CHAPTER VIII
WE SWIM THE NECHACO
Here was perfection of camping, but no allurement could turn thegoldseekers aside. Some of them remained for a day, a few for twodays, but not one forgot for a moment that he was on his way to theKlondike River sixteen hundred miles away. In my enthusiasm Iproposed to camp for a week, but my partner, who was "out for goldinstid o' daisies, 'guessed' we'd better be moving." He could notbear to see any one pass us, and that was the feeling of every man onthe trail. Each seemed to fear that the gold might all be claimedbefore he arrived. With a sigh I turned my back on this gloriousregion and took up the forward march.
All the next day we skirted the shores of Tatchick Lake, coming latein the afternoon to the Nechaco River, a deep, rapid stream whichrose far to our left in the snowy peaks of the coast range. All daythe sky to the east had a brazen glow, as if a great fire were ragingthere, but toward night the wind changed and swept it away. The trailwas dusty for the first time, and the flies venomous. Late in theafternoon we pitched camp, setting our tent securely, expecting rain.Before we went to sleep the drops began to drum on the tent roof, apleasant sound after the burning dust of the trail. The two tramperskept abreast of us nearly all day, but they began to show fatigue andhunger, and a look of almost sullen desperation had settled on theirfaces.
As we came down next day to where the swift Nechaco met the Endakorushing out of Fraser Lake, we found the most dangerous flood we hadyet crossed. A couple of white men were calking a large ferry-boat,but as it was not yet seaworthy and as they had no cable, the horsesmust swim. I dreaded to see them enter this chill, gray stream, fornot only was it wide and swift, but the two currents coming togethermade the landing confusing to the horses as well as to ourselves.Rain was at hand and we had no time to waste.
The horses knew that some hard swimming was expected of them andwould gladly have turned back if they could. We surrounded them withfurious outcry and at last Ladrone sprang in and struck for thenearest point opposite, with that intelligence which marks the broncohorse. The others followed readily. Two of the poorer ones laboredheavily, but all touched shore in good order.
The rain began to fall sharply and we were forced to camp on theopposite bank as swiftly as possible, in order to get out of thestorm. We worked hard and long to put everything under cover and weremuddy and tired at the end of it. At last the tent was up, the outfitcovered with waterproof canvas, the fire blazing and our breadbaking. In pitching our camp we had plenty of assistance at thehands of several Indian boys from a near-by village, who hung about,eager to lend a hand, in the hope of getting a cup of coffee and apiece of bread in payment. The streaming rain seemed to have no moreeffect upon them than on a loon. The conditions were all strangelysimilar to those at the Muddy River.
Night closed in swiftly. Through the dark we could hear the low swishof the rising river, and Burton, with a sly twinkle in his eye,remarked, "For a semi-arid country, this is a pretty wet rain."
In planning the trip, I had written to him saying: "The trail runsfor the most part though a semi-arid country, somewhat like easternWashington."
It rained all the next day and we were forced to remain in camp,which was dismal business; but we made the best of it, doing somemending of clothes and tackle during the long hours.
We were visited by all the Indians from Old Fort Fraser, which wasonly a mile away. They sat about our blazing fire laughing andchattering like a group of girls, discussing our characters minutely,and trying to get at our reasons for going on such a journey.
One of them who spoke a little English said, after looking over mytraps: "You boss, you ty-ee, you belly rich man. Why you come?"
This being interpreted meant, "You have a great many splendid things,you are rich. Now, why do you come away out here in this poor Siwashcountry?"
I tried to convey to him that I wished to see the mountains and toget acquainted with the people. He then asked, "More white men come?"
Throwing my hands in the air and spreading my fingers many times, Iexclaimed, "Hy-u white man, hy-u!" Whereat they all clicked theirtongues and looked at each other in astonishment. They could notunderstand why this sudden flood of white people should pour intotheir country. This I also explained in lame Chinook: "We go klapPilchickamin (gold). White man hears say Hy-u Pilchickamin there (Ipointed to the north). White man heap like Pilchickamin, so hecomes."
All the afternoon and early evening little boys came and went on theswift river in their canoes, singing wild, hauntingly musical boatingsongs. They had no horses, but assembled in their canoes, racing andbetting precisely as the Cheyenne lads run horses at sunset in thevalley of the Lamedeer. All about the village the grass was rich andsweet, uncropped by any animal, for these poor fishermen do notaspire to the wonderful wealth of owning a horse. They had heard thatcattle were coming over the trail and all inquired, "Spose whenMoos-Moos come?" They knew that milk and butter were good things, andsome of them had hopes of owning a cow sometime.
They had tiny little gardens in sheltered places on the sunny slopes,wherein a few potatoes were planted; for the rest they hunt and fishand trap in winter and trade skins for meat and flour and coffee, andso live. How they endure the winters in such wretched houses, it isimpossible to say. There was a lone white man living on the site ofthe old fort, as agent of the Hudson Bay Company. He kept a smallstock of clothing and groceries and traded for "skins," as theIndians all call pelts. They count in skins. So many skins will buy arifle, so many more will secure a sack of flour.
The storekeeper told me that the two trampers had arrived there a fewdays before without money and without food. "I gave 'em some flourand sent 'em on," he said. "The Siwashes will take care of them, butit ain't right. What the cussed idiots mean by setting out on such ajourney I can't understand. Why, one tramp came in here early in thespring who couldn't speak English, and who left Quesnelle withouteven a blanket or an axe. Fact! And yet the Lord seems to take careof these fools. You wouldn't believe it, but that fellow picked up anaxe and a blanket the first day out. But he'd a died only for theIndians. They won't let even a white man starve to death. I helpedhim out with some flour and he went on. They all rush on. Seems likethey was just crazy to get to Dawson--couldn't sleep without dreamin'of it."
I was almost as eager to get on as the tramps, but Burton went abouthis work regularly as a clock. I wrote, yawned, stirred the bigcampfire, gazed at the clouds, talked with the Indians, and so passedthe day. I began to be disturbed, for I knew the power of a rain onthe trail. It transforms it, makes it ferocious. The path that hascharmed and wooed, becomes uncertain, treacherous, gloomy, andengulfing. Creeks become rivers, rivers impassable torrents, andmarshes bottomless abysses. Pits of quicksand develop in mostunexpected places. Driven from smooth lake margins, the trailers'ponies are forced to climb ledges of rock, and to rattle over longslides of shale. In places the threadlike way itself becomes anaqueduct for a rushing overflow of water.
At such times the man on the trail feels the grim power of Nature.She has no pity, no consideration. She sets mud, torrents, rocks,cold, mist, to check and chill him, to devour him. Over him he has noroof, under him no pavement. Never for an instant is he free from thepressure of the elements. Sullen streams lie athwart his road likedragons, and in a land like this, where snowy peaks rise on allsides, rain meant sudden and enormous floods of icy water.
It was still drizzling on the third day, but we packed and pushed on,though the hills were slippery and the creeks swollen. Water waseverywhere, but the sun came out, lighting the woods into radiantgreens and purples. Robins and sparrows sang ecstatically, andviolets, dandelions, and various kinds of berries were in odorousbloom. A vine with a blue flower, new to me, attracted my attention,also a yellow blossom of the cowslip variety. This latter had a formnot unlike a wild sunflower.
Here for the first time I heard a bird singing a song quite new tome. He was a thrushlike little fellow, very shy and difficult to seeas he sat poised on the tip of a black pine in the deep f
orest. Hisnote was a clear cling-ling, like the ringing of a steel triangle._Chingaling, chingaling_, one called near at hand, and then fartheroff another answered, _ching, ching, chingaling-aling_, with immensevim, power, and vociferation.
Burton, who had spent many years in the mighty forests of Washington,said: "That little chap is familiar to me. Away in the pines wherethere is no other bird I used to hear his voice. No matter how darkit was, I could always tell when morning was coming by his note, andon cloudy days I could always tell when the sunset was coming byhearing him call."
To me his phrase was not unlike the metallic ringing cry of a sort ofblackbird which I heard in the torrid plazas of Mexico. He was verydifficult to distinguish, for the reason that he sat so high in thetree and was so wary. He was very shy of approach. He was a plump,trim little fellow of a plain brown color, not unlike a small robin.
There was another cheerful little bird, new to me also, which utteredan amusing phrase in two keys, something like _tee tay, tee tay, teetay_, one note sustained high and long, followed by another given ona lower key. It was not unlike to the sound made by a boy with atuning pipe. This, Burton said, was also a familiar sound in thedepths of the great Washington firs. These two cheery birds kept uscompany in the gloomy, black-pine forest, when we sorely neededsolace of some kind.
Fraser Lake was also very charming, romantic enough to be the sceneof Cooper's best novels. The water was deliciously clear and cool,and from the farther shore great mountains rose in successive sweepsof dark green foothills. At this time we felt well satisfied withourselves and the trip. With a gleam in his eyes Burton said, "Thisis the kind of thing our folks think we're doing all the time."
RELENTLESS NATURE
She laid her rivers to snare us, She set her snows to chill, Her clouds had the cunning of vultures, Her plants were charged to kill. The glooms of her forests benumbed us, On the slime of her ledges we sprawled; But we set our feet to the northward, And crawled and crawled and crawled! We defied her, and cursed her, and shouted: "To hell with your rain and your snow. Our minds we have set on a journey, And despite of your anger we go!"
CHAPTER IX
THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE BULKLEY
We were now following a chain of lakes to the source of the Endako,one of the chief northwest sources of the Fraser, and were surroundedby tumultuous ridges covered with a seamless robe of pine forests.For hundreds of miles on either hand lay an absolutely untrackedwilderness. In a land like this the trail always follows awater-course, either ascending or descending it; so for some days wefollowed the edges of these lakes and the banks of the connectingstreams, toiling over sharp hills and plunging into steep ravines,over a trail belly-deep in mud and water and through a wood empty oflife.
These were hard days. We travelled for many hours through a burnt-outtract filled with twisted, blackened uprooted trees in the wake offire and hurricane. From this tangled desolation I received thesuggestion of some verses which I call "The Song of the North Wind."The wind and the fire worked together. If the wind precedes, heprepares the way for his brother fire, and in return the fire weakensthe trees to the wind.
We had settled into a dull routine, and the worst feature of eachday's work was the drag, drag of slow hours on the trail. We couldnot hurry, and we were forced to watch our horses with unremittingcare in order to nurse them over the hard spots, or, rather, the softspots, in the trail. We were climbing rapidly and expected soon topass from the watershed of the Fraser into that of the Skeena.
We passed a horse cold in death, with his head flung up as if he hadbeen fighting the wolves in his final death agony. It was a grimsight. Another beast stood abandoned beside the trail, gazing at usreproachfully, infinite pathos in his eyes. He seemed not to have theenergy to turn his head, but stood as if propped upon his legs, hisribs showing with horrible plainness a tragic dejection in everymuscle and limb.
The feed was fairly good, our horses were feeling well, and curiouslyenough the mosquitoes had quite left us. We overtook and passed anumber of outfits camped beside a splendid rushing stream.
On Burns' Lake we came suddenly upon a settlement of quite sizableIndian houses with beautiful pasturage about. The village containedtwenty-five or thirty families of carrier Indians, and was musicalwith the plaintive boat-songs of the young people. How long thesenative races have lived here no one can tell, but their mark on theland is almost imperceptible. They are not of those who mar thelandscape.
On the first of June we topped the divide between the two mightywatersheds. Behind us lay the Fraser, before us the Skeena. Themajestic coast range rose like a wall of snow far away to thenorthwest, while a near-by lake, filling the foreground, reflectedthe blue ridges of the middle distance--a magnificent spread of wildlandscape. It made me wish to abandon the trail and push out into theunexplored.
From this point we began to descend toward the Bulkley, which is themost easterly fork of the Skeena. Soon after starting on our downwardpath we came to a fork in the trail. One trail, newly blazed, led tothe right and seemed to be the one to take. We started upon it, butfound it dangerously muddy, and so returned to the main trail whichseemed to be more numerously travelled. Afterward we wished we hadtaken the other, for we got one of our horses into the quicksand andworked for more than three hours in the attempt to get him out. Ahorse is a strange animal. He is counted intelligent, and so he is ifhe happens to be a bronco or a mule. But in proportion as he is athoroughbred, he seems to lose power to take care of himself--losesheart. Our Ewe-neck bay had a trace of racer in him, and beingweakened by poor food, it was his bad luck to slip over the bank intoa quicksand creek. Having found himself helpless he instantly gave upheart and lay out with a piteous expression of resignation in his bigbrown eyes. We tugged and lifted and rolled him around from oneposition to another, each more dangerous than the first, all to noresult.
While I held him up from drowning, my partner "brushed in" around himso that he _could_ not become submerged. We tried hitching the otherhorses to him in order to drag him out, but as they weresaddle-horses, and had never set shoulder to a collar in theirlives, they refused to pull even enough to take the proverbialsetting hen off the nest.
Up to this time I had felt no need of company on the trail, and forthe most part we had travelled alone. But I now developed a poignantdesire to hear the tinkle of a bell on the back trail, for there isno "funny business" about losing a packhorse in the midst of a wildcountry. His value is not represented by the twenty-five dollarswhich you originally paid for him. Sometimes his life is worth allyou can give for him.
After some three hours of toil (the horse getting weaker all thetime), I looked around once more with despairing gaze, and caughtsight of a bunch of horses across the valley flat. In this countrythere were no horses except such as the goldseeker owned, and thisbunch of horses meant a camp of trailers. Leaping to my saddle, Igalloped across the spongy marsh to hailing distance.
My cries for help brought two of the men running with spades to helpus. The four of us together lifted the old horse out of the pit moredead than alive. We fell to and rubbed his legs to restorecirculation. Later we blanketed him and turned him loose upon thegrass. In a short time he was nearly as well as ever.
It was a sorrowful experience, for a fallen horse is a horse in ruinsand makes a most woful appeal upon one's sympathies. I went to bedtired out, stiff and sore from pulling on the rope, my handsblistered, my nerves shaken.
As I was sinking off to sleep I heard a wolf howl, as though hemourned the loss of a feast.
We had been warned that the Bulkley River was a bad stream tocross,--in fact, the road-gang had cut a new trail in order to avoidit,--that is to say, they kept to the right around the sharp elbowwhich the river makes at this point, whereas the old trail cutdirectly across the elbow, making two crossings. At the point wherethe new trail led to the right we held a council of war to determinewhether to keep to the old trail, and so save several days' travel,or
to turn to the right and avoid the difficult crossing. The newtrail was reported to be exceedingly miry, and that determined thematter--we concluded to make the short cut.
We descended to the Bulkley through clouds of mosquitoes and endlesssloughs of mud. The river was out of its banks, and its quicksandflats were exceedingly dangerous to our pack animals, although theriver itself at this point was a small and sluggish stream.
It took us exactly five hours of most exhausting toil to cross theriver and its flat. We worked like beavers, we sweated like hiredmen, wading up to our knees in water, and covered with mud, brushingin a road over the quicksand for the horses to walk. The Ewe-neckedbay was fairly crazy with fear of the mud, and it was necessary tolead him over every foot of the way. We went into camp for the firsttime too late to eat by daylight. It became necessary for us to use acandle inside the tent at about eleven o'clock.
The horses were exhausted, and crazy for feed. It was a struggle toget them unpacked, so eager were they to forage. Ladrone, alwaysfaithful, touched my heart by his patience and gentleness, and hisreliance upon me. I again heard a gray wolf howl as I was sinking offto sleep.
THE GAUNT GRAY WOLF
O a shadowy beast is the gaunt gray wolf! And his feet fall soft on a carpet of spines; Where the night shuts quick and the winds are cold He haunts the deeps of the northern pines.
His eyes are eager, his teeth are keen, As he slips at night through the bush like a snake, Crouching and cringing, straight into the wind, To leap with a grin on the fawn in the brake.
He falls like a cat on the mother grouse Brooding her young in the wind-bent weeds, Or listens to heed with a start of greed The bittern booming from river reeds.