote Charles MacKenzie, of the famous MacKenzie clan. He
was journeying north from the Missouri. "We had to alter our course
and steer to a distant lake. When we got there we found the lake
dry. However, we dug a pit which produced a kind of stinking liquid
which we all drank. It was salt and bitter, caused an inflammation
of the mouth, left a disagreeable roughness of the throat, and
seemed to increase our thirst.... We passed the night under great
uneasiness. Next day we continued our journey, but not a drop of
water was to be found, ... and our distress became
insupportable.... All at once our horses became so unruly that we
could not manage them. We observed that they showed an inclination
towards a hill which was close by. It struck me that they might
have scented water.... I ascended to the top, where, to my great
joy, I discovered a small pool.... My horse plunged in before I
could prevent him, ... and all the horses drank to excess."
"_The plains across_"--which was a western expression meaning the end of
that part of the trip--there rose on the west rolling foothills and dark
peaked profiles against the sky scarcely to be distinguished from gray
cloud banks. These were the mountains; and the real hazards of free
trapping began. No use to follow the easiest passes to the most
frequented valleys. The fur company brigades marched through these,
sweeping up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers sought out the
hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where neither pack horse nor _canot
à bec d'esturgeon_ could follow. How did they do it? Very much the way
Simon Fraser's hunters crawled down the river-course named after him.
"Our shoes," said one trapper, "did not last a single day."
"We had to plunge our daggers into the ground, ... otherwise we
would slide into the river," wrote Fraser. "We cut steps into the
declivity, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, with which
some of the men ascended in order to haul it up. .. Our lives hung,
as it were, upon a thread, as the failure of the line or the false
step of the man might have hurled us into eternity.... We had to
pass where no human being should venture.... Steps were formed like
a ladder on the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another
and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended
from the top to the foot of immense precipices, and fastened at
both extremities to stones and trees."
He speaks of the worst places being where these frail swaying ladders
led up to the overhanging ledge of a shelving precipice.
* * * * *
Such were the very real adventures of the trapper's life, a life whose
fascinations lured John Colter from civilization to the wilds again and
again till he came back once too often and found himself stripped,
helpless, captive, in the hands of the Blackfeet.
It would be poor sport torturing a prisoner who showed no more fear than
this impassive white man coolly listening and waiting for them to
compass his death. So the chief dismissed the suggestion to shoot at
their captive as a target. Suddenly the Blackfoot leader turned to
Colter. "Could the white man run fast?" he asked. In a flash Colter
guessed what was to be his fate. He, the hunter, was to be hunted. No,
he cunningly signalled, he was only a poor runner.
Bidding his warriors stand still, the chief roughly led Colter out
three hundred yards. Then he set his captive free, and the exultant
shriek of the running warriors told what manner of sport this was to be.
It was a race for life.
The white man shot out with all the power of muscles hard as iron-wood
and tense as a bent bow. Fear winged the man running for his life to
outrace the winged arrows coming from the shouting warriors three
hundred yards behind. Before him stretched a plain six miles wide, the
distance he had so thoughtlessly paddled between the rampart walls of
the cañon but a few hours ago. At the Jefferson was a thick forest
growth where a fugitive might escape. Somewhere along the Jefferson was
his own hidden cabin.
Across this plain sped Colter, pursued by a band of six hundred
shrieking demons. Not one breath did he waste looking back over his
shoulder till he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
who was only a hundred yards behind.
There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!
This is an Indian _ruse_ to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
pinned the savage through the body to the earth.
That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.
In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
up with his head among branches of trees.
* * * * *
All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
Bighorn River.
Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
subsisted entirely on roots and berries.
* * * * *
Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
episode for history in a small-type foot-note to his book published in
London in 1817.
Two other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.
And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
to his life--he had taken to himself a bride.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 38: Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
_Bois-Brûlés_? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.]
CHAPTER XIV
THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD
In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
of silent achievement.
Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.[39] Such is the Hudson's
Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
trade to his cousin Prince Rupert.
Governors and chief factors have changed with the changing centuries;
but the character of the company's personnel has never changed. Prince
Rupert, the first governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James
II); and the royal governor by a long line of distinguished public men
down to Lord Strathcona, the present governor, and C. C. Chipman, the
chief commissioner or executive officer. All have been men of noted
achievement, often in touch with the Crown, always with that passion for
executive and mastery of difficulty which exults most when the conflict
is keenest.
Pioneers face the unknown when circumstances push them into it.
Adventurers rush into the unknown for the zest of conquering it. It has
been to the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged.
Radisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who first brought back word
of the great wealth in furs round the far northern sea, had been
gentlemen adventurers--"rascals" their enemies called them. Prince
Rupert, who leagued himself with the Frenchmen to obtain a charter for
his fur trade, had been an adventurer of the high seas--"pirate" we
would say--long before he became first governor of the Hudson's Bay
Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, the company's third governor, was
as great an adventurer as he was a general.
Latterly the word "adventurer" has fallen in such evil repute, it may
scarcely be applied to living actors. But using it in the old-time sense
of militant hero, what cavalier of gold braid and spurs could be more of
an adventurer than young Donald Smith who traded in the desolate wastes
of Labrador, spending seventeen years in the hardest field of the fur
company, tramping on snow-shoes half the width of a continent, camping
where night overtook him under blanketing of snow-drifts, who rose step
by step from trader on the east coast to commissioner in the west? And
this Donald Smith became Lord Strathcona, the governor of the Hudson's
Bay Company.
Men bold in action and conservative in traditions have ruled the
company. The governor resident in England is now represented by the
chief commissioner, who in turn is represented at each of the many
inland forts by a chief factor of the district. Nominally, the
fur-trader's northern realm is governed by the Parliament of Canada.
Virtually, the chief factor rules as autocratically to-day as he did
before the Canadian Government took over the proprietary rights of the
fur company.
How did these rulers of the wilds, these princes of the fur trade, live
in lonely forts and mountain fastnesses? Visit one of the northern forts
as it exists to-day.
The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The farther north the fort,
the more typical it is of the fur-trader's realm.
For six, seven, eight months of the year, the fur-trader's world is a
white wilderness of snow; snow water-waved by winds that sweep from the
pole; snow drifted into ramparts round the fort stockades till the
highest picket sinks beneath the white flood and the corner bastions are
almost submerged and the entrance to the central gate resembles the
cutting of a railway tunnel; snow that billows to the unbroken reaches
of the circling sky-line like a white sea. East, frost-mist hides the
low horizon in clouds of smoke, for the sun which rises from the east in
other climes rises from the south-east here; and until the spring
equinox, bringing summer with a flood-tide of thaw, gray darkness hangs
in the east like a fog. South, the sun moves across the snowy levels in
a wheel of fire, for it has scarcely risen full sphered above the
sky-line before it sinks again etching drift and tip of half-buried
brush in long lonely fading shadows. The west shimmers in warm purplish
grays, for the moist Chinook winds come over the mountains melting the
snow by magic. North, is the cold steel of ice by day; and at night
Northern Lights darting through the polar dark like burnished spears.
Christmas day is welcomed at the northern fur posts by a firing of
cannon from the snow-muffled bastions. Before the stars have faded,
chapel services begin. Frequently on either Christmas or New Year's day,
a grand feast is given the tawny-skinned _habitués_ of the fort, who
come shuffling to the main mess-room with no other announcement than the
lifting of the latch, and billet themselves on the hospitality of a host
that has never turned hungry Indians from its doors.
For reasons well-known to the woodcraftsman, a sudden lull falls on
winter hunting in December, and all the trappers within a week's journey
from the fort, all the half-breed guides who add to the instinct of
native craft the reasoning of the white, all the Indian hunters ranging
river-course and mountain have come by snow-shoes and dog train to spend
festive days at the fort. A great jangling of bells announces the
huskies (dog trains) scampering over the crusted snow-drifts. A babel of
barks and curses follows, for the huskies celebrate their arrival by
tangling themselves up in their harness and enjoying a free fight.
Dogs unharnessed, in troop the trappers to the banquet-hall, flinging
packs of tightly roped peltries down promiscuously, to be sorted next
day. One Indian enters just as he has left the hunting-field, clad from
head to heel in white caribou with the antlers left on the capote as a
decoy. His squaw has togged out for the occasion in a comical medley of
brass bracelets and finger-rings, with a bear's claw necklace and ermine
ruff which no city connoisseur could possibly mistake for rabbit. If a
daughter yet remain unappropriated she will display the gayest
attire--red flannel galore, red shawl, red scarf, with perhaps an apron
of white fox-skin and moccasins garnished in coloured grasses. The
braves outdo even a vain young squaw. Whole fox, mink, or otter skins
have been braided to the end of their hair, and hang down in two plaits
to the floor. Whitest of buckskin has been ornamented with brightest of
beads, and over all hangs the gaudiest of blankets, it may be a
musk-ox-skin with the feats of the warrior set forth in rude drawings on
the smooth side.
Children and old people, too, come to the feast, for the Indian's
stomach is the magnet that draws his soul. Grotesque little figures the
children are, with men's trousers shambling past their heels,
rabbit-skin coats with the fur turned in, and on top of all some old
stovepipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to the urchin's
neck. The old people have more resemblance to parchment on gnarled
sticks than to human beings. They shiver under dirty blankets with every
sort of cast-off rag tied about their limbs, hobbling lame from frozen
feet or rheumatism, mumbling toothless requests for something to eat or
something to wear, for tobacco, the solace of Indian woes, or what is
next best--tea.
Among so many guests are many needs. One half-breed from a far wintering
outpost, where perhaps a white man and this guide are living in a
chinked shack awaiting a hunting party's return, arrives at the fort
with frozen feet. Little Labree's feet must be thawed out, and sometimes
little Labree dies under the process, leaving as a legacy to the chief
factor the death-bed pledge that the corpse be taken to a distant tribal
burying-ground. And no matter how inclement the winter, the chief factor
keeps his pledge, for the integrity of a promise is the only law in the
fur-trader's realm. Special attentions, too, must be paid those old
retainers who have acted as mentors of the fort in times of trouble.
A few years ago it would not have been safe to give this treat inside
the fort walls. Rations would have been served through loop-holes and
the feast held outside the gates; but so faithfully have the Indians
become bound to the Hudson's Bay Company there are not three forts in
the fur territory where Indians must be excluded.
Of the feast little need be said. Like the camel, the Indian lays up
store for the morrow, judging from his capacity for weeks of morrows.
His benefactor no more dines with him than a plantation master of the
South would have dined with feasting slaves. Elsewhere a bell calls the
company officers to breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 1, supper at 7.
Officers dine first, white hunters and trappers second, that difference
between master and servant being maintained which is part of the
company's almost military discipline. In the large forts are libraries,
whither resort the officers for the long winter nights. But over the
feast wild hilarity reigns.
A French-Canadian fiddler strikes up a tuneless jig that sets the
Indians pounding the floor in figureless dances with moccasined heels
till midday glides into midnight and midnight to morning. I remember
hearing of one such midday feast in Red River settlement that prolonged
itself past four of the second morning. Against the walls sit old folks
spinning yarns of the past. There is a print of Sir George Simpson
behind one _raconteur's_ head. Ah! yes, the oldest guides all remember
Sir George, though half a century has passed since his day. He was the
governor who travelled with flags flying from every prow, and cannon
firing when he left the forts, and men drawn up in procession like
soldiers guarding an emperor when he entered the fur posts with
_coureurs_ and all the flourish of royal state. Then some story-teller
recalls how he has heard the old guides tell of the imperious governor
once provoking personal conflict with an equally imperious steersman,
who first ducked the governor into a lake they were traversing and then
ducked into the lake himself to rescue the governor.
And there is a crucifix high on the wall left by Père Lacomb the last
time the famous missionary to the red men of the Far North passed this
way; and every Indian calls up some kindness done, some sacrifice by
Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old muskets and Indian masks and
scalp-locks, bringing back the days when Russian traders instigated a
massacre at this fort and when white traders flew at each other's
throats as Nor' Westers struggled with Hudson's Bay for supremacy in the
fur trade.
"Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fighters, they did not know
how to stop. Mais, sacré, they were fools, those white men after all!
Instead of hiding in ambush to catch the foe, those white men measured
off paces, stood up face to face and fired blank--oui--fired blank! Ugh!
Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, most like, he was
wound'! Ugh, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?"[40]
Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless. That enormous
bear-skin stretched to four pegs on the wall brings up Montagnais, the
Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest
bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one
hand dragging the enormous skin and the other holding the place which
his nose no longer graced.
"Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez
ici--bien--so--I tole you 'bout heem," begins some French-Canadian
trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
"Bigosh! He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go
stumble t'rough snow--how you call dat?--hill, steep--steep! Oui, by
Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de--de gran'
rapeed, see?" emphasizing the snow-slide with illustrative gesture.
"Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem
fall--so--see? Tonnerre! Bigosh! for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
Sacré! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg ol' bear sleep in snow.
Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear--diable!
'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg
loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man--he not scare--he say wan leetle
prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'--sacré--dat grab hees
knife out hees belt--sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her
breat'--diable!--for sure he fin' de place her heart beat--Tonnerre!
Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat
bear! Dat bes' t'ing do--for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best
t'ing do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she
no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over
too--leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"
And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
credit of Montagnais's heroism.
But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.
The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
effected.
But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.
South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.
First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth
from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox
worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's
Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000
blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the
trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and
white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against
the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other
game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur
taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be
that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the
hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the
Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the
white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and
seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares
the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is
plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.
Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to
the store counter where begins interminable dickering. Montagnais's
squaw has only fifty "beaver" coin, and her desires are a hundredfold
what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating
down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk
a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to
have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At
the termination of each bargain, so many coins pass across the counter.
Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver
enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of
Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many "beaver"
against the trapper's next hunt.
Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a
disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an
easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor
the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no competition,
whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer,
for which the Indian has as keen an appetite, both for the exigencies of
hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first
thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they
considered the more dangerous.
Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
Christmas.
Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
handled differently.
Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snowbird or
rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.
If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its
spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his
hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little
ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the
knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been
teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its
tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that
frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like
ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife. But alas for the
resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm
tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little
stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper
comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble
up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the
ermine.
Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
a leading fort would amount to:
Bear of all varieties 400
Ermine, medium 200
Blue fox 4
Red fox 91
Silver fox 3
Marten 2,000
Musk-rat 200,000
Mink 8,000
Otter 500
Skunk 6
Wolf 100
Beaver 5,000
Pekan (fisher) 50
Cross fox 30
White fox 400
Lynx 400
Wolverine 200
The value of these furs in "beaver" currency varied with the fashions of
the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the
locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver
equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500
rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no
set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the
annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.
To understand the values of these furs to the Indian, "beaver" currency
must be compared to merchandise, one beaver buying such a red
handkerchief as trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunters
not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two an axe, from eight to
twenty a gun or rifle, according to its quality. And in one old trading
list I found--vanity of vanities--"one beaver equals looking-glass."
Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
fort with the harvest of winter furs.
Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
falls--falls--falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
the shady side--that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
that a wanderer use his eyes--which the white man seldom does--the limbs
of the northern trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.
One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in the lodge.
Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had
been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
dead.[41]
The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
the outside world.
Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
the leagueless world of the Far North.
Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
the huskies can gallop.
Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
ox-carts that used to screech and creak and jolt over the rutted prairie
roads between Winnipeg and St. Paul. More than 1,500 Hudson's Bay
Company carts manned by 500 traders with tawny spouses and black-eyed
impish children, squatted on top of the load, left Canada for St. Paul
in August and returned in October. The carts were made without a rivet
of iron. Bent wood formed the tires of the two wheels. Hardwood axles
told their woes to the world in the scream of shrill bagpipes. Wooden
racks took the place of cart box. In the shafts trod a staid old ox
guided from the horns or with a halter, drawing the load with collar
instead of a yoke. The harness was of skin thongs. In place of the ox
sometimes was a "shagganippy" pony, raw and unkempt, which the imps
lashed without mercy or the slightest inconvenience to the horse.
A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white decorated the leading
cart. During the Sioux massacres the fur caravans were unmolested, for
the Indians recognised the flags and wished to remain on good terms with
the fur traders.
Ox-carts still bring furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts, and screech
over the corduroyed swamps of the MacKenzie; but the railway has
replaced the caravan as a carrier of freight.
[Illustration: Carrying goods over long _portage_ in MacKenzie River
region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts.]
Hudson's Bay Company steamers now ply on the largest of the inland
rivers with long lines of fur-laden barges in tow; but the canoe
brigades still bring the winter's hunt to the forts in spring. Five to
eight craft make a brigade, each manned by eight paddlers with an
experienced steersman, who is usually also guide. But the one ranking
first in importance is the bowman, whose quick eye must detect signs of
nearing rapids, whose steel-shod pole gives the cue to the other
paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The bowman it is who
leaps out first when there is "tracking"--pulling the craft up-stream by
tow-line--who stands waist high in ice water steadying the rocking bark
lest a sudden swirl spill furs to the bottom, who hands out the packs to
the others when the waters are too turbulent for "tracking" and there
must be a "_portage_," and who leads the brigade on a run--half trot,
half amble--overland to the calmer currents. "Pipes" are the measure of
a _portage_--that is, the pipes smoked while the _voyageurs_ are on the
run. The bowman it is who can thread a network of water-ways by day or
dark, past rapids or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.
The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.
Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.
Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
the letters H. B. C.[42] Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
and rampart.
Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
an American Siberia--the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
waterway, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
without raising a sand bar.
The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.
Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.
Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one
hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
employed as traders, packers, _coureurs_, canoe men, hunters, and
guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
this power was seldom abused.[43] Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
might use lash and triangle and branding along the northern coast; but
officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
terms of justice with their men.
The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
Times without number under the old _régime_ has a Hudson's Bay officer
set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.
Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt
to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says
the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.
And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?
Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies--splendid types of manhood
because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains;
coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot--low and lazy because the great
rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work.
Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay
Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life
in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a
single year.
Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been
assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten,
twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But,
then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single
year.
When fighting rivals long ago, it is true that the Hudson's Bay Company
recognised neither human nor divine law. Grant the charge and weigh it
against the benefits of the company's rule. When Hearne visited
Chippewyans two centuries ago he found the Indians in a state
uncontaminated by the trader; and that state will give the ordinary
reader cold shivers of horror at the details of massacre and
degradation. Every visitor since has reported the same tribe improved in
standard of living under Hudson's Bay rule. Recently a well-known
Canadian governor making an itinerary of the territory round the bay
found the Indians such devout Christians that they put his white retinue
to shame. Returning to civilization, the governor was observed attending
the services of his own denomination with a greater fury than was his
wont. Asked the reason, he confided to a club friend that he would be
_blanked_ if he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians than
he was.
Some of the shiftless Indians may be hopelessly in debt to the company
for advanced provisions, but if the company had not made these advances
the Indians would have starved, and the debt is never exacted by seizure
of the hunt that should go to feed a family.
Of how many other creditors may that be said? Of how many companies that
it has cared for the sick, sought the lost, fed the starving, housed the
homeless? With all its faults, that is the record of the Hudson's Bay
Company.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 39: The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter
seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the
apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.]
[Footnote 40: To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white
traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.]
[Footnote 41: It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.]
[Footnote 42: The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
there would be no trade.]
[Footnote 43: Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
conspicuous for his brutality.]
CHAPTER XV
KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT
Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
that he _feels_ his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
as _that_--jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.
So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
valley--but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first _explored_ the
Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
Company was the first Canadian to _explore_ the lower Columbia; but
before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
her young?
Something, which may be the result of generations of accumulated
observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
brute. It is not sharp-sightedness--though no man is sharper of sight
than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing--though the trapper
learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
is not touch--in the sense of tactile contact--any more than it is touch
that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
senses, a sixth sense--a sense of _feel_, without contact--a sense on
which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of _feel_, his weapon
against the instinct of the brute. What part it plays in the life of
every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.
* * * * *
When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
supplied by "wahboos--little white chap," which is the Indian name for
rabbit.
And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimming over the snow for all
the world like a bouncing football done up in gray fur--all members of
the cat tribe running wherever the "little white chaps" run.
So when the lull fell on the hunt and the mink trapping was well over
and marten had not yet begun, Koot gathered up his traps, and getting a
supply of provisions at the fur post, crossed the white wastes of
prairie to lonely swamp ground where dwarf alder and willow and
cottonwood and poplar and pine grew in a tangle. A few old logs
dovetailed into a square made the wall of a cabin. Over these he
stretched the canvas of his tepee for a roof at a sharp enough angle to
let the heavy snow-fall slide off from its own weight. Moss chinked up
the logs. Snow banked out the wind. Pine boughs made the floor, two logs
with pine boughs, a bed. An odd-shaped stump served as chair or table;
and on the logs of the inner walls hung wedge-shaped slabs of cedar to
stretch the skins. A caribou curtain or bear-skin across the entrance
completed Koot's winter quarters for the rabbit-hunt.
Koot's genealogy was as vague as that of all old trappers hanging round
fur posts. Part of him--that part which served best when he was on the
hunting-field--was Ojibway. The other part, which made him improvise
logs into chair and table and bed, was white man; and that served him
best when he came to bargain with the chief factor over the pelts. At
the fur post he attended the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field,
when suddenly menaced by some great danger, he would cry out in the
Indian tongue words that meant "O Great Spirit!" And it is altogether
probable that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was
worshipping the same Being. When he swore--strange commentary on
civilization--he always used white man's oaths, French _patois_ or
straight English.
Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the Rockies,
Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not usually go to the
wilds alone; but there was so little danger in rabbit-snaring, that
Koot had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog that had drawn
his provisions from the fort on a sort of toboggan sleigh.
The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write their daily
record for those who can read. All over the white swamp were little deep
tracks; here, holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks as
from the bound--bound--bound of something soft; then, again, where the
thicket was like a hedge with only one breach through, the footprints
had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light--the
rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.
All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his
cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful--as they always were
in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest--Koot's circuit of snares
would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
numerous, the foragers that prey--wolf and wolverine and lynx and
bob-cat--will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon--the Indian's hour of the
short shadow--is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
to his cabin, and in it--instead of caching in a tree--keeps fish or
bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.
Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
twine, and traps, and set out in the evening to make the round of his
snares, unaccompanied by the dog. Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and
white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in
the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his
shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin
when that strange sense of _feel_ told him that he was being followed.
What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled--he called it by name.
In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet
as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall.
By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, or the snowbuntings
chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to hedge-top, or the saucy
jay shriek some scolding impudence. A squirrel may chatter out his noisy
protest at some thief for approaching the nuts which lie cached under
the rotten leaves at the foot of the tree, or the sun-warmth may set the
melting snow showering from the swan's-down branches with a patter like
rain. But at nightfall the frost has stilled the drip of thaw. Squirrel
and bird are wrapped in the utter quiet of a gray darkness. And the
marauders that fill midnight with sharp bark, shrill trembling scream,
deep baying over the snow are not yet abroad in the woods. All is
shadowless--stillness--a quiet that is audible.
Koot turned sharply and whistled and called his dog. There wasn't a
sound. Later when the frost began to tighten, sap-frozen twigs would
snap. The ice of the swamp, frozen like rock, would by-and-bye crackle
with the loud echo of a pistol-shot--crackle--and strike--and break as
if artillery were firing a fusillade and infantry shooters answering
sharp. By-and-bye, moon and stars and Northern Lights would set the
shadows dancing; and the wail of the cougar would be echoed by the
lifting scream of its mate. But now, was not a sound, not a motion, not
a shadow, only the noiseless stillness, the shadowless quiet, and the
_feel_, the _feel_ of something back where the darkness was gathering
like a curtain in the bush.
It might, of course, be only a silly long-ears loping under cover
parallel to the man, looking with rabbit curiosity at this strange
newcomer to the swamp home of the animal world. Koot's sense of _feel_
told him that it wasn't a rabbit; but he tried to persuade himself that
it was, the way a timid listener persuades herself that creaking floors
are burglars. Thinking of his many snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
Then it came again, that _feel_ of something coursing behind the
underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
short--and listened--and listened--listened to a snow-muffled silence,
to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.
The sense of _feel_ that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.
That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
lodge. Once his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
the sniff--sniff--sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
answering scream--a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.
"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."
* * * * *
Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
hour of the short shadow.
It did not surprise the trapper after he had heard the lifting wail from
the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of _feel_, but he couldn't
make this thing out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
from the sky and gone back to the sky.
Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
mark like that shuffling padded print.
"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
Koot told himself.
The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
benighted hunters.
This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
there--oh!--I'll be _on_ to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
and his ears failed to localize, to _real_-ize, to visualize what those
little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he marched off very matter
of fact to the next snare.
But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of _feel_ and he had
glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just above the
snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade
something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear-tufts
caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow-crust. Then
the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form hardly differing
from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed to a tiny
blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell-tale light. The big round
body mottled gray and white like the snowy tree
widened--stretched---flattened till it was almost a part of the tossing
pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had passed far
beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward and the owl eyes open and
the big body bunch out like a cat with elevated haunches ready to
spring.
But by-and-bye the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. They grew
scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew
hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming across the
billowy drifts, something black far ahead bounced up, caught a bunting
on the wing, and with another bounce disappeared among the trees.
Koot said one word--"Cat!"--and the dog was off full cry.
Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, he had
known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still hunters
among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail of their ravages,
rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even the remains of a fox
or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from the printings on the white
page that the still hunter had been hunted full cry by coyote or
timber-wolf. Against these wolfish foes the cat had one sure refuge
always--a tree. The hungry coyote might try to starve the bob-cat into
surrender; but just as often, the bob-cat could starve the coyote into
retreat; for if a foolish rabbit darted past, what hungry coyote could
help giving chase? The tree had even defeated both dog and man that
first week when Koot could not find the cat. But a dog in full chase
could follow the trail to a tree, and a man could shoot into the tree.
As the rabbits decreased, Koot set out many traps for the bob-cats now
reckless with hunger, steel-traps and deadfalls and pits and log pens
with a live grouse clucking inside. The midwinter lull was a busy season
for Koot.
Towards March, the sun-glare has produced a crust on the snow that is
almost like glass. For Koot on his snow-shoes this had no danger; but
for the mongrel that was to draw the pelts back to the fort, the snow
crust was more troublesome than glass. Where the crust was thick, with
Koot leading the way snow-shoes and dog and toboggan glided over the
drifts as if on steel runners. But in midday the crust was soft and the
dog went floundering through as if on thin ice, the sharp edge cutting
his feet. Koot tied little buckskin sacks round the dog's feet and made
a few more rounds of the swamp; but the crust was a sign that warned
him it was time to prepare for the marten-hunt. To leave his furs at the
fort, he must cross the prairie while it was yet good travelling for the
dog. Dismantling the little cabin, Koot packed the pelts on the
toboggan, roped all tightly so there could be no spill from an upset,
and putting the mongrel in the traces, led the way for the fort one
night when the snow-crust was hard as ice.
* * * * *
The moon came up over the white fields in a great silver disk. Between
the running man and the silver moon moved black skulking forms--the
foragers on their night hunt. Sometimes a fox loped over a drift, or a
coyote rose ghostly from the snow, or timber-wolves dashed from wooded
ravines and stopped to look till Koot fired a shot that sent them
galloping.
In the dark that precedes daylight, Koot camped beside a grove of
poplars--that is, he fed the dog a fish, whittled chips to make a fire
and boil some tea for himself, then digging a hole in the drift with his
snow-shoe, laid the sleigh to windward and cuddled down between
bear-skins with the dog across his feet.
Daylight came in a blinding glare of sunshine and white snow. The way
was untrodden. Koot led at an ambling run, followed by the dog at a fast
trot, so that the trees were presently left far on the offing and the
runners were out on the bare white prairie with never a mark, tree or
shrub, to break the dazzling reaches of sunshine and snow from horizon
to horizon. A man who is breaking the way must keep his eyes on the
ground; and the ground was so blindingly bright that Koot began to see
purple and yellow and red patches dancing wherever he looked on the
snow. He drew his capote over his face to shade his eyes; but the pace
and the sun grew so hot that he was soon running again unprotected from
the blistering light.
Towards the afternoon, Koot knew that something had gone wrong. Some
distance ahead, he saw a black object against the snow. On the unbroken
white, it looked almost as big as a barrel and seemed at least a mile
away. Lowering his eyes, Koot let out a spurt of speed, and the next
thing he knew he had tripped his snow-shoe and tumbled. Scrambling up,
he saw that a stick had caught the web of his snow-shoe; but where was
the barrel for which he had been steering? There wasn't any barrel at
all--the barrel was this black stick which hadn't been fifty yards away.
Koot rubbed his eyes and noticed that black and red and purple patches
were all over the snow. The drifts were heaving and racing after each
other like waves on an angry sea. He did not go much farther that day;
for every glint of snow scorched his eyes like a hot iron. He camped at
the first bluff and made a poultice of cold tea leaves which he laid
across his blistered face for the night.
Any one who knows the tortures of snow-blindness will understand why
Koot did not sleep that night. It was a long night to the trapper, such
a very long night that the sun had been up for two hours before its heat
burned through the layers of his capote into his eyes and roused him
from sheer pain. Then he sprang up, put up an ungantled hand and knew
from the heat of the sun that it was broad day. But when he took the
bandage off his eyes, all he saw was a black curtain one moment,
rockets and wheels and dancing patches of purple fire the next.
Koot was no fool to become panicky and feeble from sudden peril. He knew
that he was snow-blind on a pathless prairie at least two days away from
the fort. To wait until the snow-blindness had healed would risk the few
provisions that he had and perhaps expose him to a blizzard. The one
rule of the trapper's life is to go ahead, let the going cost what it
may; and drawing his capote over his face, Koot went on.
The heat of the sun told him the directions; and when the sun went down,
the crooning west wind, bringing thaw and snow-crust, was his compass.
And when the wind fell, the tufts of shrub-growth sticking through the
snow pointed to the warm south. Now he tied himself to his dog; and when
he camped beside trees into which he had gone full crash before he knew
they were there, he laid his gun beside the dog and sleigh. Going out
the full length of his cord, he whittled the chips for his fire and
found his way back by the cord.
On the second day of his blindness, no sun came up; nor could he guide
himself by the feel of the air, for there was no wind. It was one of the
dull dead gray days that precedes storms. How would he get his
directions to set out? Memory of last night's travel might only lead him
on the endless circling of the lost. Koot dug his snow-shoe to the base
of a tree, found moss, felt it growing on only one side of the tree,
knew that side must be the shady cold side, and so took his bearings
from what he thought was the north.
Koot said the only time that he knew any fear was on the evening of the
last day. The atmosphere boded storm. The fort lay in a valley.
Somewhere between Koot and that valley ran a trail. What if he had
crossed the trail? What if the storm came and wiped out the trail before
he could reach the fort? All day, whisky-jack and snow-bunting and fox
scurried from his presence; but this night in the dusk when he felt
forward on his hands and knees for the expected trail, the wild
creatures seemed to grow bolder. He imagined that he felt the coyotes
closer than on the other nights. And then the fearful thought came that
he might have passed the trail unheeding. Should he turn back?
Afraid to go forward or back, Koot sank on the ground, unhooded his face
and tried to _force_ his eyes to see. The pain brought biting salty
tears. It was quite useless. Either the night was very dark, or the eyes
were very blind.
And then white man or Indian--who shall say which came uppermost?--Koot
cried out to the Great Spirit. In mockery back came the saucy scold of a
jay.
But that was enough for Koot--it was prompt answer to his prayer; for
where do the jays quarrel and fight and flutter but on the trail?
Running eagerly forward, the trapper felt the ground. The rutted marks
of a "jumper" sleigh cut the hard crust. With a shout, Koot headed down
the sloping path to the valley where lay the fur post, the low hanging
smoke of whose chimneys his eager nostrils had already sniffed.
CHAPTER XVI
OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT--BEING AN ACCOUNT
OF MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT, SIKAK THE SKUNK, WENUSK THE BADGER, AND
OTHERS
I
_Musquash the Musk-rat_
Every chapter in the trapper's life is not a "stunt."
There are the uneventful days when the trapper seems to do nothing but
wander aimlessly through the woods over the prairie along the margin of
rush-grown marshy ravines where the stagnant waters lap lazily among the
flags, though a feathering of ice begins to rim the quiet pools early in
autumn. Unless he is duck-shooting down there in the hidden slough where
is a great "quack-quack" of young teals, the trapper may not uncase his
gun. For a whole morning he lies idly in the sunlight beside some river
where a roundish black head occasionally bobs up only to dive under when
it sees the man. Or else he sits by the hour still as a statue on the
mossy log of a swamp where a long wriggling--wriggling trail marks the
snaky motion of some creature below the amber depths.
To the city man whose days are regulated by clockwork and electric trams
with the ceaseless iteration of gongs and "step fast there!" such a
life seems the type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are
those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures come unsought.
Perhaps when the great profit-and-loss account of the hereafter is cast
up, the trapper may be found to have a greater sum total of happiness,
of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi-millionaire whose life
was one buzzing round of drive and worry and grind. Usually the busy
city man has spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his youth
in study and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's
work. The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering
through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand.
And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without
bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her
realm.
On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching so
lazily over the prarie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp autumn
air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper at once
heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as if the light
green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank bank. But ravines are
not dank in the clear fall days; and by October the musk-plant has
wilted dry. This is a fresh living odour with all the difference between
it and dead leaves that there is between June roses and the dried dust
of a rose jar. The wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of
swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere
in these prairie ravines; and a sense that is part _feel_, part
intuition, part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell,
leads his footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bottom of a
slough.
A covey of teals--very young, or they would not be so bold--flackers up,
wings about with a clatter, then settles again a space farther ahead
when the ducks see that the intruder remains so still. The man parts the
flags, sits down on a log motionless as the log itself--and watches!
Something else had taken alarm from the crunch of the hunter's moccasins
through the dry reeds; for a wriggling trail is there, showing where a
creature has dived below and is running among the wet under-tangle. Not
far off on another log deep in the shade of the highest flags solemnly
perches a small prairie-owl. It is almost the russet shade of the dead
log. It hunches up and blinks stupidly at all this noise in the swamp.
"Oho," thinks the trapper, "so I've disturbed a still hunt," and he sits
if anything stiller than ever, only stooping to lay his gun down and
pick up a stone.
At first there is nothing but the quacking of the ducks at the far end
of the swamp. A lapping of the water against the brittle flags and a
water-snake has splashed away to some dark haunt. The whisky-jack calls
out officious note from a topmost bough, as much as to say: "It's all
right! Me--me!--I'm always there!--I've investigated!--it's all
right!--he's quite harmless!" And away goes the jay on business of state
among the gopher mounds.
Then the interrupted activity of the swamp is resumed, scolding mother
ducks reading the riot act to young teals, old geese coming craning and
craning their long necks to drink at the water's edge, lizards and
water-snakes splashing down the banks, midgets and gnats sunning
themselves in clouds during the warmth of the short autumn days, with a
feel in the air as of crisp ripeness, drying fruit, the harvest-home of
the year. In all the prairie region north and west of Minnesota--the
Indian land of "sky-coloured water"--the sloughs lie on the prairie
under a crystal sky that turns pools to silver. On this almost
motionless surface are mirrored as if by an etcher's needle the sky
above, feathered wind clouds, flag stems, surrounding cliffs, even the
flight of birds on wing. As the mountains stand for majesty, the
prairies for infinity, so the marsh lands are types of repose.
But it is not a lifeless repose. Barely has the trapper settled himself
when a little sharp black nose pokes up through the water at the fore
end of the wriggling trail. A round rat-shaped head follows this
twitching proboscis. Then a brownish earth-coloured body swims with a
wriggling sidelong movement for the log, where roosts the blinking
owlet. A little noiseless leap! and a dripping musk-rat with long flat
tail and webbed feet scrabbles up the moss-covered tree towards the
stupid bird. Another moment, and the owl would have toppled into the
water with a pair of sharp teeth clutched to its throat. Then the man
shies a well-aimed stone!
Splash! Flop! The owl is flapping blindly through the flags to another
hiding-place, while the wriggle-wriggle of the waters tells where the
marsh-rat has darted away under the tangled growth. From other idle days
like these, the trapper has learned that musk-rats are not solitary but
always to be found in colonies. Now if the musk-rat were as wise as the
beaver to whom the Indians say he is closely akin, that alarmed
marauder would carry the news of the man-intruder to the whole swamp.
Perhaps if the others remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash
of a gun what man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight
of every musk-rat from the marsh. But musquash--little beaver, as the
Indians call him--is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened
from his home as _amisk_,[44] the beaver. In fact, nature's provision
for the musk-rat's protection seems to have emboldened the little rodent
almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of that burnt umber shade
hardly to be distinguished from the earth. At one moment his sharp nose
cuts the water, at the next he is completely hidden in the soft clay of
the under-tangle; and while you are straining for a sight of him
through the pool, he has scurried across a mud bank to his burrow.
Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws wading through
swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting from the Chesapeake and
the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky-coloured water" on the far prairie,
little musquash still yields 6,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of
diminishing. A hundred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held
in esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of Canada sent out
only 17,000 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did musk-rat grow in
favour as a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual
thing for 200,000 musk-rat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay
Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier furs than
in the United States, so that the all-fur coat is in greater demand than
the fur-lined; but in Canada, not less than 2,000,000 musk-rat furs are
taken every year. In the United States the total is close on 4,000,000.
In one city alone, St. Paul, 50,000 musk-rat-skins are cured every year.
A single stretch of good marsh ground has yielded that number of skins
year after year without a sign of the hunt telling on the prolific
little musquash. Multiply 50,000 by prices varying from 7 cents to 75
cents and the value of the musk-rat-hunt becomes apparent.
What is the secret of the musk-rat's survival while the strong creatures
of the chase like buffalo and timber-wolf have been almost exterminated?
In the first place, settlers can't farm swamps; so the musk-rat thrives
just as well in the swamps of New Jersey to-day as when the first white
hunter set foot in America. Then musquash lives as heartily on owls and
frogs and snakes as on water mussels and lily-pads. If one sort of food
fails, the musk-rat has as omnivorous powers of digestion as the bear
and changes his diet. Then he can hide as well in water as on land. And
most important of all, musk-rat's family is as numerous as a cat's, five
to nine rats in a litter, and two or three litters a year. These are the
points that make for little musquash's continuance in spite of all that
shot and trap can do.
Having discovered what the dank whiff, half animal, half vegetable,
signified, the trapper sets about finding the colony. He knows there is
no risk of the little still-hunter carrying alarm to the other
musk-rats. If he waits, it is altogether probable that the fleeing
musk-rat will come up and swim straight for the colony. On the other
hand, the musk-rat may have scurried overland through the rushes.
Besides, the trapper observed tracks, tiny leaf-like tracks as of little
webbed feet, over the soft clay of the marsh bank. These will lead to
the colony, so the trapper rises and parting the rushes not too noisily,
follows the little footprint along the margin of the swamp.
Here the track is lost at the narrow ford of an inflowing stream, but
across the creek lies a fallen poplar littered with--what? The feathers
and bones of a dead owlet. Balancing himself--how much better the
moccasins cling than boots!--the trapper crosses the log and takes up
the trail through the rushes. But here musquash has dived off into the
water for the express purpose of throwing a possible pursuer off the
scent. But the tracks betrayed which way musquash was travelling; so the
trapper goes on, knowing if he does not find the little haycock houses
on this side, he can cross to the other.
[Illustration: Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
Hudson's Bay Company, beyond tree line; hence the houses are built of
imported timber, with thatch roofs.]
Presently, he almost stumbles over what sent the musk-rat diving just at
this place. It is the wreck of a wolverine's ravage--a little wattled
dome-shaped house exposed to that arch-destroyer by the shrinking of the
swamp. So shallow has the water become, that a wolverine has easily
waded and leaped clear across to the roof of the musk-rat's house. A
beaver-dam two feet thick cannot resist the onslaught of the wolverine's
claws; how much less will this round nest of reeds and grass and
mosses cemented together with soft clay? The roof has been torn from the
domed house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the domestic
economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round walls inside, a floor or
gallery of sticks and grasses, where the family had lived in an air
chamber above the water, rough walls below the water-line and two or
three little openings that must have been safely under water before the
swamp receded. Perhaps a mussel or lily bulb has been left in the
deserted larder. From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the
topmost wall will not measure more than two or three feet. If the
swamp had not dried here, the stupid little musk-rats that escaped the
ravager's claws would probably have come back to the wrecked house,
built up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till another
wolverine came. But a water doorway the musk-rat must have. That he has
learned by countless assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh
retreated the musk-rats abandoned their house.
All about the deserted house are runways, tiny channels across oozy
peninsulas and islands of the musk-rat's diminutive world such as a very
small beaver might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry patch or
mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and prods an earth bank with a
stick. It is as he thought--hollow; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the
clay wall where the refugees from this house had scuttled from the
wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water has shrunk--that was the
danger signal to the musk-rat; and there had been a grand moving to a
deeper part of the swamp. Perhaps, after all, this is a very old house
not used since last winter.
Going back to the bank, the trapper skirts through the crush of brittle
rushes round the swamp. Coming sharply on deeper water, a dank, stagnant
bayou, heavy with the smell of furry life, the trapper pushes aside the
flags, peers out and sees what resembles a prairie-dog town on
water--such a number of wattled houses that they had shut in the water
as with a dam. Too many flags and willows lie over the colony for a
glimpse of the tell-tale wriggling trail across the water; but from the
wet tangle of grass and moss comes an oozy pattering.
If it were winter, the trapper could proceed as he would against a
beaver colony, staking up the outlet from the swamp, trenching the ice
round the different houses, breaking open the roofs and penning up any
fugitives in their own bank burrows till he and his dog and a spear
could clear out the gallery. But in winter there is more important work
than hunting musk-rat. Musk-rat-trapping is for odd days before the
regular hunt.
Opening the sack which he usually carries on his back, the trapper draws
out three dozen small traps no larger than a rat or mouse trap. Some of
these he places across the runways without any bait; for the musk-rat
must pass this way. Some he smears with strong-smelling pomatum. Some he
baits with carrot or apple. Others he does not bait at all, simply
laying them on old logs where he knows the owlets roost by day. But each
of the traps--bait or no bait--he attaches to a stake driven into the
water so that the prisoner will be held under when he plunges to escape
till he is drowned. Otherwise, he would gnaw his foot free of the trap
and disappear in a burrow.
If the marsh is large, there will be more than one musk-rat colony.
Having exhausted his traps on the first, the trapper lies in wait at the
second. When the moon comes up over the water, there is a great
splashing about the musk-rat nests; for autumn is the time for
house-building and the musk-rats work at night. If the trapper is an
Eastern man, he will wade in as they do in New Jersey; but if he is a
type of the Western hunter, he lies on the log among the rushes, popping
a shot at every head that appears in the moonlit water. His dog swims
and dives for the quarry. By the time the stupid little musk-rats have
taken alarm and hidden, the man has twenty or thirty on the bank. Going
home, he empties and resets the traps.
Thirty marten traps that yield six martens do well. Thirty musk-rat
traps are expected to give thirty musk-rats. Add to that the twenty
shot, and what does the day's work represent? Here are thirty skins of a
coarse light reddish hair, such as lines the poor man's overcoat. These
will sell for from 7 to 15 cents each. They may go roughly for $3 at the
fur post. Here are ten of the deeper brown shades, with long soft fur
that lines a lady's cloak. They are fine enough to pass for mink with a
little dyeing, or imitation seal if they are properly plucked. These
will bring 25 or 30 cents--say $2.50 in all. But here are ten skins,
deep, silky, almost black, for which a Russian officer will pay high
prices, skins that will go to England, and from England to Paris, and
from Paris to St. Petersburg with accelerating cost mark till the
Russian grandee is paying $1 or more for each pelt. The trapper will ask
30, 40, 50 cents for these, making perhaps $3.50 in all. Then this idle
fellow's day has totaled up to $9, not a bad day's work, considering he
did not go to the university for ten years to learn his craft, did not
know what wear and tear and drive meant as he worked, did not spend more
than a few cents' worth of shot. But for his musk-rat-pelts the man will
not get $9 in coin unless he lives very near the great fur markets. He
will get powder and clothing and food and tobacco whose first cost has
been increased a hundredfold by ship rates and railroad rates, by
keel-boat freight and pack-horse expenses and _portage_ charges past
countless rapids. But he will get all that he needs, all that he wants,
all that his labour is worth, this "lazy vagabond" who spends half his
time idling in the sun. Of how many other men can that be said?
But what of the ruthless slaughter among the little musk-rats? Does
humanity not revolt at the thought? Is this trapping not after all
brutal butchery?
Animal kindliness--if such a thing exists among musk-rats--could hardly
protest against the slaughter, seeing the musk-rats themselves wage as
ruthless a war against water-worm and owlet as man wages against
musk-rats. It is the old question, should animal life be sacrificed to
preserve human life? To that question there is only one answer. Linings
for coats are more important life-savers than all the humane societies
of the world put together. It is probable that the first thing the
prehistoric man did to preserve his own life when he realized himself
was to slay some destructive animal and appropriate its coat.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 44: _Amisk_, the Chippewyan, _umisk_, the Cree, with much the
same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he considered the
variation in Indian language more a matter of dialect than difference in
meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had any
difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan,
and Assiniboine. For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is
_wahboos_ on the Upper Ottawa, _wapus_ on the Saskatchewan, _wapauce_ on
the MacKenzie.]
II
_Sikak the Skunk_
Sikak the skunk it is who supplies the best imitations of sable. But
cleanse the fur never so well, on a damp day it still emits the heavy
sickening odour that betrays its real nature. That odour is sikak's
invincible defence against the white trapper. The hunter may follow the
little four-abreast galloping footprints that lead to a hole among
stones or to rotten logs, but long before he has reached the
nesting-place of his quarry comes a stench against which white blood is
powerless. Or the trapper may find an unexpected visitor in one of the
pens which he has dug for other animals--a little black creature the
shape of a squirrel and the size of a cat with white stripings down his
back and a bushy tail. It is then a case of a quick deadly shot, or the
man will be put to rout by an odour that will pollute the air for miles
around and drive him off that section of the hunting-field. The
cuttlefish is the only other creature that possesses as powerful means
of defence of a similar nature, one drop of the inky fluid which it
throws out to hide it from pursuers burning the fisherman's eyes like
scalding acid. As far as white trappers are concerned, sikak is only
taken by the chance shots of idle days. Yet the Indian hunts the skunk
apparently utterly oblivious of the smell. Traps, poison, deadfalls,
pens are the Indian weapons against the skunk; and a Cree will
deliberately skin and stretch a pelt in an atmosphere that is blue with
what is poison to the white man.
The only case I ever knew of white trappers hunting the skunk was of
three men on the North Saskatchewan. One was an Englishman who had been
long in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company and knew all the animals
of the north. The second was the guide, a French-Canadian, and the third
a Sandy, fresh "frae oot the land o' heather." The men were wakened one
night by the noise of some animal scrambling through the window into
their cabin and rummaging in the dark among the provisions. The
Frenchman sprang for a light and Sandy got hold of his gun.
"Losh, mon, it's a wee bit beastie a' strip't black and white wi' a tail
like a so'dier's cocade!"
That information brought the Englishman to his feet howling, "Don't
shoot it! Don't shoot it! Leave that thing alone, I tell you!"
But Sandy being a true son of Scotia with a Presbyterian love of
argument wished to debate the question.
"An' what for wu'd a leave it eating a' the oatmeal? I'll no leave it
rampagin' th' eatables--I wull be pokin' it oot!--shoo!--shoo!"
At that the Frenchman flung down the light and bolted for the door,
followed by the English trader cursing between set teeth that before
"that blundering blockhead had argued the matter" something would
happen.
Something did happen.
Sandy came through the door with such precipitate haste that the topmost
beam brought his head a mighty thwack, roaring out at the top of his
voice that the deil was after him for a' the sins that iver he had
committed since he was born.
III
_Wenusk the Badger_
Badger, too, is one of the furs taken by the trapper on idle days. East
of St. Paul and Winnipeg, the fur is comparatively unknown, or if known,
so badly prepared that it is scarcely recognisable for badger. This is
probably owing to differences in climate. Badger in its perfect state is
a long soft fur, resembling wood marten, with deep overhairs almost the
length of one's hand and as dark as marten, with underhairs as thick and
soft and yielding as swan's-down, shading in colour from fawn to grayish
white. East of the Mississippi, there is too much damp in the atmosphere
for such a long soft fur. Consequently specimens of badger seen in the
East must either be sheared of the long overhairs or left to mat and
tangle on the first rainy day. In New York, Quebec, Montreal, and
Toronto--places where the finest furs should be on sale if anywhere--I
have again and again asked for badger, only to be shown a dull matted
short fawnish fur not much superior to cheap dyed furs. It is not
surprising there is no demand for such a fur and Eastern dealers have
stopped ordering it. In the North-West the most common mist during the
winter is a frost mist that is more a snow than a rain, so there is
little injury to furs from moisture. Here the badger is prime, long,
thick, and silky, almost as attractive as ermine if only it were
enhanced by as high a price. Whether badger will ever grow in favour
like musk-rat or 'coon, and play an important part in the returns of the
fur exporters, is doubtful. The world takes its fashions from European
capitals; and European capitals are too damp for badger to be in
fashion with them. Certainly, with the private dealers of the North and
West, badger is yearly becoming more important.
Like the musk-rat, badger is prime in the autumn. Wherever the
hunting-grounds of the animals are, there will the hunting-grounds of
the trapper be. Badgers run most where gophers sit sunning themselves on
the clay mounds, ready to bolt down to their subterranean burrows on the
first approach of an enemy. Eternal enemies these two are, gopher and
badger, though they both live in ground holes, nest their lairs with
grasses, run all summer and sleep all winter, and alike prey on the
creatures smaller than themselves--mice, moles, and birds. The gopher,
or ground squirrel, is smaller than the wood squirrel, while the badger
is larger than a Manx cat, with a shape that varies according to the
exigencies of the situation. Normally, he is a flattish, fawn-coloured
beast, with a turtle-shaped body, little round head, and small legs with
unusually strong claws. Ride after the badger across the prairie and he
stretches out in long, lithe shape, resembling a baby cougar, turning at
every pace or two to snap at your horse, then off again at a hulking
scramble of astonishing speed. Pour water down his burrow to compel him
to come up or down, and he swells out his body, completely filling the
passage, so that his head, which is downward, is in dry air, while his
hind quarters alone are in the water. In captivity the badger is a
business-like little body, with very sharp teeth, of which his keeper
must beware, and some of the tricks of the skunk, but inclined, on the
whole, to mind his affairs if you will mind yours. Once a day regularly
every afternoon out of his lair he emerges for the most comical sorts of
athletic exercises. Hour after hour he will trot diagonally--because
that gives him the longest run--from corner to corner of his pen,
rearing up on his hind legs as he reaches one corner, rubbing the back
of his head, then down again and across to the other corner, where he
repeats the performance. There can be no reason for the badger doing
this, unless it was his habit in the wilds when he trotted about leaving
dumb signs on mud banks and brushwood by which others of his kind might
know where to find him at stated times.
Sunset is the time when he is almost sure to be among the gopher
burrows. In vain the saucy jay shrieks out a warning to the gophers. Of
all the prairie creatures, they are the stupidest, the most beset with
curiosity to know what that jay's shriek may mean. Sunning themselves in
the last rays of daylight, the gophers perch on their hind legs to wait
developments of what the jay announced. But the badger's fur and the
gopher mounds are almost the same colour. He has pounced on some playful
youngsters before the rest see him. Then there is a wild scuttling down
to the depths of the burrows. That, too, is vain; for the badger begins
ripping up the clay bank like a grisly, down--down--in pursuit, two,
three, five feet, even twelve.
Then is seen one of the most curious freaks in all the animal life of
the prairie. The underground galleries of the gophers connect and lead
up to different exits. As the furious badger comes closer and closer on
the cowering gophers, the little cowards lose heart, dart up the
galleries to open doors, and try to escape through the grass of the
prairie. But no sooner is the badger hard at work than a gray form seems
to rise out of the earth, a coyote who had been slinking to the rear all
the while; and as the terrified gophers scurry here, scurry there,
coyote's white teeth snap!--snap! He is
here--there--everywhere--pouncing--jumping--having the fun of his life,
gobbling gophers as cats catch mice. Down in the bottom of the burrow,
the badger may get half a dozen poor cooped huddling prisoners; but the
coyote up on the prairie has devoured a whole colony.
Do these two, badger and coyote, consciously hunt together? Some old
trappers vow they do--others just as vehemently that they don't. The
fact remains that wherever the badger goes gopher-hunting on an
unsettled prairie, there the coyote skulks reaping reward of all the
badger's work. The coincidence is no stranger than the well-known fact
that sword-fish and thrasher--two different fish--always league together
to attack the whale.
One thing only can save the gopher colony, and that is the gun barrel
across yon earth mound where a trapper lies in wait for the coming of
the badger.
IV
_The 'Coon_
Sir Alexander MacKenzie reported that in 1798 the North-West Company
sent out only 100 raccoon from the fur country. Last year the city of
St. Paul alone cured 115,000 'coon-skins. What brought about the change?
Simply an appreciation of the qualities of 'coon, which combines the
greatest warmth with the lightest weight and is especially adapted for
a cold climate and constant wear. What was said of badger applies with
greater force to 'coon. The 'coon in the East is associated in one's
mind with cabbies, in the West with fashionably dressed men and women.
And there is just as wide a difference in the quality of the fur as in
the quality of the people. The cabbies' 'coon coat is a rough yellow fur
with red stripes. The Westerner's 'coon is a silky brown fur with black
stripes. One represents the fall hunt of men and boys round hollow logs,
the other the midwinter hunt of a professional trapper in the Far North.
A dog usually bays the 'coon out of hiding in the East. Tiny tracks,
like a child's hand, tell the Northern hunter where to set his traps.
Wahboos the rabbit, musquash the musk-rat, sikak the skunk, wenusk the
badger, and the common 'coon--these are the little chaps whose hunt
fills the idle days of the trapper's busy life. At night, before the
rough stone hearth which he has built in his cabin, he is still busy by
fire-light preparing their pelts. Each skin must be stretched and cured.
Turning the skin fur side in, the trapper pushes into the pelt a
wedge-shaped slab of spliced cedar. Into the splice he shoves another
wedge of wood which he hammers in, each blow widening the space and
stretching the skin. All pelts are stretched fur in but the fox. Tacking
the stretched skin on a flat board, the trapper hangs it to dry till he
carries all to the fort; unless, indeed, he should need a garment for
himself--cap, coat, or gantlets--in which case he takes out a square
needle and passes his evenings like a tailor, sewing.
CHAPTER XVII
THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES SAKWASEW THE MINK, NEKIK THE
OTTER, WUCHAK THE FISHER, AND WAPISTAN THE MARTEN
I
_Sakwasew the Mink_
There are other little chaps with more valuable fur than musquash, whose
skin seldom attains higher honour than inside linings, and wahboos,
whose snowy coat is put to the indignity of imitating ermine with a
dotting of black cat for the ermine's jet tip. There are mink and otter
and fisher and fox and ermine and sable, all little fellows with pelts
worth their weight in coin of the realm.
On one of those idle days when the trapper seems to be doing nothing but
lying on his back in the sun, he has witnessed a curious, but common,
battle in pantomime between bird and beast. A prairie-hawk circles and
drops, lifts and wheels again with monotonous silent persistence above
the swamp. What quarry does he seek, this lawless forager of the upper
airs still hunting a hidden nook of the low prairie? If he were out
purely for exercise, like the little badger when it goes rubbing the
back of its head from post to post, there would be a buzzing of wings
and shrill lonely callings to an unseen mate.
But the circling hawk is as silent as the very personification of death.
Apparently he can't make up his mind for the death-drop on some rat or
frog down there in the swamp. The trapper notices that the hawk keeps
circling directly above the place where the waters of the swamp tumble
from the ravine in a small cataract to join a lower river. He knows,
too, from the rich orange of the plumage that the hawk is young. An
older fellow would not be advertising his intentions in this fashion.
Besides, an older hawk would have russet-gray feathering. Is the
rascally young hawk meditating a clutch of talons round some of the
unsuspecting trout that usually frequent the quiet pools below a
waterfall. Or does he aim at bigger game? A young hawk is bold with the
courage that has not yet learned the wisdom of caution. That is why
there are so many more of the brilliant young red hawks in our museums
than old grizzled gray veterans whose craft circumvents the specimen
hunter's cunning. Now the trapper comes to have as keen a sense of
_feel_ for all the creatures of the wilds as the creatures of the wilds
have for man; so he shifts his position that he may find what is
attracting the hawk.
Down on the pebbled beach below the waterfalls lies an auburn bundle of
fur, about the size of a very long, slim, short-legged cat, still as a
stone--some member of the weasel family gorged torpid with fish,
stretched out full length to sleep in the sun. To sleep, ah, yes, and as
the Danish prince said, "perchance to dream"; for all the little fellows
of river and prairie take good care never to sleep where they are
exposed to their countless enemies. This sleep of the weasel arouses
the man's suspicion. The trapper draws out his field-glass. The sleeper
is a mink, and its sleep is a sham with beady, red eyes blinking a deal
too lively for real death. Why does it lie on its back rigid and
straight as if it were dead with all four tiny paws clutched out stiff?
The trapper scans the surface of the swamp to see if some foolish
musk-rat is swimming dangerously near the sleeping mink.
Presently the hawk circles lower--lower!--Drop, straight as a stone! Its
talons are almost in the mink's body, when of a sudden the sleeper
awakens--awakens--with a leap of the four stiff little feet and a
darting spear-thrust of snapping teeth deep in the neck of the hawk! At
first the hawk rises tearing furiously at the clinging mink with its
claws. The wings sag. Down bird and beast fall. Over they roll on the
sandy beach, hawk and mink, over and over with a thrashing of the hawk's
wings to beat the treacherous little vampire off. Now the blood-sucker
is on top clutching--clutching! Now the bird flounders up craning his
neck from the death-grip. Then the hawk falls on his back. His wings are
prone. They cease to flutter.
Running to the bank the trapper is surprised to see the little
blood-sucker making off with the prey instead of deserting it as all
creatures akin to the weasel family usually do. That means a family of
mink somewhere near, to be given their first lesson in bird-hunting, in
mink-hawking by the body of this poor, dead, foolish gyrfalcon.
By a red mark here, by a feather there, crushed grass as of something
dragged, a little webbed footprint on the wet clay, a tiny marking of
double dots where the feet have crossed a dry stone, the trapper slowly
takes up the trail of the mink. Mink are not prime till the late fall.
Then the reddish fur assumes the shades of the russet grasses where they
run until the white of winter covers the land. Then--as if nature were
to exact avengement for all the red slaughter the mink has wrought
during the rest of the year--his coat becomes dark brown, almost black,
the very shade that renders him most conspicuous above snow to all the
enemies of the mink world. But while the trapper has no intention of
destroying what would be worthless now but will be valuable in the
winter, it is not every day that even a trapper has a chance to trail a
mink back to its nest and see the young family.
But suddenly the trail stops. Here is a sandy patch with some tumbled
stones under a tangle of grasses and a rivulet not a foot away.
Ah--there it is--a nest or lair, a tiny hole almost hidden by the
rushes! But the nest seems empty. Fast as the trapper has come, the mink
came faster and hid her family. To one side, the hawk had been dropped
among the rushes. The man pokes a stick in the lair but finds nothing.
Putting in his hand, he is dragging out bones, feathers, skeleton
musk-rats, putrid frogs, promiscuous remnants of other quarries brought
to the burrow by the mink, when a little cattish _s-p-i-t!_ almost
touches his hand. His palm closes over something warm, squirming,
smaller than a kitten with very downy fur, on a soft mouse-like skin,
eyes that are still blind and a tiny mouth that neither meows nor
squeaks, just _spits!--spits!--spits!_--in impotent viperish fury. All
the other minklets, the mother had succeeded in hiding under the
grasses, but somehow this one had been left. Will he take it home and
try the experiment of rearing a young mink with a family of kittens?
The trapper calls to mind other experiments. There was the little beaver
that chewed up his canoe and gnawed a hole of escape through the door.
There were the three little bob-cats left in the woods behind his cabin
last year when he refrained from setting out traps and tied up his dog
to see if he could not catch the whole family, mother and kittens, for
an Eastern museum. Furtively at first, the mother had come to feed her
kittens. Then the man had put out rugs to keep the kittens warm and lain
in wait for the mother; but no sooner did she see her offspring
comfortably cared for, than she deserted them entirely, evidently acting
on the proverb that the most gracious enemy is the most dangerous, or
else deciding that the kits were so well off that she was not needed.
Adopting the three little wild-cats, the trapper had reared them past
blind-eyes, past colic and dumps and all the youthful ills to which live
kittens are heirs, when trouble began. The longing for the wilds came.
Even catnip green and senna tea boiled can't cure that. So keenly did
the gipsy longing come to one little bob that he perished escaping to
the woods by way of the chimney flue. The second little bob succeeded in
escaping through a parchment stop-gap that served the trapper as a
window. And the third bobby dealt such an ill-tempered gash to the dog's
nose that the combat ended in instant death for the cat.
Thinking over these experiments, the trapper wisely puts the mink back
in the nest with words which it would have been well for that litle ball
of down to have understood. He told it he would come back for it next
winter and to be sure to have its best black coat on. For the little
first-year minks wear dark coats, almost as fine as Russian sable.
Yes--he reflects, poking it back to the hole and retreating quickly so
that the mother will return--better leave it till the winter; for wasn't
it Koot who put a mink among his kittens, only to have the little viper
set on them with tooth and claw as soon as its eyes opened? Also mink
are bad neighbours to a poultry-yard. Forty chickens in a single night
will the little mink destroy, not for food but--to quote man's
words--for the zest of the sport. The mink, you must remember, like
other pot-hunters, can boast of a big bag.
The trapper did come back next fall. It was when he was ranging all the
swamp-lands for beaver-dams. Swamp lands often mean beaver-dams; and
trappers always note what stops the current of a sluggish stream.
Frequently it is a beaver colony built across a valley in the mountains,
or stopping up the outlet of a slough. The trapper was sleeping under
his canoe on the banks of the river where the swamp tumbled out from the
ravine. Before retiring to what was a boat by day and a bed by night, he
had set out a fish net and some loose lines--which the flow of the
current would keep in motion--below the waterfall. Carelessly, next day,
he threw the fish-heads among the stones. The second morning he found
such a multitude of little tracks dotting the rime of the hoar frost
that he erected a tent back from the waterfalls, and decided to stay
trapping there till the winter. The fish-heads were no longer thrown
away. They were left among the stones in small steel-traps weighted with
other stones, or attached to a loose stick that would impede flight.
And if the poor gyrfalcon could have seen the mink held by the jaws of a
steel-trap, hissing, snarling, breaking its teeth on the iron, spitting
out all the rage of its wicked nature, the bird would have been avenged.
And as winter deepened, the quality of minks taken from the traps became
darker, silkier, crisper, almost brown black in some of the young, but
for light fur on the under lip. The Indians say that sakwasew the mink
would sell his family for a fish, and as long as fish lay among the
stones, the trapper gathered his harvest of fur: reddish mink that would
be made into little neck ruffs and collar pieces, reddish brown mink
that would be sewed into costly coats and cloaks, rare brownish black
mink that would be put into the beautiful flat scarf collars almost as
costly as a full coat. And so the mink-hunt went on merrily for the man
till the midwinter lull came at Christmas. For that year the mink-hunt
was over.
II
_Nekik the Otter_
Sakwasew was not the only fisher at the pool below the falls. On one of
those idle days when the trapper sat lazily by the river side, a round
head slightly sunburned from black to russet had hobbled up to the
surface of the water, peered sharply at the man sitting so still,
paddled little flipper-like feet about, then ducked down again.
Motionless as the mossed log under him sits the man; and in a moment up
comes the little black head again, round as a golf ball, about the size
of a very large cat, followed by three other little bobbing heads--a
mother otter teaching her babies to dive and swim and duck from the
river surface to the burrows below the water along the river bank.
Perhaps the trapper has found a dead fish along this very bank with only
the choice portions of the body eaten--a sure sign that nekik the otter,
the little epicure of the water world, has been fishing at this river.
With a scarcely perceptible motion, the man turns his head to watch the
swimmers. Instantly, down they plunge, mother and babies, to come to the
surface again higher up-stream, evidently working up-current like the
beaver in spring for a glorious frolic in the cold clear waters of the
upper sources. At one place on the sandy beach they all wade ashore. The
man utters a slight "Hiss!" Away they scamper, the foolish youngsters,
landward instead of to the safe water as the hesitating mother would
have them do, all the little feet scrambling over the sand with the
funny short steps of a Chinese lady in tight boots. Maternal care proves
stronger than fear. The frightened mother follows the young otter and
will no doubt read them a sound lecture on land dangers when she has
rounded them back to the safe water higher up-stream.
Of all wild creatures, none is so crafty in concealing its lairs as the
otter. Where did this family come from? They had not been swimming
up-stream; for the man had been watching on the river bank long before
they appeared on the surface. Stripping, the trapper dives in
mid-stream, then half wades, half swims along the steepest bank, running
his arm against the clay cliff to find a burrow. On land he could not do
this at the lair of the otter; for the smell of the man-touch would be
left on his trail, and the otter, keener of scent and fear than the
mink, would take alarm. But for the same reason that the river is the
safest refuge for the otter, it is the surest hunting for the man--water
does not keep the scent of a trail. So the man runs his arm along the
bank. The river is the surest hunting for the man, but not the safest.
If an old male were in the bank burrow now, or happened to be emerging
from grass-lined subterranean air chambers above the bank gallery, it
might be serious enough for the exploring trapper. One bite of nekik the
otter has crippled many an Indian. Knowing from the remnants of
half-eaten fish and from the holes in the bank that he has found an
otter runway, the man goes home as well satisfied as if he had done a
good day's work.
And so that winter when he had camped below the swamp for the mink-hunt,
the trapper was not surprised one morning to find a half-eaten fish on
the river bank. Sakwasew the mink takes good care to leave no remnants
of his greedy meal. What he cannot eat he caches. Even if he has
strangled a dozen water-rats in one hunt, they will be dragged in a heap
and covered. The half-eaten fish left exposed is not mink's work. Otter
has been here and otter will come back; for as the frost hardens, only
those pools below the falls keep free from ice. No use setting traps
with fish-heads as long as fresh fish are to be had for the taking.
Besides, the man has done nothing to conceal his tracks; and each
morning the half-eaten fish lie farther off the line of the man-trail.
By-and-bye the man notices that no more half-eaten fish are on his side
of the river. Little tracks of webbed feet furrowing a deep rut in the
soft snow of the frozen river tell that nekik has taken alarm and is
fishing from the other side. And when Christmas comes with a dwindling
of the mink-hunt, the man, too, crosses to the other side. Here he finds
that the otter tracks have worn a path that is almost a toboggan slide
down the crusted snow bank to the iced edge of the pool. By this time
nekik's pelt is prime, almost black, and as glossy as floss. By this
time, too, the fish are scarce and the epicure has become ravenous as a
pauper. One night when the trapper was reconnoitring the fish hole, he
had approached the snow bank so noiselessly that he came on a whole
colony of otters without their knowledge of his presence. Down the snow
bank they tumbled, head-first, tail-first, slithering through the snow
with their little paws braced, rolling down on their backs like lads
upset from a toboggan, otter after otter, till the man learned that the
little beasts were not fishing at all, but coasting the snow bank like
youngsters on a night frolic. No sooner did one reach the bottom than up
he scampered to repeat the fun; and sometimes two or three went down in
a rolling bunch mixed up at the foot of a slide as badly as a couple of
toboggans that were unpremeditatedly changing their occupants. Bears
wrestle. The kittens of all the cat tribe play hide and seek. Little
badger finds it fun to run round rubbing the back of his head on things;
and here was nekik the otter at the favourite amusement of his
kind--coasting down a snow bank.
If the trapper were an Indian, he would lie in wait at the landing-place
and spear the otter as they came from the water. But the white man's
craft is deeper. He does not wish to frighten the otter till the last
had been taken. Coming to the slide by day, he baits a steel-trap with
fish and buries it in the snow just where the otter will be coming down
the hill or up from the pool. Perhaps he places a dozen such traps
around the hole with nothing visible but the frozen fish lying on the
surface. If he sets his traps during a snow-fall, so much the better.
His own tracks will be obliterated and the otter's nose will discover
the fish. Then he takes a bag filled with some substance of animal
odour, pomatum, fresh meat, pork, or he may use the flesh side of a
fresh deer-hide. This he drags over the snow where he has stepped. He
may even use a fresh hide to handle the traps, as a waiter uses a
serviette to pass plates. There must be no man-smell, no man-track near
the otter traps.
While the mink-hunt is fairly over by midwinter, otter-trapping lasts
from October to May. The value of all rare furs, mink, otter, marten,
ermine, varies with two things: (1) the latitude of the hunting-field;
(2) the season of the hunt. For instance, ask a trapper of Minnesota or
Lake Superior what he thinks of the ermine, and he will tell you that it
is a miserable sort of weasel of a dirty drab brown not worth
twenty-five cents a skin. Ask a trapper of the North Saskatchewan what
he thinks of ermine; and he will tell you it is a pretty little whitish
creature good for fur if trapped late enough in the winter and always
useful as a lining. But ask a trapper of the Arctic about the ermine,
and he describes it as the finest fur that is taken except the silver
fox, white and soft as swan's-down, with a tail-tip like black onyx.
This difference in the fur of the animal explains the wide variety of
prices paid. Ermine not worth twenty-five cents in Wisconsin might be
worth ten times as much on the Saskatchewan.
[Illustration:
Fur press in use
at Fort Good
Hope, at the
extreme north
of Hudson's
Bay Company's
territory.
Old wedge press
in use at Fort
Resolution, of
the sub-Arctics.
Types of Fur Presses.]
So it is with the otter. All trapped between latitude thirty-five and
sixty is good fur; and the best is that taken toward the end of winter
when scarcely a russet hair should be found in the long over-fur of
nekik's coat.
III
_Wuchak the Fisher, or Pekan_
Wherever the waste of fish or deer is thrown, there will be found lines
of double tracks not so large as the wild-cat's, not so small as the
otter's, and without the same webbing as the mink's. This is wuchak the
fisher, or pekan, commonly called "the black cat"--who, in spite of his
fishy name, hates water as cats hate it. And the tracks are double
because pekan travel in pairs. He is found along the banks of streams
because he preys on fish and fisher, on mink and otter and musk-rat, on
frogs and birds and creatures that come to drink. He is, after all, a
very greedy fellow, not at all particular about his diet, and, like all
gluttons, easily snared. While mink and otter are about, the trapper
will waste no steel-traps on pekan. A deadfall will act just as
effectively; but there is one point requiring care. Pekan has a sharp
nose. It is his nose that brings him to all carrion just as surely as
hawks come to pick dead bones. But that same nose will tell him of man's
presence. So when the trapper has built his pen of logs so that the
front log or deadfall will crush down on the back of an intruder tugging
at the bait inside, he overlays all with leaves and brush to quiet the
pekan's suspicions. Besides, the pekan has many tricks akin to the
wolverine. He is an inveterate thief. There is a well-known instance of
Hudson's Bay trappers having a line of one hundred and fifty marten
traps stretching for fifty miles robbed of their bait by pekan. The men
shortened the line to thirty miles and for six times in succession did
pekan destroy the traps. Then the men set themselves to trap the robber.
He will rifle a deadfall from the slanting back roof where there is no
danger; so the trapper overlays the back with heavy brush.
Pekan do not yield a rare fur; but they are always at run where the
trapper is hunting the rare furs, and for that reason are usually snared
at the same time as mink and otter.
IV
_Wapistan the Marten_
When Koot went blind on his way home from the rabbit-hunt, he had
intended to set out for the pine woods. Though blizzards still howl over
the prairie, by March the warm sun of midday has set the sap of the
forests stirring and all the woodland life awakens from its long winter
sleep. Cougar and lynx and bear rove through the forest ravenous with
spring hunger. Otter, too, may be found where the ice mounds of a
waterfall are beginning to thaw. But it is not any of these that the
trapper seeks. If they cross his path, good--they, too, will swell his
account at the fur post. It is another of the little chaps that he
seeks, a little, long, low-set animal whose fur is now glistening bright
on the deep dark overhairs, soft as down in the thick fawn underhairs,
wapistan the marten.
When the forest begins to stir with the coming of spring, wapistan stirs
too, crawling out from the hollow of some rotten pine log, restless with
the same blood-thirst that set the little mink playing his tricks on
the hawk. And yet the marten is not such a little viper as the mink.
Wapistan will eat leaves and nuts and roots if he can get vegetable
food, but failing these, that ravenous spring hunger of his must be
appeased with something else. And out he goes from his log hole
hunger-bold as the biggest of all other spring ravagers. That boldness
gives the trapper his chance at the very time when wapistan's fur is
best. All winter the trapper may have taken marten; but the end of
winter is the time when wapistan wanders freely from cover. Thus the
trapper's calendar would have months of musk-rat first, then beaver and
mink and pekan and bear and fox and ermine and rabbit and lynx and
marten, with a long idle midsummer space when he goes to the fort for
the year's provisions and gathers the lore of his craft.
Wapistan is not hard to track. Being much longer and heavier than a cat
with very short legs and small feet, his body almost drags the ground
and his tracks sink deep, clear, and sharp. His feet are smaller than
otter's and mink's, but easily distinguishable from those two fishers.
The water animal leaves a spreading footprint, the mark of the webbed
toes without any fur on the padding of the toe-balls. The land animal of
the same size has clear cut, narrower, heavier marks. By March, these
dotting foot-tracks thread the snow everywhere.
Coming on marten tracks at a pine log, the trapper sends in his dog or
prods with a stick. Finding nothing, he baits a steel-trap with
pomatum, covers it deftly with snow, drags the decoy skin about to
conceal his own tracks, and goes away in the hope that the marten will
come back to this log to guzzle on his prey and sleep.
If the track is much frequented, or the forest over-run with marten
tracks, the trapper builds deadfalls, many of them running from tree to
tree for miles through the forest in a circle whose circuit brings him
back to his cabin. Remnants of these log traps may be seen through all
parts of the Rocky Mountain forests. Thirty to forty traps are
considered a day's work for one man, six or ten marten all that he
expects to take in one round; but when marten are plentiful, the unused
traps of to-day may bring a prize to-morrow.
The Indian trapper would use still another kind of trap. Where the
tracks are plainly frequently used runways to watering-places or lair in
hollow tree, the Indian digs a pit across the marten's trail. On this he
spreads brush in such roof fashion that though the marten is a good
climber, if once he falls in, it is almost impossible for him to
scramble out. If a poor cackling grouse or "fool-hen" be thrust into the
pit, the Indian is almost sure to find a prisoner. This seems to the
white man a barbarous kind of trapping; but the poor "fool-hen," hunted
by all the creatures of the forest, never seems to learn wisdom, but
invites disaster by popping out of the brush to stare at every living
thing that passes. If she did not fall a victim in the pit, she
certainly would to her own curiosity above ground. To the steel-trap the
hunter attaches a piece of log to entangle the prisoner's flight as he
rushes through the underbush. Once caught in the steel jaws, little
wapistan must wait--wait for what? For the same thing that comes to the
poor "fool-hen" when wapistan goes crashing through the brush after her;
for the same thing that comes to the baby squirrels when wapistan climbs
a tree to rob the squirrel's nest, eat the young, and live in the rifled
house; for the same thing that comes to the hoary marmot whistling his
spring tune just outside his rocky den when wapistan, who has climbed
up, pounces down from above. Little death-dealer he has been all his
life; and now death comes to him for a nobler cause than the stuffing of
a greedy maw--for the clothing of a creature nobler than himself--man.
The otter can protect himself by diving, even diving under snow. The
mink has craft to hide himself under leaves so that the sharpest eyes
cannot detect him. Both mink and otter furs have very little of that
animal smell which enables the foragers to follow their trail. What gift
has wapistan, the marten, to protect himself against all the powers that
prey? His strength and his wisdom lie in the little stubby feet. These
can climb.
A trapper's dog had stumbled on a marten in a stump hole. A snap of the
marten's teeth sent the dog back with a jump. Wapistan will hang on to
the nose of a dog to the death; and trappers' dogs grow cautious. Before
the dog gathered courage to make another rush, the marten escaped by a
rear knot-hole, getting the start of his enemy by fifty yards. Off they
raced, the dog spending himself in fury, the marten keeping under the
thorny brush where his enemy could not follow, then across open snow
where the dog gained, then into the pine woods where the trail ended on
the snow. Where had the fugitive gone? When the man came up, he first
searched for log holes. There were none. Then he lifted some of the
rocks. There was no trace of wapistan. But the dog kept baying a special
tree, a blasted trunk, bare as a mast pole and seemingly impossible for
any animal but a squirrel to climb. Knowing the trick by which creatures
like the bob-cat can flatten their body into a resemblance of a tree
trunk, the trapper searched carefully all round the bare trunk. It was
not till many months afterward when a wind storm had broken the tree
that he discovered the upper part had been hollow. Into this eerie nook
the pursued marten had scrambled and waited in safety till dog and man
retired.
In one of his traps the man finds a peculiarly short specimen of the
marten. In the vernacular of the craft this marten's bushy tail will not
reach as far back as his hind legs can stretch. Widely different from
the mink's scarcely visible ears, this fellow's ears are sharply
upright, keenly alert. He is like a fox, where the mink resembles a
furred serpent. Marten moves, springs, jumps like an animal. Mink glides
like a snake. Marten has the strong neck of an animal fighter. Mink has
the long, thin, twisting neck which reptiles need to give them striking
power for their fangs. Mink's under lip has a mere rim of white or
yellow. Marten's breast is patched sulphur. But this short marten with a
tail shorter than other marten differs from his kind as to fur. Both
mink and marten fur are reddish brown; but this short marten's fur is
almost black, of great depth, of great thickness, and of three
qualities: (1) There are the long dark overhairs the same as the
ordinary marten, only darker, thicker, deeper; (2) there is the soft
under fur of the ordinary marten, usually fawn, in this fellow deep
brown; (3) there is the skin fur resembling chicken-down, of which this
little marten has such a wealth--to use a technical expression--you
cannot find his scalp. Without going into the old quarrel about species,
when a marten has these peculiarities, he is known to the trapper as
sable.
Whether he is the American counterpart to the Russia sable is a disputed
point. Whether his superior qualities are owing to age, climate,
species, it is enough for the trapper to know that short, dark marten
yields the trade--sable.
CHAPTER XVIII
UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN
I
_Of Foxes, Many and Various--Red, Cross, Silver, Black, Prairie, Kit or
Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray_
Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and there will
the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a fox-skin may be as a
specimen, it has value as a fur only when it belongs to one of three
varieties--Arctic, black, and silver. Other foxes--red, cross, prairie,
swift, and gray--the trapper will take when they cross his path and sell
them in the gross at the fur post, as he used to barter buffalo-hides.
But the hunter who traps the fox for its own sake, and not as an
uncalculated extra to the mink-hunt or the beaver total, must go to the
Far North, to the land of winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the
best fox-skins.
It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run
among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most
shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz
dog, ears alert as a terrier's and a brush, more like a lady's gray
feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's fur is
a grizzled gray shading to mottled fawn. The hairs are coarse, horsey,
indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value to the trader; so
dainty little swift, who looks as if nature made him for a pet dog
instead of a fox, is slighted by the hunter, unless kit persists in
tempting a trap. Rufus the red fellow, with his grizzled gray head and
black ears and whitish throat and flaunting purplish tinges down his
sides like a prince royal, may make a handsome mat; but as a fur he is
of little worth. His cousin with the black fore feet, the prairie fox,
who is the largest and strongest and scientifically finest of all his
kind, has more value as a fur. The colour of the prairie fox shades
rather to pale ochre and yellow that the nondescript grizzled gray that
is of so little value as a fur. Of the silver-gray fox little need be
said. He lives too far south--California and Texas and Mexico--to
acquire either energy or gloss. He is the one indolent member of the fox
tribe, and his fur lacks the sheen that only winter cold can give. The
value of the cross fox depends on the markings that give him his name.
If the bands, running diagonally over his shoulders in the shape of a
cross, shade to grayish blue he is a prize, if to reddish russet, he is
only a curiosity.
The Arctic and black and silver foxes have the pelts that at their worst
equal the other rare furs, at their best exceed the value of all other
furs by so much that the lucky trapper who takes a silver fox has made
his fortune. These, then, are the foxes that the trapper seeks and these
are to be found only on the white wastes of the polar zone.
That brings up the question--what is a silver fox? Strange as it may
seem, neither scientist nor hunter can answer that question. Nor will
study of all the park specimens in the world tell the secret, for the
simple reason that only an Arctic climate can produce a silver fox; and
parks are not established in the Arctics yet. It is quite plain that the
prairie fox is in a class by himself. The uniformity of his size, his
strength, his habits, his appearance, distinguish him from other foxes.
It is quite plain that the little kit fox or swift is of a kind distinct
from other foxes. His smallness, the shape of his bones, the cast of his
face, the trick of sitting rather than lying, that wonderful big bushy
soft tail of which a peacock might be vain--all differentiate him from
other foxes. The same may be said of the Arctic fox with a pelt that is
more like white wool than hairs of fur. He is much smaller than the red.
His tail is bushier and larger than the swift, and like all Arctic
creatures, he has the soles of his feet heavily furred. All this is
plain and simple classification. But how about Mr. Blue Fox of the same
size and habit as the white Arctic? Is he the Arctic fox in summer
clothing? Yes, say some trappers; and they show their pelts of an Arctic
fox taken in summer of a rusty white. But no, vow other trappers--that
is impossible, for here are blue fox-skins captured in the depths of
midwinter with not a white hair among them. Look closely at the skins.
The ears of one blue fox are long, perfect, unbitten by frost or foe--he
was a young fellow; and he is blue. Here is another with ears almost
worn to stubs by fights and many winters' frosts--he is an old fellow;
and he, too, is blue. Well, then, the blue fox may sometimes be the
white Arctic fox in summer dress; but the blue fox who is blue all the
year round, varying only in the shades of blue with the seasons, is
certainly not the white Arctic fox.
The same difficulty besets distinction of silver fox from black. The old
scientists classified these as one and the same creature. Trappers know
better. So do the later scientists who almost agree with the unlearned
trapper's verdict--there are as many species as there are foxes. Black
fox is at its best in midwinter, deep, brilliantly glossy, soft as
floss, and yet almost impenetrable--the very type of perfection of its
kind. But with the coming of the tardy Arctic spring comes a change. The
snows are barely melted in May when the sheen leaves the fur. By June,
the black hairs are streaked with gray; and the black fox is a gray fox.
Is it at some period of the transition that the black fox becomes a
silver fox, with the gray hairs as sheeny as the black and each gray
hair delicately tipped with black? That question, too, remains
unanswered; for certainly the black fox trapped when in his gray summer
coat is not the splendid silver fox of priceless value. Black fox
turning to a dull gray of midsummer may not be silver fox; but what
about gray fox turning to the beautiful glossy black of midwinter? Is
that what makes silver fox? Is silver fox simply a fine specimen of
black caught at the very period when he is blooming into his greatest
beauty? The distinctive difference between gray fox and silver is that
gray fox has gray hairs among hairs of other colour, while silver fox
has silver hair tipped with glossiest black on a foundation of downy
gray black.
Even greater confusion surrounds the origin of cross and red and gray.
Trappers find all these different cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs
grow, those pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red becomes
cross; and what they become at maturity, that they remain, varying only
with the seasons.[45] It takes many centuries to make one perfect rose.
Is it the same with the silver fox? Is he a freak or a climax or the
regular product of yearly climatic changes caught in the nick of time by
some lucky trapper? Ask the scientist that question, and he theorizes.
Ask the trapper, and he tells you if he could only catch enough silver
foxes to study that question, he would quit trapping. In all the maze of
ignorance and speculation, there is one anchored fact. While animals
turn a grizzled gray with age, the fine gray coats are not caused by
age. Young animals of the rarest furs--fox and ermine--are born in ashy
colour that turns to gray while they are still in their first nest.
To say that silver fox is costly solely because it is rare is sheerest
nonsense. It would be just as sensible to say that labradorite, which is
rare, should be as costly as diamonds. It is the intrinsic beauty of the
fur, as of the diamonds, that constitutes its first value. The facts
that the taking of a silver fox is always pure luck, that the luck comes
seldom, that the trapper must have travelled countless leagues by
snow-shoe and dog train over the white wastes of the North, that
trappers in polar regions are exposed to more dangers and hardships than
elsewhere and that the fur must have been carried a long distance to
market--add to the first high value of silver fox till it is not
surprising that little pelts barely two feet long have sold for prices
ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the trapper the way to the fortune of
a silver fox is the same as the road to fortune for all other men--by
the homely trail of every-day work. Cheers from the fort gates bid
trappers setting out for far Northern fields God-speed. Long ago there
would have been a firing of cannon when the Northern hunters left for
their distant camping-grounds; but the cannon of Churchill lie rusting
to-day and the hunters who go to the sub-Arctics and the Arctics no
longer set out from Churchill on the bay, but from one of the little
inland MacKenzie River posts. If the fine powdery snow-drifts are
glossed with the ice of unbroken sun-glare, the runners strap iron
crampets to their snow-shoes, and with a great jingling of the
dog-bells, barking of the huskies, and yelling of the drivers, coast
away for the leagueless levels of the desolate North. Frozen river-beds
are the only path followed, for the high cliffs--almost like ramparts on
the lower MacKenzie--shut off the drifting east winds that heap
barricades of snow in one place and at another sweep the ground so clear
that the sleighs pull heavy as stone. Does a husky fag? A flourish of
whips and off the laggard scampers, keeping pace with the others in the
traces, a pace that is set for forty miles a day with only one feeding
time, nightfall when the sleighs are piled as a wind-break and the
frozen fish are doled out to the ravenous dogs. Gun signals herald the
hunter's approach to a chance camp; and no matter how small and mean the
tepee, the door is always open for whatever visitor, the meat pot set
simmering for hungry travellers. When the snow crust cuts the dogs'
feet, buckskin shoes are tied on the huskies; and when an occasional dog
fags entirely, he is turned adrift from the traces to die. Relentless
as death is Northern cold; and wherever these long midwinter journeys
are made, gruesome traditions are current of hunter and husky.
I remember hearing of one old husky that fell hopelessly lame during the
north trip. Often the drivers are utter brutes to their dogs, speaking
in curses which they say is the only language a husky can understand,
emphasized with the blows of a club. Too often, as well, the huskies are
vicious curs ready to skulk or snap or bolt or fight, anything but work.
But in this case the dog was an old reliable that kept the whole train
in line, and the driver had such an affection for the veteran husky that
when rheumatism crippled the dog's legs the man had not the heart to
shoot such a faithful servant. The dog was turned loose from the traces
and hobbled lamely behind the scampering teams. At last he fell behind
altogether, but at night limped into camp whining his joy and asking
dumbly for the usual fish. In the morning when the other teams set out,
the old husky was powerless to follow. But he could still whine and wag
his tail. He did both with all his might, so that when the departing
driver looked back over his shoulder, he saw a pair of eyes pleading, a
head with raised alert ears, shoulders straining to lift legs that
refused to follow, and a bushy tail thwacking--thwacking--thwacking the
snow!
"You ought to shoot him," advised one driver.
"You do it--you're a dead sure aim," returned the man who had owned the
dog.
But the other drivers were already coasting over the white wastes. The
owner looked at his sleighs as if wondering whether they would stand an
additional burden. Then probably reflecting that old age is not
desirable for a suffering dog in a bitingly keen frost, he turned
towards the husky with his hand in his belt. Thwack--thwack went the
tail as much as to say: "Of course he wouldn't desert me after I've
hauled his sleigh all my life! Thwack--thwack! I'd get up and jump all
around him if I could; there isn't a dog-gone husky in all polar land
with half as good a master as I have!"
The man stopped. Instead of going to the dog he ran back to his sleigh,
loaded his arms full of frozen fish and threw them down before the dog.
Then he put one caribou-skin under the old dog, spread another over him
and ran away with his train while the husky was still guzzling. The fish
had been poisoned to be thrown out to the wolves that so often pursue
Northern dog trains.
Once a party of hunters crossing the Northern Rockies came on a dog
train stark and stiff. Where was the master who had bidden them stand
while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a blizzard for
the lost path? In the middle of the last century, one of that famous
family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown to go north to Red
River in Canada. He never went back to Georgetown and he never reached
Red River; but his coat was found fluttering from a tree, a death signal
to attract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was
discovered not far off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit
pest and the rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves
seldom give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains,
licking up the stains of the bleeding feet, or hanging spectrally on
the dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they
seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where the wolves
followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family from the North
down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would
follow so far?
The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the days, till
at last the sun, which has rolled across the south in a wheel of fire,
dwindles to a disk, the disk to a rim--then no rim at all comes up, and
it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of endless
unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the starlight
brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts
and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire--all brighten the
polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the region chiefly
hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and Chippewyan half-breeds.
The regular Northern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose
their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of "little sticks," meaning
the land where timber growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs.
The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written across the
white page of the snow. If there are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern
grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; for
the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of feet feathers have a
habit of floundering under the powdery snow; and up through that powdery
snow darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel-hunter of birds. If
there are the deep plunges of the white hare, lynx and fox and mink and
marten and pekan will be plentiful; for the poor white hare feeds all
the creatures of the Northern wastes, man and beast. If there are little
dainty tracks--oh, such dainty tracks that none but a high-stepping,
clear-cut, clean-limbed, little thoroughbred could make them!--tracks of
four toes and a thumb claw much shorter than the rest, with a padding of
five basal foot-bones behind the toes, tracks that show a fluff on the
snow as of furred foot-soles, tracks that go in clean, neat, clear long
leaps and bounds--the hunter knows that he has found the signs of the
Northern fox.
Here, then, he will camp for the winter. Camping in the Far North means
something different from the hastily pitched tent of the prairie. The
north wind blows biting, keen, unbroken in its sweep. The hunter must
camp where that wind will not carry scent of his tent to the animal
world. For his own sake, he must camp under shelter from that wind,
behind a cairn of stones, below a cliff, in a ravine. Poles have been
brought from the land of trees on the dog sleigh. These are put up,
criss-crossed at top, and over them is laid, not the canvas tent, but a
tent of skins, caribou, wolf, moose, at a sharp enough angle to let the
snow slide off. Then snow is banked deep, completely round the tent. For
fire, the Eskimo depends on whale-oil and animal grease. The white man
or half-breed from the South hoards up chips and sticks. But mainly he
depends on exercise and animal food for warmth. At night he sleeps in a
fur bag. In the morning that bag is frozen stiff as boards by the
moisture of his own breath. Need one ask why the rarest furs, which can
only be produced by the coldest of climates, are so costly?
Having found the tracks of the fox, the hunter sets out his traps baited
with fish or rabbit or a bird-head. If the snow be powdery enough, and
the trapper keen in wild lore, he may even know what sort of a fox to
expect. In the depths of midwinter, the white Arctic fox has a wool fur
to his feet like a brahma chicken. This leaves its mark in the fluffy
snow. A ravenous fellow he always is, this white fox of the hungry
North, bold from ignorance of man, but hard to distinguish from the snow
because of his spotless coat. The blue fox being slightly smaller than
the full-grown Arctic, lopes along with shorter leaps by which the
trapper may know the quarry; but the blue fox is just as hard to
distinguish from the snow as his white brother. The gray frost haze is
almost the same shade as his steel-blue coat; and when spring comes,
blue fox is the same colour as the tawny moss growth. Colour is blue
fox's defence. Consequently blue foxes show more signs of age than
white--stubby ears frozen low, battle-worn teeth, dulled claws.
The chances are that the trapper will see the black fox himself almost
as soon as he sees his tracks; for the sheeny coat that is black fox's
beauty betrays him above the snow. Bushy tail standing straight out,
every black hair bristling erect with life, the white tail-tip flaunting
a defiance, head up, ears alert, fore feet cleaving the air with the
swift ease of some airy bird--on he comes, jump--jump--jump--more of a
leap than a lope, galloping like a wolf, altogether different from the
skulking run of little foxes, openly exulting in his beauty and his
strength and his speed! There is no mistaking black fox. If the trapper
does not see the black fox scurrying over the snow, the tell-tale
characteristics of the footprints are the length and strength of the
leaps. Across these leaps the hunter leaves his traps. Does he hope for
a silver fox? Does every prospector expect to find gold nuggets? In the
heyday of fur company prosperity, not half a dozen true silver foxes
would be sent out in a year. To-day I doubt if more than one good silver
fox is sent out in half a dozen years. But good white fox and black and
blue are prizes enough in themselves, netting as much to the trapper as
mink or beaver or sable.
II
_The White Ermine_
All that was said of the mystery of fox life applies equally to ermine.
Why is the ermine of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Dakota a dirty little
weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a night, wearing a
mahogany-coloured coat with a sulphur strip down his throat, while the
ermine of the Arctics is as white as snow, noted for his courage,
wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, yes, and take from him? For a
long time the learned men who study animal life from museums held that
the ermine's coat turned white from the same cause as human hair, from
senility and debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying
climate. But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby
ermine born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the
mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat something
like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. They told
of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a fresh layer of
iron-gray fur that turned sulphur white within a few days. They told of
the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine with the softest and
whitest coats. That disposed of the senility theory. All the trapper
knows is that the whitest ermine is taken when the cold is most intense
and most continuous, that just as the cold slackens the ermine coat
assumes the sulphur tinges, deepening to russet and brown, and that the
whitest ermine instead of showing senility, always displays the most
active and courageous sort of deviltry.
Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is constantly surrounded by
ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks almost like
frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest of a poor
grouse--eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest fouled so that it
emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen lying dead from a wound
in her throat. There is the frightened rabbit loping across the fields
in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe-begone leaps, trying to shake
something off that is clinging to his throat till over he tumbles--the
prey of a hunter that is barely the size of rabbit's paw. There is the
water-rat flitting across the rocks in blind terror, regardless of the
watching trapper, caring only to reach safety--water--water! Behind
comes the pursuer--this is no still hunt but a straight open chase--a
little creature about the length of a man's hand, with a tail almost as
long, a body scarcely the thickness of two fingers, a mouth the size of
a bird's beak, and claws as small as a sparrow's. It gallops in lithe
bounds with its long neck straight up and its beady eyes fastened on the
flying water-rat. Splash--dive--into the water goes the rat!
Splash--dive--into the water goes the ermine! There is a great stirring
up of the muddy bottom. The water-rat has tried to hide in the
under-tangle; and the ermine has not only dived in pursuit but headed
the water-rat back from the safe retreat of his house. Up comes a black
nose to the surface of the water. The rat is foolishly going to try a
land race. Up comes a long neck like a snake's, the head erect, the
beady eyes on the fleeing water-rat--then with a splash they race
overland. The water-rat makes for a hole among the rocks. Ermine sees
and with a spurt of speed is almost abreast when the rat at bay turns
with a snap at his pursuer. But quick as flash, the ermine has
pirouetted into the air. The long writhing neck strikes like a serpent's
fangs and the sharp fore teeth have pierced the brain of the rat. The
victim dies without a cry, without a struggle, without a pain. That long
neck was not given the ermine for nothing. Neither were those muscles
massed on either side of his jaws like bulging cheeks.
In winter the ermine's murderous depredations are more apparent. Now the
ermine, too, sets itself to reading the signs of the snow. Now the
ermine becomes as keen a still hunter as the man. Sometimes a whirling
snow-fall catches a family of grouse out from furze cover. The trapper,
too, is abroad in the snow-storm; for that is the time when he can set
his traps undetected. The white whirl confuses the birds. They run here,
there, everywhere, circling about, burying themselves in the snow till
the storm passes over. The next day when the hunter is going the rounds
of these traps, along comes an ermine. It does not see him. It is
following a scent, head down, body close to ground, nose here, there,
threading the maze which the crazy grouse had run. But stop, thinks the
trapper, the snow-fall covered the trail. Exactly--that is why the
little ermine dives under snow just as it would under water, running
along with serpentine wavings of the white powdery surface till up it
comes again where the wind has blown the snow-fall clear. Along it runs,
still intent, quartering back where it loses the scent--along again till
suddenly the head lifts--that motion of the snake before it strikes! The
trapper looks. Tail feathers, head feathers, stupid blinking eyes poke
through the fluffy snow-drift. And now the ermine no longer runs openly.
There are too many victims this time--it may get all the foolish hidden
grouse; so it dives and if the man had not alarmed the stupid grouse,
ermine would have darted up through the snow with a finishing stab for
each bird.
By still hunt and open hunt, by nose and eye, relentless as doom, it
follows its victims to the death. Does the bird perch on a tree? Up goes
the ermine, too, on the side away from the bird's head. Does the mouse
thread a hundred mazes and hide in a hole? The ermine threads every
maze, marches into the hidden nest and takes murderous possession. Does
the rat hide under rock? Under the rock goes the ermine. Should the
trapper follow to see the outcome of the contest, the ermine will
probably sit at the mouth of the rat-hole, blinking its beady eyes at
him. If he attacks, down it bolts out of reach. If he retires, out it
comes looking at this strange big helpless creature with bold contempt.
The keen scent, the keen eyes, the keen ears warn it of an enemy's
approach. Summer and winter, its changing coat conceals it. The furze
where it runs protects it from fox and lynx and wolverine. Its size
admits it to the tiniest of hiding-places. All that the ermine can do to
hunt down a victim, it can do to hide from an enemy. These qualities
make it almost invincible to other beasts of the chase. Two joints in
the armour of its defence has the little ermine. Its black tail-tip
moving across snow betrays it to enemies in winter: the very intentness
on prey, its excess of self-confidence, leads it into danger; for
instance, little ermine is royally contemptuous of man's tracks. If the
man does not molest it, it will follow a scent and quarter and circle
under his feet; so the man has no difficulty in taking the little beast
whose fur is second only to that of the silver fox. So bold are the
little creatures that the man may discover their burrows under brush, in
rock, in sand holes, and take the whole litter before the game mother
will attempt to escape. Indeed, the plucky little ermine will follow the
captor of her brood. Steel rat traps, tiny deadfalls, frosted bits of
iron smeared with grease to tempt the ermine's tongue which the frost
will hold like a vice till the trapper comes, and, most common of all,
twine snares such as entrap the rabbit, are the means by which the
ermine comes to his appointed end at the hands of men.
The quality of the pelt shows as wide variety as the skin of the fox;
and for as mysterious reasons. Why an ermine a year old should have a
coat like sulphur and another of the same age a coat like swan's-down,
neither trapper nor scientist has yet discovered. The price of the
perfect ermine-pelt is higher than any other of the rare furs taken in
North America except silver fox; but it no longer commands the fabulous
prices that were certainly paid for specimen ermine-skins in the days
of the Georges in England and the later Louis in France. How were those
fabulously costly skins prepared? Old trappers say no perfectly downy
pelt is ever taken from an ermine, that the downy effect is produced by
a trick of the trade--scraping the flesh side so deftly that all the
coarse hairs will fall out, leaving only the soft under-fur.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 45: That is, as far as trappers yet know.]
CHAPTER XIX
WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR
Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of nature's most
harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of nature's most
destructive agents, against traders who were rivals and Indians who were
hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be himself a type of nature's
arch-destroyer.
Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and
mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the most
skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the crack of the
trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his trap, seem the
only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence that riots with a
very fulness of life. But such a world is only a dream. The reality is
cruel as death. Of all the creatures that prey, man is the most
merciful.
Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. There
are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating capacity and
penned off from the possibility of harming anything weaker than
themselves. There are the private pets fed equally well, pampered and
chained safely from harming or being harmed. There are the wild
creatures roaming natural haunts, some two or three days' travel from
civilization, whose natures have been gradually modified generation by
generation from being constantly hunted with long-range repeaters.
Judging from these sorts of wild animals, it certainly seems that the
brute creation has been sadly maligned. The bear cubs lick each other's
paws with an amatory singing that is something between the purr of a cat
and the grunt of a pig. The old polars wrestle like boys out of school,
flounder in grotesque gambols that are laughably clumsy, good-naturedly
dance on their hind legs, and even eat from their keeper's hand. And all
the deer family can be seen nosing one another with the affection of
turtle-doves. Surely the worst that can be said of these animals is that
they shun the presence of man. Perhaps some kindly sentimentalist
wonders if things hadn't gone so badly out of gear in a certain historic
garden long ago, whether mankind would not be on as friendly relations
with the animal world as little boys and girls are with bears and
baboons in the fairy books. And the scientist goes a step further, and
soberly asks whether these wild things of the woods are not kindred of
man after all; for have not man and beast ascended the same scale of
life? Across the centuries, modern evolution shakes hands with
old-fashioned transmigration.
To be sure, members of the deer family sometimes kill their mates in
fits of blind rage, and the innocent bear cubs fall to mauling their
keeper, and the old bears have been known to eat their young. These
things are set down as freaks in the animal world, and in nowise allowed
to upset the influences drawn from animals living in unnatural
surroundings, behind iron bars, or in haunts where long-range rifles
have put the fear of man in the animal heart.
Now the trapper studies animal life where there is neither a pen to keep
the animal from doing what it wants to do, nor any rifle but his own to
teach wild creatures fear. Knowing nothing of science and sentiment, he
never clips facts to suit his theory. On the truthfulness of his eyes
depends his own life, so that he never blinks his eyes to disagreeable
facts.
Looking out on the life of the wilds clear-visioned as his mountain air,
the trapper sees a world beautiful as a dream but cruel as death. He
sees a world where to be weak, to be stupid, to be dull, to be slow, to
be simple, to be rash are the unpardonable crimes; where the weak must
grow strong, keen of eye and ear and instinct, sharp, wary, swift, wise,
and cautious; where in a word the weak must grow fit to survive
or--perish!
The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into the soft fur
of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch the swooping
talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself overland risks
bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home colony. Bird preys on
worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf on lynx, and bear on all
creatures that live from men and moose down to the ant and the embryo
life in the ant's egg. But the vision of ravening destruction does not
lead the trapper to morbid conclusions on life as it leads so many
housed thinkers in the walled cities; for the same world that reveals to
him such ravening slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest
and the strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of
cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight,
of semblance, of death--that will defend it from all enemies. The
ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw an enemy
off the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one of the most
helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from foes of the
air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind the breath of a
pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a harrying eagle flopping
head over heels on the ground, and simulate the stillness of inanimate
objects surrounding it so truly that the passer-by can scarcely
distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the russet bark of a log. And the
rabbit's big eyes and ears are not given it for nothing.
Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same reason. Both
seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it is; and the world
that they see is red in tooth and claw. But neither grows morbid from
his vision; for that same vision shows each that the ravening
destruction is only a weeding out of the unfit. There is too much
sunlight in the trapper's world, too much fresh air in his lungs, too
much red blood in his veins for the morbid miasmas that bring bilious
fumes across the mental vision of the housed city man.
And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper occupy?
Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red-dyed monster,
excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the hunter to slay, but
after all only the most highly developed of the creatures that prey. Is
this true? Arch-destroyer he may be; but it should be remembered that he
is the destroyer of destroyers.
Animals kill young and old, male and female.
The true trapper does not kill the young; for that would destroy his
next year's hunt. He does not kill the mother while she is with the
young. He kills the grown males which--it can be safely said--have
killed more of each other than man has killed in all the history of
trapping. Wherever regions have been hunted by the pot-hunter, whether
the sportsman for amusement or the settler supplying his larder, game
has been exterminated. This is illustrated by all the stretch of country
between the Platte and the Saskatchewan. Wherever regions have been
hunted only by the trapper, game is as plentiful as it has ever been.
This is illustrated by the forests of the Rockies, by the No-Man's Land
south of Hudson Bay and by the Arctics. Wherever the trapper has come
destroying grisly and coyote and wolverine, the prong horn and
mountain-sheep and mountain-goat and wapiti and moose have increased.
But the trapper stands for something more than a game warden, something
more than the most merciful of destroyers. He destroys _animal_ life--a
life which is red in tooth and claw with murder and rapine and
cruelty--in order that _human_ life may be preserved, may be rendered
independent of the elemental powers that wage war against it.
It is a war as old as the human race, this struggle of man against the
elements, a struggle alike reflected in Viking song of warriors
conquering the sea, and in the Scandinavian myth of pursuing Fenris
wolf, and in the Finnish epic of the man-hero wresting secrets of
life-bread from the earth, and in Indian folk-lore of a Hiawatha hunting
beast and treacherous wind. It is a war in which the trapper stands
forth as a conqueror, a creature sprung of earth, trampling all the
obstacles that earth can offer to human will under his feet, finding
paths through the wilderness for the explorer who was to come after him,
opening doors of escape from stifled life in crowded centres of
population, preparing a highway for the civilization that was to follow
his own wandering trail through the wilds.
APPENDIX
When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the
entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life.
It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian
mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the
diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she
lived at Hamilton Inlet. Having related how she shot a deer, skinning it
herself, made her snow-shoes and set her rabbit snares, she closes her
first entry with:
"Well, as I sed, I can't write much at a time now, for i am getting
blind and some mist rises up before me if i sew, read or write a little
while."
Lydia Campbell's mother was captured by Eskimo. She ran away when she
had grown up, to quote her own terse diary, "crossed a river on drift
sticks, wading in shallows, through woods, meeting bears, sleeping under
trees--seventy miles flight--saw a French boat--took off skirt and waved
it to them--came--took my mother on board--worked for them--with the
sealers--camped on the ice.
"As there was no other kind of women to marrie hear, the few English men
each took a wife of that sort and they never was sorry that they took
them, for they was great workers and so it came to pass that I was one
of the youngest of them." [Meaning, of course, that she was the daughter
of one of these marriages.]
* * * * *
"Our young man pretended to spark the two daughters of Tomas. He was a
one-armed man, for he had shot away one arm firing at a large bird....
He double-loaded his gun in his fright, so the por man lost one of his
armes,... he was so smart with his gun that he could bring down a bird
flying past him, or a deer running past he would be the first to bring
it down."
* * * * *
"They was holden me hand and telling me that I must be his mother now as
his own mother is dead and she was a great friend of mine although we
could not understand each other's language sometimes, still we could
make it out with sins and wonders."
* * * * *
"April 7, 1894.--Since I last wrote on this book, I have been what
people call cruising about here. I have been visiting some of my
friends, though scattered far apart, with my snow-shoes and axe on my
shoulders. The nearest house to this place is about five miles up a
beautiful river, and then through woods, what the french calls a
portage--it is what I call pretty. Many is the time that I have been
going with dogs and komatick 40 or 50 years ago with my husband and
family to N. W. River, to the Hon. Donald A. Smith and family to keep N.
Year or Easter."
* * * * *
"My dear old sister Hannah Mishlin who is now going on for 80 years old
and she is smart yet, she hunts fresh meat and chops holes in the 3 foot
ice this very winter and catches trout with her hook, enough for her
household, her husband not able to work, he has a bad complaint."
* * * * *
"You must please excuse my writing and spelling for I have never been to
school, neither had I a spelling book in my young day--me a native of
this country, Labrador, Hamilton's Inlet, Esquimaux Bay--if you wish to
know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Lydia Brooks, then
Blake, after Blake, now Campbell. So you see ups and downs has been my
life all through, and now I am what I am--prais the Lord."
"I have been hunting most every day since Easter, and to some of my
rabbit snares and still traps, cat traps and mink traps. I caught 7
rabbits and 1 marten and I got a fix and 4 partridges, about 500 trout
besides household duties--never leave out morning and Evening prayers
and cooking and baking and washing for 5 people--3 motherless little
children--with so much to make for sale out of seal skin and deer skin
shoes, bags and pouches and what not.... You can say well done old
half-breed woman in Hamilton's Inlet. Good night, God bless us all and
send us prosperity.
"Yours ever true,
"LYDIA CAMPBELL."
* * * * *
"We are going to have an evening worship, my poor old man is tired, he
has been a long way to-day and he shot 2 beautyful white partridges. Our
boy heer shot once spruce partridge."
* * * * *
"Caplin so plentiful boats were stopped, whales, walrusses and white
bears."
* * * * *
"Muligan River, May 24, 1894.--They say that once upon a time the world
was drowned and that all the Esquimaux were drownded but one family and
he took his family and dogs and chattels and his seal-skin boat and Kiak
and Komaticks and went on the highest hill that they could see, and
stayed there till the rain was over and when the water dried up they
descended down the river and got down to the plains and when they could
not see any more people, they took off the bottoms of their boots and
took some little white [seal] pups and sent the poor little things off
to sea and they drifted to some islands far away and became white
people. Then they done the same as the others did and the people spread
all over the world. Such was my poor father's thought.... There is up
the main river a large fall, the same that the American and English
gentlemen have been up to see. [Referring to Mr. Bryant, of
Philadelphia, who visited Grand Falls.] Well there is a large whirlpool
or hole at the bottom of the fall. The Indians that frequent the place
say that there is three women--Indians--that lives under that place or
near to it I am told, and at times they can hear them speaking to each
other louder than the roar of the falls." [The Indians always think the
mist of a waterfall signifies the presence of ghosts.]
"I have been the cook of that great Sir D. D. Smith that is in Canada at
this time. [In the days when Lord Strathcona was chief trader at
Hamilton Inlet.] He was then at Rigolet Post, a chief trader only, now
what is he so great! He was seen last winter by one of the women that
belong to this bay. She went up to Canada ... and he is gray headed and
bended, that is Sir D. D. Smith."
* * * * *
"August 1, 1894.--My dear friends, you will please excuse my writing and
spelling--the paper sweems by me, my eyesight is dim now----"
THE END
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