Читать книгу New Rivers of the North: The Yarn of Two Amateur Explorers - Footner Hulbert - Страница 5

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Next morning we found that Hinton, or, as it was more generally called, Mile 65, was rapidly taking on the air of a deserted village. The construction trains were now hauling the contractors' freight through to Mile 88, consequently everyone was moving on. We had seen several such abandoned towns en route, one of which, Wolf Creek, extended for upwards of a mile beside the track. The population had fallen from hundreds of souls to three. The "tote road," I need hardly explain, is built by the contractors for the purpose of hauling supplies to the various camps along the line of construction. We learned that it had been completed through the pass except for a ten-mile break at Moose Lake.

At Mile 65 the only wagon ready to start west was drawn by a double team of oxen. We looked askance at the slavering, heavy-footed beasts, which promised anything but rapid transit, but at least the driver was hitching them up, and there was nothing else in sight; it was a start. At ten o'clock we set our faces west on the tote road, snow-capped peaks beckoning us ahead. Our folding boat, and our grub outfit followed on top of the load.

The driver's name was Everitt. He was a mild young man with rosy cheeks and large, lusterless eyes like his oxen. We had not traveled far in his company before we discovered that an exclusive association with his slow beasts had sapped the springs of his energy. Men who spoke to us about him later would shake their heads and say: "Everitt, he used to be one of the smartest young fellers on the trail. But 'pears he must have slipped a cog somewheres. He can't get through no more!"

We could supply the explanation. Everitt was an impressionable youth, and he had taken the color of his "bulls." Like them he was slow almost to the point of paralysis, also timid and self-distrustful to a degree. Once stopped he required a goad to set him in motion again. We would see Everitt standing motionless for minutes at a time with a piece of harness in his hands, and his eyes fixed in a vacant stare. At such a moment all that he lacked to complete the resemblance was a cud to chew.

We traveled at about a mile and a half an hour, with frequent pauses to breathe the oxen—and Everitt. My partner and I walking ahead could stop for a swim, or an hour's fishing, or to climb a mountain without any danger of being left too far behind. Everitt had assured us he was in the habit of making fifteen or twenty miles a day, but we had not gone three before he sat down for a two-hour spell in a mosquito-ridden meadow. He made ten miles the first day, and he was greatly pleased with himself. Fortunately we were overtaken by a pedestrian philosopher called Jim Waters, who threw in his lot with us. He was an old acquaintance of Everitt's and his energy supplied a kind of goad.

We camped within the confines of Jasper Park, one of the Canadian national reservations, pitching our tent in a magnificent grove of spruce trees. There we lay for two whole days. It rained, and Everitt insisted with tears in his voice, that he would never, never be able to get his load through the four miles of timber that lay beyond. We pointed out that the more it rained, the worse the road would become, but without avail. On the third morning word was brought along the road that the mounted police were coming, and that they were "frisking" every load they overtook. I do not know if Everitt carried any contraband; but any rate he started.

It was in truth a very bad piece of road that followed, but nothing to what we had expected from Everitt's harrowing forecast. We got through without capsizing. It was amusing to hear the mild young driver bellowing to his steeds in an awful voice that issued from his boots.

Beyond the timber, the hills that hemmed us in became mountains. Roche Miette was now rearing its crude, bold steeple of rock close ahead. The first mountain on our left had no name that we could discover, and we christened it Mount Primus. We climbed it while our cavalcade crawled up the valley. The summit was perhaps twenty-five hundred feet above the river. We endured frequent cold squalls of rain, and hordes of mosquitoes for the sake of the view. The Athabasca issued from between the great mountains on our left in innumerable channels among spruce-clad islands. At our feet it spread out in a vast muddy lake. The effects of rain and mist among the heights were magnificent. We came down on the run in the track of a mountain goat, who considerately pointed out the easiest way, but the goat himself escaped our view.

The next day we came to an obstruction that almost broke Everitt's heart all over again. The bridge over Fiddle Creek had been undermined by heavy rains, and there was no way to cross but by fording. Everitt swore he would never be able to do it, and had it not been for Jim Waters I have no doubt he would be there yet. We ourselves crawled across the broken bridge through a roaring cataract, at the imminent danger of being carried down. We desired to get pictures of the oxen fording. I lost my best pipe.

Everitt finally made a start, but the oxen went in up to their bellies, and he was seized with panic. For perhaps ten minutes he kept the hapless creatures standing there in the icy, rushing water while he debated what to do. Finally he unhitched them, and attaching them to the back of the wagon, pulled it back from the water's edge.

Then there was a long wait. From our side of the stream we could see Jim Waters vainly expostulating. Finally a half-breed driver came along with a load, and without so much as a glance at the torrent, nonchalantly drove through. Everitt followed in his wake. To hear him crow at the other side one would have thought he had dared the Rubicon unaided. Unfortunately the pictures we took of these operations are a trifle over-exposed. We made heavy allowances for the dazzling brilliance of the Alberta sunshine, but not sufficient, it appears.

At Mile 88 we decided we had had enough of Everitt and his bulls. In five days we had made twenty-three miles. At any rate Everitt was going but twenty miles farther, and Mile 88 offered the best chance of engaging a through passage. Unluckily the railroad bridge over Fiddle Creek was likewise down, and the freighters were standing about idle. For five more days we waited in camp. It was a comfortable camp in a grove of trees beside the Athabasca, with Roche Miette towering over our shoulder. They were delightful days of loafing, and quaffing deep of the champagne of the mountain tops, but we chafed at the delay.

Every day one of us walked into the "cache," as they call any place where goods are stored, for news of the freighters. One friend, Jim Waters, had his team there. On the way was a camp of Indians and breeds, a sadly mixed lot, the first natives we had seen on the journey. There was nothing of story-book Indian about them. Imagine the noble red-man with a patent washing machine at the door of his tent and a universal bread-mixer inside! They did not even live in tepees, but in dirty wall-tents with a rusty stove-pipe sticking out of one end. Nevertheless, dirty and degenerate as they were, the rags of romance still clung to them. They are so mysterious! They keep themselves to themselves and it is impossible for a white man to tell what is going on behind their smooth, dark, sullen faces.

On the sixth day my partner returned to inform me with a rather dubious joy that he had found a freighter going up light, who would carry our stuff to the summit of the pass. When the wagon presently hove in view, I understood his doubts. I never saw a more criminal-looking outfit. The driver was a little, one-armed man with a wicked, merry eye, and clad in deplorable rags. As he said himself: he "hadn't enough clothes to flag a freight with." His companion was a hulking young Irishman with an alcoholic flush, and a furtive glance, but one cannot be too particular on the trail; we cast in our lot with them.

We soon found that we were in the company of an honest enough pair. They were desperately hard up. They had scarcely any food, and their cooking outfit was limited to a battered lard pail for boiling their tea, and an axle-grease tin to drink it from. Yet the team that "Wingy" drove so cleverly was one of the best on the tote road, and we heard of other horses that he owned. We gathered later that he had been cleaned out in a poker game down the line.

Wingy was an Irishman too, a witty one, and madly improvident. He had an infinite command of picturesque metaphor, and I am sorry that owing to reasons of propriety I may not quote him more. He let fall many hints of strange adventures on the seven seas. As for the hulking Pat, he proved to be the soul of simplicity and good-nature. Wingy drew him out endlessly for our benefit.

We now made good time, and would have done better still had we not fallen in with a blacksmith emigrating westward with all his worldly goods. His horses were played out, and Wingy helped him up the hills, and even changed teams with him, when his own beasts could pull no farther. Wingy did all this largely out of pure good will (he had never seen the man before) but partly, we guessed, out of respect for the blacksmith's well-furnished grub-box. At any rate Wingy and Pat feasted upon tinned salmon and jam at every meal. Two passengers rode on top of the blacksmith's load; a middle-aged man nursing a broken leg, and his daughter, a pretty little girl who, poor child, had had no chance to take off her clothes or brush her hair since leaving Edmonton. We pitied them, frightfully jolted and thrown about as they were on their insecure perch.

Another delay was caused by Pop Hopper. Pop Hopper was the Jonah of the tote road. The other freighters hated to get behind him, knowing if they did they would be obliged to stop and help him out of all his troubles. He was a blustering old infant who, in the parlance of the road, "had money," and only freighted for the fun of it. Certainly he could not have made anything. Wingy opined that Pop Hopper "would make better time if he let one of the horses drive, and put his own neck in the collar."

We were unlucky enough to fall behind him one morning. We occupied ourselves picking up pails of jam, tins of corn, and so on, that had spilled off his load. After lunch we came upon him with his hind wheels locked to the hubs in the affectionate embrace of a muskeg. It was his custom when anything like this befell him to sit down and have a lunch while waiting for someone to come along. By the time we arrived he had already collected quite a crowd from the nearest construction camp. He was in his element, ordering his volunteer helpers about like the foreman of a gang of navvies.