Young Alaskans in the Far North, Emerson Hough [the false prince series TXT] 📗

I should say it would take us about thirty minutes to make a landing, build a fire, cook a meal, and get off again. There’s no time to be wasted, don’t you see?”

“I suppose Sir Alexander Mackenzie found that out himself when he first went down this river,” said Rob.

“I’ll warrant you he did! And his lesson has stuck in the minds of all these northern people to this day.”

“Well, anyhow,” commented Jesse, as one mosquito bit his hand, “I wish they wouldn’t bother me while I’m eating.”

“Now if John had said that,” said Uncle Dick, “it wouldn’t be so strange.”

They all joined in his laughing at John, whose appetite made a standing joke among them. But John only laughed with them and went on with his supper. “There can’t anybody bluff me out of a good meal,” said he, “not even the mosquitoes.”

“That’s the idea,” nodded his older adviser. “But really these insect pests are the great drawback of this entire northern country. Perhaps they will keep the settlers out as much as anything else. Fur-traders and trappers and travelers like ourselves—they can’t stop for them, of course. We’ll take our chances like Sir Alexander Mackenzie—eh, boys?”

“I’m not afraid,” said Jesse.

“Nor I,” added John.

And indeed they finished their evening meal, which they cooked for themselves, in fairly comfortable surroundings; and in their mosquito-proof tent they passed an untroubled night, each in the morning declaring that he had slept in perfect comfort.

“We’ll leave the tents standing for a while,” said Uncle Dick, “until we know just when we are going to embark. The brigade may pull out any day now. We’ll have warning enough so that we can easily get ready. But come on now and we’ll go over to the boat-yard,” he added. “It’s time we began to see about our own boat and to get our supplies ready for shipping.”

They followed him through the straggling town down to the edge of the water-front, where the Athabasca, now somewhat turbulent in the high waters of the spring, rolled rapidly by.

Here there was a rude sort of lumber-yard, to all appearance, with the addition of a sort of rough shipyard. Chips and shavings and fragments of boards lay all about. Here and there on trestles stood the gaunt frames of what appeared to be rough flatboats, long, wide, and shallow, constructed with no great art or care. There was no keel to any one of these boats, and the ribs were flimsily put together.

“Well, I don’t think much of these boats,” grumbled John, as he passed among them slowly.

“Don’t be too rough with them,” said Uncle Dick, laughingly. “Like everything else up here, they may not be the best in the world, but they do for their purpose. These scows are never intended to come back, you must remember; all they have to do is to stand the trip down, for a month or two. All the frame houses of the Far North are made out of these scows; they break them up at the ends of the trips. Our boat may be part of a church before it gets through.

“Come now, and I’ll introduce you to old Adam McAdam, the builder and pump-maker.” He nodded toward an old man who was passing slowly here and there among the rude craft. “This old chap is no doubt over seventy-five years old, and he must have built hundreds of these boats in his time. He makes the pumps, too, and a pump has to go with every scow to keep it from sinking at first, before the seams get swelled up.”

The old man proved pleasant enough, and with a certain pride showed them all about these rude craft of the fur trade. Each boat appeared to be about fifty feet in length and nearly twenty in width, the carrying capacity of each being about ten tons.

“Of course you know, my lads,” said the old man, “a scow goes no faster than the river runs. Here’s the great oar—twenty feet it is in length—made out of a young tree. The steersman uses that to straighten her up betimes. But there’s nothing to make the boat run saving the current, do ye mind?”

“Well, that won’t be so very fast,” commented Rob, thinking of the long distances that lay ahead.

“Oh, we’re not confined to scows for much more than two hundred and fifty miles,” replied Uncle Dick. “At McMurray we get a steamer which carries us down-stream to Smith’s Landing. That’s the big and bad portage of the whole trip—that is to say, excepting the Rat Portage of five hundred miles over the Yukon. But when we get below the Smith’s Landing portage we strike another Hudson’s Bay Company steamer that takes us fast enough, day and night, all the way to the Arctic Circle. That’s where we make our time, don’t you see? These boats only get us over the rapids.

“Of course,” he explained, a little later, “a few of them go on down, towed by the steamboats, because the steamboats are not big enough to carry all the freight which must go north. There are only two steamboats between us and the Arctic Circle now, barring one or two little ones which are not of much account. The scows have to carry all the supplies for the entire fur trade—trade goods, bacon, flour, and everything.”

“Who’s that old gentleman coming along there, Uncle Dick?” demanded Jesse, turning toward the end of the street.

“That’s old Father Le Fèvre,” replied his uncle. “He’s the purchasing agent for all the many missions of the Catholic Church in the Far North. Each year he comes in with ten or more scows, each carrying ten tons of goods. He may go as far as Chippewyan, and then come back, or he may go on to Great Slave. I understand there are two good Sisters going even farther north this year. No one knows when they will come back, of course; they’ll be teachers up among the native schools.

“Well, now you see the transport system beyond the head of the rails in the Athabasca and Mackenzie country,” he continued, as, hands in pocket, he passed along among the finished and unfinished craft which still lay in the shipyard.

Outside, moored to stumps along the shore, floated a number of the rude scows, some of which even now were partially laden. The leader of the expedition pointed out to one of these.

“That’s our boat yonder, young men,” said he. “You’ll see that she has the distinction of a name. Most scows have only numbers on them, and each post gets certain scows with certain numbers. But ours has a name—the Midnight Sun. How do you like that?”

“That’s fine, sir!” said Rob. “And we’ll see to it that she doesn’t come to grief as long as we use her.”

“Well, it will only be for a couple of hundred miles or so,” said Uncle Dick, “but I fancy there’ll be nothing slow in that two hundred miles.”

“Where will we eat?” demanded John, with his usual regard for creature comforts.

“That’s easy,” said Rob. “I know all about that. I saw two men loading a cook-stove on one of the scows. They took it out of a canoe, and how they did it without upsetting the canoe I can’t tell, but they did it. I suppose we’ll cook as we go along.”

“Precisely,” nodded Uncle Dick. “The cook-boat is the only thing that goes under steam. The cook builds his fire in the stove just as though he were on shore. When he calls time for meals, the men from the other boats take turns in putting out in canoes and going to the cook-boat for meals. Sometimes a landing is made while they eat, and of course they always tie up at night They have certain stages which they try to make. The whole thing is all planned out on a pretty good system, rough but effective, as you will see.”

“Is he a pretty good cook?” asked John, somewhat demurring.

“Well, good enough for us, if he is good enough for the others,” replied his uncle. “But I’ll tell you what we might do once in a while. They do say that the two good Sisters who go north with the mission brigade know how to cook better than any half-breed. I’ve made arrangements so that we can eat on their scow once in a while if we like.”

“What’s that funny business on the end of our boat?” asked Jesse, presently, pointing to a rude framework of bent poles which covered the short deck at the stern of the boat.

“That’s what they call a ‘bower’ up in this country,” said Uncle Dick. “They have some curious old English words in here, even yet. Now a bower is simply a lot of poles, like an Indian wickiup, covering the end of your boat, as you see. You can throw your blankets over it, if you like, or green willows. It keeps the sun off. Since the Hudson’s Bay Company charges a pretty stiff price for taking any passenger north, it tries to earn its money by building a bower for the select few, such as we are.”

“I don’t think that we need any bower,” said Rob, and all the other boys shook their heads.

“A little sunshine won’t hurt us,” said Jesse, stoutly.

“But think of the style about it,” laughed Uncle Dick, pleased to see the hardiness of his young charges. “Well, we’ll do as we like about that. One thing, we’ve got to have a chance to see out, for I know you will want to keep your eyes open every foot of the way.”

“Well, I wish the breeds would hurry up and get the boats loaded,” added Jesse, impatiently, after a while. “There’s nothing doing here worth while.”

“Don’t be too hard with the breeds,” counseled Uncle Dick. “They’re like children, that’s all. This is the best time of the year for them, when the great fur brigade goes north. It couldn’t go without them. The fur trade in this country couldn’t exist without the half-breeds and the full-bloods; there’s a half-dozen tribes on whom the revenues of this great corporation depend absolutely.

“You’ll see now the best water-men and the best trail-men in the world. Look at these packages—a hundred pounds or better in each. Every pound of all that stuff is to be portaged across the Smith’s Landing portage, and the Mountain Portage, and even at Grand Island, just below here, if the water is low. They have to carry it up from the scows to the steamboats, and from the steamboats to the shore. Every pound is handled again and again. It’s the half-breeds that do that. They’re as strong as horses and as patient as dogs; fine men they are, so you must let them have their little fling after their old ways; they don’t know any better.”

“How many of the fur posts are there in the North, Uncle Dick?” asked Rob, curious always to be exact in all his information.

“Well, let’s see,” pondered Uncle Dick, holding up his fingers and counting them off. “The first one above here is McMurray; that’s one of the treaty posts where the tribes are paid their annuities by the Dominion government. It’s two hundred and fifty-two miles from here, and there’s where we hit our first steamboat, as I told you.

“Then comes Chippewyan, on Athabasca Lake. It was founded by Sir Alexander Mackenzie in seventeen eighty-eight, and from that time on it has been one of the most important trading-posts of the North—in fact, I believe it is the most important to-day, as it seems to be a sort of center, right where a lot of rivers converge. That’s four hundred and thirty-seven miles from here. When you get that far