The Young Fur Traders, R. M. Ballantyne [psychology books to read TXT] 📗

friends and by several other young comrades whom they found there. We shall not speak of the horror of Harry Somerville, and the extreme disappointment of his friend Charley Kennedy, when the former was told that, instead of hunting grizzly bears up the Saskatchewan, he was condemned to the desk again at York Fort, the depot on Hudson’s Bay—a low, swampy place near the seashore, where the goods for the interior are annually landed and the furs shipped for England, where the greater part of the summer and much of the winter is occupied by the clerks who may be doomed to vegetate there in making up the accounts of what is termed the Northern Department, and where the brigades converge from all the wide-scattered and far-distant outposts, and the ship from England—that great event of the year—arrives, keeping the place in a state of constant bustle and effervescence until autumn, when ship and brigades finally depart, leaving the residents (about thirty in number) shut up for eight long, dreary months of winter, with a tenantless wilderness around and behind them, and the wide, cold, frozen sea before. This was among the first of Harry’s disappointments. He suffered many afterwards, poor fellow!

Neither shall we accompany Charley up the south branch of the Saskatchewan, where his utmost expectations in the way of hunting were more than realised, and where he became so accustomed to shooting ducks and geese, and bears and buffaloes, that he could not forbear smiling when he chanced to meet with a red-legged gull, and remembered how he and his friend Harry had comported themselves when they first met with these birds on the shores of Lake Winnipeg! We shall pass over all this, and the summer, autumn, and winter too, and leap at once into the spring of the following year.

On a very bright, cheery morning of that spring, a canoe might have been seen slowly ascending one of the numerous streams which meander through a richly-wooded, fertile country, and mingle their waters with those of the Athabasca River, terminating their united career in a large lake of the same name. The canoe was small—one of the kind used by the natives while engaged in hunting, and capable of holding only two persons conveniently, with their baggage. To any one unacquainted with the nature or capabilities of a northern Indian canoe, the fragile, bright orange-coloured machine that was battling with the strong current of a rapid must indeed have appeared an unsafe and insignificant craft; but a more careful study of its performances in the rapid, and of the immense quantity of miscellaneous goods and chattels which were, at a later period of the day, disgorged from its interior, would have convinced the beholder that it was in truth the most convenient and serviceable craft that could be devised for the exigencies of such a country.

True, it could only hold two men (it might have taken three at a pinch), because men, and women too, are awkward, unyielding baggage, very difficult to stow compactly; but it is otherwise with tractable goods. The canoe is exceedingly thin, so that no space is taken up or rendered useless by its own structure, and there is no end to the amount of blankets, and furs, and coats, and paddles, and tent-covers, and dogs, and babies, that can be stowed away in its capacious interior. The canoe of which we are now writing contained two persons, whose active figures were thrown alternately into every graceful attitude of manly vigour, as with poles in hand they struggled to force their light craft against the boiling stream. One was a man apparently of about forty-five years of age. He was a square-shouldered, muscular man, and from the ruggedness of his general appearance, the soiled hunting-shirt that was strapped round his waist with a parti-coloured worsted belt, the leather leggings, a good deal the worse for wear, together with the quiet, self-possessed glance of his grey eye, the compressed lip and sunburned brow, it was evident that he was a hunter, and one who had seen rough work in his day. The expression of his face was pleasing, despite a look of habitual severity which sat upon it, and a deep scar which traversed his brow from the right temple to the top of his nose. It was difficult to tell to what country he belonged. His father was a Canadian, his mother a Scotchwoman. He was born in Canada, brought up in one of the Yankee settlements on the Missouri, and had, from a mere youth, spent his life as a hunter in the wilderness. He could speak English, French, or Indian with equal ease and fluency, but it would have been hard for any one to say which of the three was his native tongue. The younger man, who occupied the stern of the canoe, acting the part of steersman, was quite a youth, apparently about seventeen, but tall and stout beyond his years, and deeply sunburned. Indeed, were it not for this fact, the unusual quantity of hair that hung in massive curls down his neck, and the voyageur costume, we should have recognised our young friend Charley Kennedy again more easily. Had any doubts remained in our mind, the shout of his merry voice would have scattered them at once.

“Hold hard, Jacques!” he cried, as the canoe trembled in the current; “one moment, till I get my pole fixed behind this rock. Now then, shove ahead. Ah!” he exclaimed, with chagrin, as the pole slipped on the treacherous bottom and the canoe whirled round.

“Mind the rock,” cried the bowsman, giving an energetic thrust with his pole, that sent the light bark into an eddy formed by a large rock which rose above the turbulent waters. Here it rested while Jacques and Charley raised themselves on their knees (travellers in small canoes always sit in a kneeling position) to survey the rapid.

“It’s too much for us, I fear, Mr Charles,” said Jacques, shading his brow with his horny hand. “I’ve paddled up it many a time alone, but never saw the water so big as now.”

“Humph! we shall have to make a portage, then, I presume. Could we not give it one trial more? I think we might make a dash for the tail of that eddy, and then the stream above seems not quite so strong. Do you think so, Jacques?”

Jacques was not the man to check a daring young spirit. His motto through life had ever been, “Never venture, never win,”—a sentiment which his intercourse among fur-traders had taught him to embody in the pithy expression, “Never say die;” so that, although quite satisfied that the thing was impossible, he merely replied to his companion’s speech by an assenting “Ho,” and pushed out again into the stream. An energetic effort enabled them to gain the tail of the eddy spoken of, when Charley’s pole snapped across, and falling heavily on the gunwale, he would have upset the little craft, had not Jacques, whose wits were habitually on the qui vive, thrown his own weight at the same moment on the opposite side, and counterbalanced Charley’s slip. The action saved them a ducking; but the canoe, being left to its own devices for an instant, whirled off again into the stream, and before Charley could seize a paddle to prevent it, they were floating in the still water at the foot of the rapids.

“Now, isn’t that a bore?” said Charley, with a comical look of disappointment at his companion.

Jacques laughed.

“It was well to try, master. I mind a young clerk who came into these parts the same year as I did, and he seldom tried anything. He couldn’t abide canoes. He didn’t want for courage neither; but he had a nat’ral dislike to them, I suppose, that he couldn’t help, and never entered one except when he was obliged to do so. Well, one day he wounded a grizzly bear on the banks o’ the Saskatchewan (mind the tail o’ that rapid, Mr Charles; we’ll land t’other side o’ yon rock). Well, the bear made after him, and he cut stick right away for the river, where there was a canoe hauled up on the bank. He didn’t take time to put his rifle aboard, but dropped it on the gravel, crammed the canoe into the water and jumped in, almost driving his feet through its bottom as he did so, and then plumped down so suddenly, to prevent its capsizing, that he split it right across. By this time the bear was at his heels, and took the water like a duck. The poor clerk, in his hurry, swayed from side to side tryin’ to prevent the canoe goin’ over. But when he went to one side, he was so unused to it that he went too far, and had to jerk over to the other pretty sharp; and so he got worse and worse, until he heard the bear give a great snort beside him. Then he grabbed the paddle in desperation, but at the first dash he missed his stroke, and over he went. The current was pretty strong at the place, which was lucky for him, for it kept him down a bit, so that the bear didn’t observe him for a little; and while it was pokin’ away at the canoe, he was carried downstream like a log and stranded on a shallow. Jumping up, he made tracks for the wood, and the bear (which had found out its mistake) after him; so he was obliged at last to take to a tree, where the beast watched him for a day and a night, till his friends, thinking that something must be wrong, sent out to look for him. (Steady, now, Mr Charles; a little more to the right. That’s it.) Now, if that young man had only ventured boldly into small canoes when he got the chance, he might have laughed at the grizzly and killed him too.”

As Jacques finished, the canoe glided into a quiet bay formed by an eddy of the rapid, where the still water was overhung by dense foliage.

“Is the portage a long one?” asked Charley, as he stepped out on the bank, and helped to unload the canoe.

“About half a mile,” replied his companion. “We might make it shorter by poling up the last rapid; but it’s stiff work, Mr Charles, and we’ll do the thing quicker and easier at one lift.”

The two travellers now proceeded to make a portage. They prepared to carry their canoe and baggage overland, so as to avoid a succession of rapids and waterfalls which intercepted their further progress.

“Now, Jacques, up with it,” said Charley, after the loading had been taken out and placed on the grassy bank.

The hunter stooped, and seizing the canoe by its centre bar, lifted it out of the water, placed it on his shoulders, and walked off with it into the woods. This was not accomplished by the man’s superior strength. Charley could have done it quite as well; and, indeed, the strong hunter could have carried a canoe of twice the size with perfect ease. Immediately afterwards Charley followed with as much of the lading as he could carry, leaving enough on the bank to form another load.

The banks of the river were steep—in some places so much so that Jacques found it a matter of no small difficulty to climb over the broken rocks with the unwieldy canoe on his back; the more so that the branches interlaced overhead so thickly as to present a strong barrier, through which the canoe had to be forced, at the risk of damaging its delicate bark covering. On reaching the comparatively level land above, however, there was more open space, and the hunter threaded his way among the tree stems more rapidly, making a détour occasionally to avoid a swamp or piece of broken ground; sometimes descending a deep gorge