The Arctic Prairies Part 21

THE MUSK-OX

In the afternoon, Preble, Billy, and I went northward on foot to look for Musk-ox. A couple of miles from camp I left the others and went more westerly.

After wandering on for an hour, disturbing Longspurs, s...o...b..rds, Pipits, Groundsquirrel, and Caribou, I came on a creature that gave me new thrills of pleasure. It was only a Polar Hare, the second we had seen; but its very scarceness here, at least this year, gave it unusual interest, and the Hare itself helped the feeling by letting me get near it to study, sketch, and photograph.

It was exactly like a Prairie Hare in all its manners, even to the method of holding its tail in running, and this is one of the most marked and distinctive peculiarities of the different kinds.

On the 16th of August we left Lockhart's River, knowing now that the north arm of the lake was our way. We pa.s.sed a narrow bay out of which there seemed to be a current, then, on the next high land, noted a large brown spot that moved rather quickly along. It was undoubtedly some animal with short legs, whether a Wolverine a mile away, or a Musk-ox two miles away, was doubtful. Now did that canoe put on its six-mile gait, and we soon knew for certain that the brown thing was a Musk-ox. We were not yet in their country, but here was one of them to meet us. Quickly we landed. Guns and cameras were loaded.

"Don't fire till I get some pictures--unless he charges," were the orders. And then we raced after the great creature grazing from us.

We had no idea whether he would run away or charge, but knew that our plan was to remain unseen as long as possible. So, hiding behind rocks when he looked around, and dashing forward when he grazed, we came unseen within two hundred yards, and had a good look at the huge woolly ox. He looked very much like an ordinary Buffalo, the same in colour, size, and action. I never was more astray in my preconcept of any animal, for I had expected to see something like a large brown sheep.

My, first film was fired. Then, for some unknown reason, that Musk-ox took it into his head to travel fast away from us, not even stopping to graze; he would soon have been over a rocky ridge.

I nodded to Preble. His rifle rang; the bull wheeled sharp about with an angry snort and came toward us. His head was up, his eye blazing, and he looked like a South African Buffalo and a Prairie Bison combined, and seemed to get bigger at every moment. We were safely hidden behind rocks, some fifty yards from him now, when I got my second snap.

Realising the occasion, and knowing my men, I said: "Now, Preble, I am going to walk up to that bull and get a close picture. He will certainly charge me, as I shall be nearest and in full view. There is only one combination that can save my life: that is you and that rifle."

Then with characteristic loquacity did Preble reply: "Go ahead."

I fixed my camera for twenty yards and quit the sheltering rock.

The bull snorted, shook his head, took aim, and just before the precious moment was to arrive a heavy shot behind me, rang out, the bull staggered and fell, shot through the heart, and Weeso cackled aloud in triumph.

How I cursed the meddling old fool. He had not understood. He saw, as he supposed, "the Okimow in peril of his life," and acted according to the dictates of his accursedly poor discretion. Never again shall he carry a rifle with me.

So the last scene came not, but we had the trophy of a Musk-ox that weighed nine hundred pounds in life and stood five feet high at the shoulders--a world's record in point of size.

Now we must camp perforce to save the specimen. Measurements, photos, sketches, and weights were needed, then the skinning and preparing would be a heavy task for all. In the many portages afterwards the skull was part of my burden; its weight was actually forty pounds, its heaviness was far over a hundred.

What extraordinary luck we were having. It was impossible in our time limit to reach the summer haunt of the Caribou on the Arctic Coast, therefore the Caribou came to us in their winter haunt on the Artillery Lake. We did not expect to reach the real Musk-ox country on the Lower Back River, so the Musk-ox sought us out on Aylmer Lake. And yet one more piece of luck is to be recorded. That night something came in our tent and stole meat. The next night Billy set a trap and secured the thief--an Arctic Fox in summer coat. We could not expect to go to him in his summer home, so he came to us.

While the boys were finishing the dressing of the bull's hide, I, remembering the current from the last bay, set out on foot over the land to learn the reason. A couple of miles brought me to a ridge from which I made the most important geographical discovery of the journey. Stretching away before me to the far dim north-west was a great, splendid river--broad, two hundred yards wide in places, but averaging seventy or eighty yards across--broken by white rapids and waterfalls, but blue deep in the smoother stretches and emptying into the bay we had noticed. So far as the record showed, I surely was the first white man to behold it. I went to the margin; it was stocked with large trout. I followed it up a couple of miles and was filled with the delight of discovery. "Earl Grey River"', I have been privileged to name it after the distinguished statesman, now Governor-general of Canada.

Then and there I built a cairn, with a record of my visit, and sitting on a hill with the new river below me, I felt that there was no longer any question of the expedition's success. The entire programme was carried out. I had proved the existence of abundance of Caribou, had explored Aylmer Lake, had discovered two great rivers, and, finally, had reached the land of the Musk-ox and secured a record-breaker to bring away. This I felt was the supreme moment of the journey.

Realizing the farness of my camp, from human abode--it could scarcely have been farther on the continent--my thoughts flew back to the dear ones at home, and my comrades, the men of the Camp-fire Club.

I wondered if their thoughts were with me at the time. How they must envy me the chance of launching into the truly unknown wilderness, a land still marked on the maps as "unexplored!" How I enjoyed the thoughts of their sympathy over our probable perils and hardships, and imagined them crowding around me with hearty greetings on my safe return! Alas! for the rush of a great city's life and crowds, I found out later that these, my companions, did not even know that I had been away from New York.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES AND MY FARTHEST NORTH

Camp Musk-Ox provided many other items of interest besides the Great River, the big Musk-ox, and the Arctic Fox. Here Preble secured a Groundsquirrel with its cheek-pouches full of mushrooms and shot a c.o.c.k Ptarmigan whose crop was crammed with leaves of willow and birch, though the ground was bright with berries of many kinds. The last evening we were there a White Wolf followed Billy into camp, keeping just beyond reach of his shotgun; and, of course, we saw Caribou every hour or two.

"All aboard," was the cry on the morning of August 19, and once more we set out. We reached the north arm of the lake, then turned north-eastward. In the evening I got photos of a Polar Hare, the third we had seen. The following day (August 20), at noon, we camped in Sandhill Bay, the north point of Aylmer Lake and the northernmost point of our travels by canoe. It seems that we were the fourth party of white men to camp on this spot.

Captain George Back, 1833-34.

Stewart and Anderson, 1855.

Warburton Pike, 1890.

E. T. Seton, 1907.

All day long we had seen small bands of Caribou. A score now appeared on a sandhill half a mile away; another and another lone specimen trotted past our camp. One of these stopped and gave us an extraordinary exhibition of agility in a sort of St. Vitus's jig, jumping, kicking, and shaking its head; I suspect the nose-worms were annoying it. While we lunched, a fawn came and gazed curiously from a distance of 100 yards. In the after-noon Preble returned from a walk to say that the Caribou were visible in all directions, but not in great bands.

Next morning I was awakened by a Caribou clattering through camp within 30 feet of my tent.

After breakfast we set off on foot northward to seek for Musk-ox, keeping to the eastward of the Great Fish River. The country is rolling, with occasional rocky ridges and long, level meadows in the lowlands, practically all of it would be considered horse country; and nearly every meadow had two or three grazing Caribou.

About noon, when six or seven miles north of Aylmer, we halted for rest and lunch on the top of the long ridge of glacial dump that lies to the east of Great Fish River. And now we had a most complete and spectacular view of the immense open country that we had come so far to see. It was spread before us like a huge, minute, and wonderful chart, and plainly marked with the processes of its shaping-time.

Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing, ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this going on for thousands of years, and we shall have the hills lowered and polished, the valleys more or less filled with broken rocks.

Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of flood. For another age all is below water, dammed by the northern ice, and icebergs breaking from the parent sheet carry bedded in them countless boulders, with which they go travelling south on the open waters.

As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow share equally in this age-long shower of erratics. Nor does it cease till the progress of the warmer day removes the northern ice-dam, sets free the flood, and the region of archaean rocks stands bare and dry.

It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of mighty power used only to destroy. A waste of shattered granite spotted with hundreds of lakes, thousands of lakelets, millions of ponds that are marvellously blue, clear, and lifeless.

But a new force is born on the scene; it attacks not this hill or rock, or that loose stone, but on every point of every stone and rock in the vast domain, it appears--the lowest form of lichen, a mere stain of gray. This spreads and by its own corrosive power eats foothold on the granite; it fructifies in little black velvet spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite, to help the effect. Soon another kind follows--a pale olive-green lichen that fruits in b.u.mps of rich brown velvet; then another branching like a tiny tree--there is a ghostly kind like white chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses higher still.

In the less exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade, searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange textures and oriental tones; broad carpets there are of gray and green; long luxurious lanes, with lilac m.u.f.flers under foot, great beds of a moss so yellow chrome, so spangled with intense red sprigs, that they might, in clumsy hands, look raw. There are knee-deep breadths of polytrichum, which blends in the denser shade into a moss of delicate crimson plush that baffles description.

Down between the broader ma.s.ses are bronze-green growths that run over each slight dip and follow down the rock crannies like streams of molten bra.s.s. Thus the whole land is overlaid with a living, corrosive mantle of activities as varied as its hues.

For ages these toil on, improving themselves, and improving the country by filing down the granite and strewing the dust around each rock.

The frost, too, is at work, breaking up the granite lumps; on every ridge there is evidence of that--low, rounded piles of stone which plainly are the remnants of a boulder, shattered by the cold. Thus, lichen, moss, and frost are toiling to grind the granite surfaces to dust.

Much of this powdered rock is washed by rain into the lakes and ponds; in time these cut their exits down, and drain, leaving each a broad mud-flat. The climate mildens and the south winds cease not, so that wind-borne gra.s.ses soon make green meadows of the broad lake-bottom flats.

The process climbs the hill-slopes; every little earthy foothold for a plant is claimed by some new settler, until each low hill is covered to the top with vegetation graded to its soil, and where the flowering kinds cannot establish themselves, the lichen pioneers still maintain their hold. Rarely, in the landscape, now, is any of the primitive colour of the rocks; even the tall, straight cliffs of Aylmer are painted and frescoed with lichens that flame and glitter with purple and orange, silver and gold. How precious and fertile the ground is made to seem, when every square foot of it is an exquisite elfin garden made by the little people, at infinite cost, filled with dainty flowers and still later embellished with delicate fruit.

One of the wonderful things about these children of the Barrens is the great size of fruit and flower compared with the plant. The cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any one of which might outweigh the herb itself.

Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly in beds of a single species. The Lalique jewelry was the sensation of the Paris Exposition of 1899. Yet here is Lalique renewed and changed for every week in the season and lavished on every square foot of a region that is a million square miles in extent.

Not a cranny in a rock but is seized on at once by the eager little gardeners in charge and made a bed of bloom, as though every inch of room were priceless. And yet Nature here exemplifies the law that our human gardeners are only learning: "Ma.s.s your bloom, to gain effect."

As I stood on that hill, the foreground was a broad stretch of old gold--the shining sandy yellow of drying gra.s.s--but it was patched with large scarlet mats of arctous that would put red maple to its reddest blush. There was no Highland heather here, but there were whole hillsides of purple red vaccinium, whose leaves were but a shade less red than its luscious grape-hued fruit.

Here were white ledums in roods and acre beds; purple mairanias by the hundred acres, and, framed in lilac rocks, were rich, rank meadows of golden-green by the mile.