The Long Labrador Trail Part 11

The George River all the way down to this point had been in past years a veritable slaughter house. There were great piles of caribou antlers (the barren-ground caribou or reindeer), sometimes as many as two or three hundred pairs in a single pile, where the Indians had speared the animals in the river, and everywhere along the banks were scattered dry bones. Abandoned camps, and some of them large ones and not very old, were distributed at frequent intervals, though we saw no more of the Indians themselves until we reached Ungava Bay.

Wolves were numerous. We saw their tracks in the sand and fresh signs of them were common. They always abound where there are caribou, which form their main living. Ptarmigans in the early morning clucked on the river banks like chickens in a barnyard, and we saw some very large flocks of them. Geese and black ducks, making their way to the southward, were met with daily. But we had no arms or ammunition with which to kill them. I saw some fox signs, but there were very few or no rabbit signs, strange to say, until we were a full hundred miles farther down the river.

This camp, where we found the stovepipe, we soon discovered was nearly at the head of Indian House Lake, so called by a Hudson's Bay Company factor-John McLean-because of the numbers of Indians that he found living on its sh.o.r.es. McLean, about seventy years earlier, had ascended the river in the interests of his company, for the purpose of establishing interior posts. The most inland Post that he erected was at the lower end of this lake, which is fifty-five miles in length. He also built a Post on a large lake which he describes in his published journal as lying to the west of Indian House Lake. The exact location of this latter lake is not now known, but I am inclined to think it is one which the Indians say is the source of Whale River, a stream of considerable size emptying into Ungava Bay one hundred and twenty miles to the westward of the mouth of the George River. These two rivers are doubtless much nearer together, however, farther inland, where Whale River has its rise. The difficulty experienced by McLean in getting supplies to these two Posts rendered them unprofitable, and after experimenting with them for three years they were abandoned. The agents in charge were each spring on the verge of starvation before the opening of the waters brought fish and food or they were relieved by the brigades from Ungava. They had to depend almost wholly upon their hunters for provisions. It was not attempted in those days to carry in flour, pork and other food stuffs now considered by the traders necessaries. And almost the only goods handled by them in the Indian trade were axes, knives, guns, ammunition and beads.

Indian House Lake now, as then, is a general rendezvous for the Indians during the summer months, when they congregate there to fish and to hunt reindeer. In the autumn they scatter to the better trapping grounds, where fur bearing animals are found in greater abundance. We were too late in the season to meet these Indians, though we saw many of their camping places.

A snowstorm began on October seventh, but the wind had so far abated that we were able to resume our journey. It was a bleak and dismal day. Save for now and then a small grove of spruce trees in some sheltered nook, and these at long intervals, the country was dest.i.tute and barren of growth. Below our camp, upon entering the lake, there was a wide, flat stretch of sand wash from the river, and below this from the lake sh.o.r.e on either side, great barren, grim hills rose in solemn majesty, across whose rocky face the wind swept the snow in fitful gusts and squalls. Off on a mountain side a wolf disturbed the white silence with his dismal cry, and farther on a big black fellow came to the water's edge, and with the snow blowing wildly about him held his head in the air and howled a challenge at us as we pa.s.sed close by. Perhaps he yearned for companionship and welcomed the sight of living things. For my part, grim and uncanny as he looked, I was glad to see him. He was something to vary the monotony of the great solemn silence of our world.

The storm increased, and early in the day the snow began to fall so heavily that we could not see our way, and forced us to turn into a bay where we found a small cl.u.s.ter of trees amongst big bowlders, and pitched our tent in their shelter. The snow had drifted in and filled the s.p.a.ce between the rocks, and on this we piled armfuls of scraggy boughs and made a fairly level and wholly comfortable bed; but it was a long, tedious job digging with our hands and feet into the snow for bits of wood for our stove. The conditions were growing harder and harder with every day, and our experience here was a common one with us for the most of the remainder of the way down the river from this point.

The day we reached the lower end of the lake I summed up briefly its characteristics in my field book as follows:

"Indian House Lake has a varying width of from a quarter mile to three miles. It is apparently not deep. Both sh.o.r.es are followed by ridges of the most barren, rocky hills imaginable, some of them rising to a height of eight to nine hundred feet and sloping down sharply to the sh.o.r.es, which are strewn with large loose bowlders or are precipitous bed rock. An occasional sand knoll occurs, and upon nearly every one of these is an abandoned Indian camp. The timber growth--none at all or very scanty spruce and tamarack. Length of lake (approximated) fifty-five miles."

I had hoped to locate the site of McLean's old Post buildings, more than three score years ago destroyed by the Indians, doubtless for firewood, but the snow had bidden what few traces of them time had not destroyed, and they were pa.s.sed unnoticed. The storm which raged all the time we were here made progress slow, and it was not until the morning of the tenth that we reached the end of the lake, where the river, vastly increased in volume, poured out through a rapid.

Below Indian House Lake there were only a few short stretches of slack water to relieve the pretty continuous rapids. The river wound in and out, in and out, rushing on its tumultuous way amongst ever higher mountains. There was no time to examine the rapids before we shot them. We had to take our chances, and as we swung around every curve we half expected to find before us a cataract that would hurl us to destruction. The banks were often sheer from the water's edge, and made landing difficult or even impossible. In one place for a distance of many miles the river had worn its way through the mountains, leaving high, perpendicular walls of solid rock on either side, forming a sort of canyon. In other places high bowlders, piled by some giant force, formed fifty-foot high walls, which we had to scale each night to make our camp. In the morning some peak in the blue distance would be noted as a landmark. In a couple of hours we would rush past it and mark another one, which, too, would soon be left behind.

The rapids continued the characteristic of the river and were terrific.

Often it would seem that no canoe could ride the high, white waves, or that we could not avoid the swirl of mighty cross-current eddies, which would have swallowed up our canoe like a chip had we got into them.

There were rapids whose roar could be distinctly heard for five or six miles. These we approached with the greatest care, and portaged around the worst places. The water was so clear that often we found ourselves dodging rocks, which, when we pa.s.sed them, were ten or twelve feet below the surface. It was here that a peculiar optical illusion occurred. The water appeared to be running down an incline of about twenty degrees. At the place where this was noticed, however, the current was not exceptionally swift. We were in a section now where the Indians never go, owing to the character of the river--a section that is wholly untraveled and unhunted.

After leaving Indian House Lake, as we descended from the plateau, the weather grew milder. There were chilly winds and bleak rains, but the snow, though remaining on the mountains, disappeared gradually from the valley, and this was a blessing to us, for it enabled us to make camp with a little less labor, and the bits of wood were left uncovered, to be gathered with more ease. Every hour of light we needed, for with each dawn and twilight the days were becoming noticeably shorter. The sun now rose in the southeast, crossed a small segment of the sky, and almost before we were aware of it set in the southwest.

The wilderness gripped us closer and closer as the days went by.

Remembrances of the outside world were becoming like dreamland fancies--something hazy, indefinite and unreal. We could hardly bring ourselves to believe that we had really met the Indians. It seemed to us that all our lives we had been going on and on through rushing water, or with packs over rocky portages, and the Post we were aiming to reach appeared no nearer to us than it did the day we left Northwest River--long, long ago. We seldom spoke. Sometimes in a whole day not a dozen words would be exchanged. If we did talk at all it was at night over soothing pipes, after the bit of pemmican we allowed ourselves was disposed of, and was usually of something to eat--planning feasts of darn goods, bread and mola.s.ses when we should reach a place where these luxuries were to be had. It was much like the way children plan what wonderful things they will do, and what unbounded good things they will indulge in, when they attain that high pinnacle of their ambition--"grown-ups."

After our upset in the rapid Easton eschewed water entirely, except for drinking purposes. He had had enough of it, he said. I did bathe my hands and face occasionally, particularly in the morning, to rouse me from the torpor of the always heavy sleep of night. What savages men will revert into when they are buried for a long period in the wilderness and shake off the trammels and customs of the conventionalism of civilization! It does not take long to make an Indian out of a white man so far as habits and customs of living go.

Our routine of daily life was always the same. Long before daylight I would arise, kindle a fire, put over it our tea water, and then get Easton out of his blankets. At daylight we would start. At midday we had tea, and at twilight made the best camp we could.

The hills were a.s.suming a different aspect--less conical in form and not so high. The bowlders on the river banks were superseded by ma.s.sive bed-rock granite. The coves and hollows were better wooded and there were some stretches of slack water. On October fifteenth we portaged around a series of low falls, below which was a small lake expansion with a river flowing into it from the east. Here we found the first evidence of human life that we had seen in a long while--a wide portage trail that had been cut through now burned and dead trees on the eastern side of the river. It was fully six feet in width and had been used for the pa.s.sage of larger boats than canoes. The moss was still unrenewed where the tramp of many moccasins had worn it off.

This was the trail made by John McLean's brigades nearly three-quarters of a century before, for in their journeys to Indian House Lake they had used rowboats and not canoes for the transportation of supplies.

The day we pa.s.sed over this portage was a most miserable one. We were soaked from morning till night with mingled snow and rain, and numb with the cold, but when we made our night camp, below the junction of the rivers, one or two ax cuttings were found, and I knew that now our troubles were nearly at an end and we were not far from men. The next afternoon (Monday, October sixteenth) we stopped two or three miles below a rapid to boil our kettle, and before our tea was made the canoe was high and dry on the rocks. We had reached tide water at last! How we hurried through that luncheon, and with what light hearts we launched the canoe again, and how we peered into every bay for the Post buildings that we knew were now close at hand can be imagined. These bays were being left wide stretches of mud and rocks by the receding water, which has a tide fall here of nearly forty feet. At last, as we rounded a rocky point, we saw the Post. The group of little white buildings nestling deep in a cove, a feathery curl of smoke rising peacefully from the agent's house, an Eskimo _tupek_ (tent), boats standing high on the mud flat below, and the howl of a husky dog in the distance, formed a picture of comfort that I shall long remember.

CHAPTER XV

OFF WITH THE ESKIMOS

The tide had left the bay drained, on the farther side and well toward the bottom of which the Post stands, and between us and the buildings was a lake of soft mud. There seemed no approach for the canoe, and rather than sit idly until the incoming tide covered the mud again so that we could paddle in, we carried our belongings high up the side of the hill, safely out of reach of the water when it should rise, and then started to pick our way around the face of the clifflike hill, with the intention of skirting the bay and reaching the Post at once from the upper side.

It was much like walking on the side of a wall, and to add to our discomfiture night began to fall before we were half way around, for it was slow work. Once I descended cautiously to the mud, thinking that I might be able to walk across it, but a deep channel filled with running water intercepted me, and I had to return to Easton, who had remained above. We finally realized that we could not get around the hill before dark and the footing was too uncertain to attempt to retrace our steps to the canoe in the fading light, as a false move would have hurled us down a hundred feet into the mud and rocks below. Fortunately a niche in the hillside offered a safe resting place, and we drew together here all the brush within reach, to be burned later as a signal to the Post folk that some one was on the hill, hoping that when the tide rose it would bring them in, a boat to rescue us from our unpleasant position. When the brush was arranged for firing at an opportune time we sat down in the thickening darkness to watch the lights which were now flickering cozily in the windows of the Post house.

"Well, this _is_ hard luck," said Easton. "There's good bread and mola.s.ses almost within hailing distance and we've likely got to sit out here on the rocks all night without wood enough to keep fire, and it's going to rain pretty soon and we can't even get back to our pemmican and tent."

"Don't give up yet, boy," I encouraged. "Maybe they'll see our fire when we start it and take us off."

We filled our pipes and struck matches to light them. They were wax taper matches and made a good blaze. "Wonder what it'll be like to eat civilized grub again and sleep in a bed," said Easton meditatively, as he puffed uncomfortably at his pipe.

While he was speaking the glow of a lantern appeared from the Post house, which we could locate by its lamp-lit windows, and moved down toward the place where we had seen the boats on the mud. The sight of it made us hope that we had been noticed, and we jumped up and combined our efforts in shouting until we were hoa.r.s.e. Then we ignited the pile of brush. It blazed up splendidly, shooting its flames high in the air, sending its sparks far, and lighting weirdly the strange scene.

We stood before it that our forms might appear in relief against the light reflected by the rocky background, waving our arms and renewing our shouts. Once or twice I fancied I heard an answering hail from the other side, like a far-off echo; but the wind was against us and I was not sure. The lantern light was now in a boat moving out toward the main river. Even though it were coming to us this was necessary, as the tide could not be high enough yet to permit its coming directly across to where we were. We watched its course anxiously. Finally it seemed to be heading toward us, but we were not certain. Then it disappeared altogether and there was nothing but blackness and silence where it had been.

"Some one that's been waiting for the tide to turn and he's just going down the river, where he likely lives," remarked Easton as we sat down again and relit our pipes. "I began to taste bread and mola.s.ses when I saw that light," he continued, after a few minutes' pause. "It's just our luck. We're in for a night of it, all right."

We sat smoking silently, resigned to our fate, when all at once there stepped out of the surrounding darkness into the radius of light cast by our now dying fire, an old Eskimo with an unlighted lantern in his hands, and a young fellow of fifteen or sixteen years of age.

"Oksutingyae," * said the Eskimo, and then proceeded to light his lantern, paying no further attention to us. "How do you do?" said the boy.

* [Dual form meaning "You two be strong," used by the Eskimos as a greeting. The singular of the same is Oksunae, and the plural (more than two) Oksusi]

The Eskimo could understand no English, but the boy, a grandson of Johm Ford, the Post agent, told us that the Eskimo had seen us strike the matches to light our pipes and reported the matter at once at the house. There was not a match at the Post nor within a hundred miles of it, so far as they knew, so Mr. Ford concluded that some strangers were stranded on the hill--possibly Eskimos in distress--and he gave them a lantern and started them over in a boat to investigate. Their lantern had blown out on the way--that was when we missed the light.

With the lantern to guide us we descended the slippery rocks to their boat and in ten minutes landed on the mud flat opposite, where we were met by Ford and a group of curious Eskimos. We were immediately conducted to the agent's residence, where Mrs. Ford received us in the hospitable manner of the North, and in a little while spread before us a delicious supper of fresh trout, white bread such as we had not seen since leaving Tom Blake's, mossberry jam and tea. It was an event in our life to sit down again to a table covered with white linen and eat real bread. We ate until we were ashamed of ourselves, but not until we were satisfied (for we had emerged from the bush with unholy appet.i.tes) and barely stopped eating in time to save our reputations from utter ruin. And now our hosts told us--and it shows how really generous and open-hearted they were to say nothing about it until we were through eating--that the _Pelican_, the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer, had not arrived on her annual visit, that it was so late in the season all hope of her coming had some time since been relinquished, and the Post provisions were reduced to forty pounds of flour, a bit of sugar, a barrel or so of corn meal, some salt pork and salt beef, and small quant.i.ties of other food stuffs, and there were a great many dependents with hungry mouths to feed. Mola.s.ses, b.u.t.ter and other things were entirely gone. The storehouses were empty.

This condition of affairs made it inc.u.mbent upon me, I believed, in spite of a cordial invitation from Ford to stay and share with them what they had, to move on at once and endeavor to reach Fort Chimo ahead of the ice. Fort Chimo is the chief establishment of the fur trading companies on Ungava Bay, and is the farthest off and most isolated station in northern Labrador. This journey would be too hazardous to undertake in the month of October in a canoe--the rough, open sea of Ungava Bay demanded a larger craft--and although Ford told me it was foolhardy to attempt it so late in the season with any craft at all, I requested him to do his utmost the following day to engage for us Eskimos and a small boat and we would make the attempt to get there. It has been my experience that frontier traders are wont to overestimate the dangers in trips of this kind, and I was inclined to the belief that this was the case with Ford. In due time I learned my mistake.

Ford had no tobacco but the soggy black chewing plug dispensed to Eskimos, and we shared with him our remaining plugs and for two hours sat in the cozy Post house kitchen smoking and chatting. Over a year had pa.s.sed since his last communication with the outside world, for no vessel other than the _Pelican_ when she makes her annual call with supplies ever comes here, and we therefore had some things of interest to tell him.

Our host I soon discovered to be a man of intelligence. He was sixty-six years of age, a native of the east coast of Labrador, with a tinge of Eskimo blood in his veins, and as familiar with the Eskimo language as with English. For twenty years, he informed me, with the exception of one or two brief intervals, he had been buried at George River Post, and was longing for the time when he could leave it and enjoy the comforts of civilization.

After our chat we were shown to our room, where the almost forgotten luxuries of feather beds and pillows, and the great, warm, fluffy woolen blankets of the Hudson's Bay Company--such blankets as are found nowhere else in the world--awaited us. To undress and crawl between them and lie there, warm and snug and dry, while we listened to the rain, which had begun beating furiously against the window and on the roof, and the wind howling around the house, seemed to me at first the pinnacle of comfort; but this sense of luxury soon pa.s.sed off and I found myself longing for the tent and spruce-bough couch on the ground, where there was more air to breathe and a greater freedom. I could not sleep. The bed was too warm and the four walls of the room seemed pressing in on me. After four months in the open it takes some time for one to accustom one's self to a bed again.

The next day at high tide, with the aid of a boat and two Eskimos, we recovered our things from the rocks where we had cached them.

There were no Eskimos at the Post competent or willing to attempt the open-boat journey to Fort Chimo. Those that were here all agreed that the ice would come before we could get through and that it was too dangerous an undertaking. Therefore, galling as the delay was to me, there was nothing for us to do but settle down and wait for the time to come when we could go with dog teams overland.

On Thursday afternoon, three days after our arrival at the Post, we saw the Eskimos running toward the wharf and shouting as though something of unusual importance were taking place and, upon joining the crowd, found them greeting three strange Eskimos who had just arrived in a boat. The real cause of the excitement we soon learned was the arrival of the _Pelican_. The strange Eskimos were the pilots that brought her from Fort Chimo. All was confusion and rejoicing at once. Ford manned a boat and invited us to join him in a visit to the ship, which lay at anchor four miles below, and we were soon off.

When we boarded the Pelican, which, by the way, is an old British cruiser, we were received by Mr. Peter McKenzie, from Montreal, who has superintendence of eastern posts, and Captain Lovegrow, who commanded the vessel. They told us that they had called at Rigolet on their way north and there heard of the arrival of Richards, Pete and Stanton at Northwest River. This relieved my mind as to their safety.

We spent a very pleasant hour over a cigar, and heard the happenings in the outside world since our departure from it, the most important of which was the close of the Russian-j.a.panese war. We also learned that the cause of delay in the ship's coming was an accident on the rocks near Cartwright, making it necessary for them to run to St. Johns for repairs; and also that only the fact of the distressful condition of the Post, unprovisioned as they knew it must be, had induced them to take the hazard of running in and chancing imprisonment for the winter in the ice.

Mr. McKenzie extended me a most cordial invitation to return with them to Rigolet, but the Eskimo pilots had brought news of large herds of reindeer that the Indians had reported as heading eastward toward the Koksoak, the river on which Fort Chimo is situated, and I determined to make an effort to see these deer. This determination was coupled with a desire to travel across the northern peninsula and around the coast in winter and learn more of the people and their life than could be observed at the Post; and I therefore declined Mr. McKenzie's invitation.

Captain James Blanford, from St. Johns, was on board, acting as ship's pilot for the east coast, and he kindly offered to carry out for me such letters and telegrams as I might desire to send and personally attend to their transmission. I gladly availed myself of this offer, as it gave us an opportunity to relieve the anxiety of our friends at home as to our safety. Captain Blanford had been with the auxiliary supply ship of the Peary Arctic expedition during the summer and told us of having left Commander Peary at eighty degrees north lat.i.tude in August. The expedition, he told us, would probably winter as high as eighty-three degrees north, and he was highly enthusiastic over the good prospects of Peary's success in at least reaching "Farthest North."

The Eskimo pilots of the _Pelican_ were more venturesome than their friends at George River. They had a small boat belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, and in it were going to attempt to reach Fort Chimo. Against his advice I had Ford arrange with them to permit Easton and me to accompany them. It was a most fortunate circ.u.mstance, I thought, that this opportunity was opened to us.

Accordingly the letters for Captain Blanford were written, sufficient provisions, consisting of corn meal, flour, hard-tack, pork, and tea to last Easton and me ten days, were packed, and our luggage was taken on board the _Pelican_ on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, where we were to spend the night as Mr. McKenzie's and Captain Lovegrow's guests.

Mr. McKenzie, before going to Montreal, had lived nearly a quarter of a century as Factor at Fort Chimo, and, thoroughly familiar with the conditions of the country and the season, joined Ford in advising us strongly against our undertaking, owing to the unusual hazard attached to it, and the probability of getting caught in the ice and wrecked.

But we were used to hardship, and believed that if the Eskimos were willing to attempt the journey we could get through with them some way, and I saw no reason why I should change my plans.

Low-hanging clouds, flying snowflakes and a rising northeast wind threatened a heavy storm on Sunday morning, October twenty-second, when the _Pelican_ weighed anchor at ten o'clock, with us on board and the small boat, the _Explorer_, that was to carry us westward in tow, and steamed down the George River, at whose mouth, twenty miles below, we were to leave her, to meet new and unexpected dangers and hardships.