The Young Alaskans on the Trail - Emerson Hough (best free novels TXT) 📗

make much hunter out of yourself, hein?”

“Well,” said Alex, “we let some mighty good cow venison get away from us, all right.”

“Never mind,” said Moise, consolingly, “we’ll got fat young caribou now plenty for two—three days, maybe so.”

Rob went up to Jesse and shook him by the hand. “Good boy, Jess!” said he. “I’m glad you got him instead of myself. But why didn’t you tell us when we came into camp?”

“Moise said good hunters didn’t do that,” ventured John, who joined the conversation. “How about that, Alex?”

“Well,” said the older hunter, “you must remember that white men are different from Injuns. People who live as Injuns do get to be rather quiet. Now, suppose an Injun hunter has gone out after a moose, and has been gone maybe two or three days. He’ll probably not hunt until everything is gone in the lodge, and maybe neither he nor his family is going to eat much until he gets a moose. Well, by and by he comes home some evening, and throws aside the skin door of the lodge, and goes in and sits down. His wife helps him off with his moccasins and hands him a dry pair, and makes up the fire. He sits and smokes. No one asks him whether he has killed or not, and he doesn’t say whether he has killed, although they all may be very hungry. Now, his wife doesn’t know whether to get ready to cook or not, but she doesn’t ask her man. He sits there awhile; but, of course, he likes his family and doesn’t want them to be hungry. So after a while, very dignified, he’ll make some excuse so that his wife can tell what the result of the hunt has been. Maybe he’ll say carelessly that he has a little blood on his shirt, which ought to be washed off, or maybe he’ll say that if any one were walking a couple of miles down the river they might see a blazed trail out toward the hills. Then his wife will smile and hurry to put on the kettles. If it isn’t too far, she’ll take her pack-strap then and start out to bring in some of the meat. Every people, you see, will have different ways.”

“But the man who doesn’t kill something goes hungry, and his family, too?”

“Not in the least!” rejoined Alex, with some spirit. “There, too, the ‘First People’ are kinder than the whites who govern them now. Suppose in my village there are twenty lodges. Out of the twenty there will be maybe four or five good hunters, men who can go out and kill moose or bear. It gets to be so that they do most of the hunting, and if one of them brings in any meat all the village will have meat. Of course the good hunters don’t do any other kind of work very much.”

“That isn’t the way white people do,” asserted John; “they don’t divide up in business matters unless they have to.”

“Maybe not,” said Alex, “but it has always been different with my people in the north. If men did not divide meat with one another many people would starve. As it is, many starve in the far-off countries each winter. Sometimes we cannot get even rabbits. It may be far to the trading-post. The moose or the caribou may be many miles away, where no one can find them. A heavy storm may come, so no one can travel. Then if a man is fortunate and has meat he would be cruel if he did not divide. He knows that all the others would do as much with him. It is our custom.”

XIV EXPLORING THE WILDERNESS

IF Rob, John, and Jesse had been eager for exciting incidents on their trip across the mountains, certainly they found them in plenty during the next three days after the caribou hunt, as they continued their passage on down the mountain river, when they had brought in all their meat and once more loaded the canoes.

Rob had been studying his maps and records, and predicted freely that below this camp they would find wilder waters. This certainly proved to be the case. Moreover, they found that although it is easier to go down-stream than up in fast water, it is more dangerous, and sometimes progress is not so rapid as might be expected. Indeed, on the first day below the caribou camp they made scarcely more than six or eight miles, for, in passing the boats down along shore to avoid a short piece of fast water, the force of the current broke the line of the Mary Ann, and it was merely by good fortune that they caught up with her, badly jammed and wedged between two rocks, her gunwale strip broken across and the cedar shell crushed through, so that she had sprung a bad leak.

They hauled the crippled Mary Ann ashore and discharged her cargo in order to examine the injuries received.

“Well, now, we’re giving an imitation of the early voyageurs,” said John, as he saw the rent in the side of the canoe. “But how are we going to fix her? She isn’t a birch-bark, and if she were, we have no bark.”

“I think we’ll manage,” Rob replied, “because we have canvas and cement and all that sort of thing. But her rail is broken quite across.”

“She’ll been good boat,” said Moise, smiling; “we’ll fix heem easy.” So saying, he took his ax and sauntered over to a half-dead cedar-tree, from which, without much difficulty, he cut some long splints. This they managed to lash inside the gunwale of the canoe, stiffening it considerably. The rent in the bottom they patched by means of their cement, and some waterproof material. They finished the patch with abundant spruce gum and tar, melted together and spread all over. When they were done their labors the Mary Ann was again watertight, but not in the least improved in beauty.

“We’ll have to be very careful all the way down from here, I’m thinking,” said Alex. “The river is getting far more powerful almost every hour as these other streams come in. Below the Finlay, I know very well, she’s a big stream, and the shores are so bad that if we had an accident it would leave things rather awkward.”

None the less, even with one boat crippled in this way, Rob and John gained confidence in running fast water almost every hour. They learned how to keep their heads when engaged in the passage of white water, how to avoid hidden rocks, as well as dangerous swells and eddies. It seemed to them quite astonishing what rough water could be taken in these little boats, and continually the temptation was, of course, to run a rapid rather than laboriously to disembark and line down alongshore. Thus, to make their story somewhat shorter, they passed on down slowly for parts of three days, until at last, long after passing the mouth of the Pack River and the Nation, and yet another smaller stream, all coming in from the west, they saw opening up on the left hand a wide valley coming down from the northwest.

The character of the country, and the distance they had traveled, left no doubt whatever in their minds that this was the Finlay River, the other head-stream of the Peace River. They therefore now felt as though they knew precisely where they were. Being tired, they pitched their camp not far below the mouth of the Finlay, and busied themselves in looking over their boats and supplies. They knew that the dreaded Finlay rapids lay only two miles below them.

They were now passing down a river which had grown to a very considerable stream, sometimes with high banks, again with shores rather low and marshy, and often broken with many islands scattered across an expanse of water sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile in extent. The last forty miles of the stream to the junction of the Finlay had averaged not more rapid but much heavier than the current had seemed toward the headwaters. The roar of the rapids they approached now came up-stream with a heavier note, and was distinguishable at much greater distances, and the boats in passing through some of the heavier rapids did so in the midst of a din quite different from the gentle babble of the shallow stream far toward its source. The boom of the bad water far below this camp made them uneasy.

“Well,” said Rob, as they sat in camp near the shore, “we know where we are now. We have passed the mouth of the McLeod outlet, and we have passed the Nation River and everything else that comes in from the west. Here we turn to the east. It must be nearly one hundred and fifty miles to the real gate of the Rockies—at the Cañon of the Rocky Mountains, as the first traders called it.”

“It looks like a pretty big river now,” said Jesse dubiously.

“I would like to hope it’s no worse than it has been just above here,” said Rob, “but I fear it is, from all I know. Mackenzie got it in high water, and he only averaged half a mile an hour for a long time going up, along in here. Of course coming down we could pick our way better than he could.”

“We have been rather lucky on the whole,” said Alex, “for, frankly, the water has been rather worse for canoes than I thought it would be. Moreover, it is still larger below here. But that’s not the worst of it.”

“What do you mean, Alex?” inquired John.

“You ought not to need to ask me,” replied the old hunter. “You’re all voyageurs, are you not?”

“But what is it, then?”

“Look closely.”

They went to the edge of the beach and looked up and down the river carefully, also studying the forking valleys into which they could see from the place where they were in camp.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Rob, “but it seems to me she’s rising a little!”

Alex nodded. “We’ve been in camp here three hours now,” said he, “and she’s come up a little more than an inch.”

“Why, how do you know that?” asked John.

“I set a stick with a notch at water-level when we first came ashore.”

“How did you happen to think of that?”

“Very likely the same thing which made Rob guess it.”

“Yes,” said Rob, “I saw that the Finlay water coming down seemed to be discolored. But at first I supposed it was the natural color of that river. So you think there has been a thaw?”

“Maybe some sort of rain or chinook over in there,” said Alex. “What do you think, Moise?”

Moise and Alex talked for a time in the Cree language, Moise shaking his head as he answered.

“Moise thinks there has been a little rise,” interpreted Alex. “He says that below here the river sometimes cañons up, or runs between high banks with a narrow channel. That would make it bad. You see, the rise of a foot in a place like that would make much more difference than two inches in the places where the river is spread out several hundred yards wide. We know a little bit more about the river from here east, because we have talked with men who have been here.”

“I suppose we’ll have to wait here until it runs down,” said Jesse.

“Maybe not. If we were here earlier in the season and this were the regular spring rise we might have to wait for some time before we could go down with these boats. But the big flood has gone down long ago. There isn’t anything to