Читать книгу Pilgrims of the Wild - Grey Evil Owl - Страница 16

3 HOW THE PILGRIMAGE COMMENCED

This decision of mine to give up beaver trapping was not a hasty one. Beaver was an animal on which I depended almost entirely for my living. They had been so identified with my own destiny as to be something in the light of a patron beast, far more so than an owl, a detestable bird whose name had been imposed on me only on account of my nocturnal habits. Although I had ably assisted at the destruction of this beast, now that he was in danger of extinction in the North, I had a sudden feeling of regret, something of that vacant feeling of bereavement that comes upon us on the disappearance of a familiar landmark, or on the decease of some spirited, well-respected enemy. Thus the hide hunters must have felt as the last buffalo dropped, so that some of them abjured forever the rifle and the knife, and strained every nerve to bring them back again. Even as veteran Indian fighters, better able to appreciate the qualities of their late foe now that he was down, reached out a helping hand to raise him up again.

One hundred thousand square miles of country in Ontario was dry of beaver, and save for their deserted works it was as if there never had been any. I had travelled nearly two thousand miles by canoe through a reputed beaver country to find only here and there a thinly populated colony, or odd survivors living alone. I had sat in council with the Simon Lake Ojibways and had talked with other bands from Grand Lake Victoria. Waswanipis from the Megiskan, Obijuwans from the head of the St. Maurice, wide-ranging half-breeds from far off Peribonka, they all carried the same tale. The beaver were going fast; in large areas they were already gone. Was this then, to be the end? Beaver stood for something vital, something essential in this wilderness, were a component part of it; they were the wilderness. With them gone it would be empty; without them it would be not a wilderness but a waste. And I, to whom the railroad and the plough were anathema, had done all I could, along with the vandals, cheap fur traders, and low-grade bushmen, to help put the country into shape for their reception.

The exuberant recklessness of my earlier days was past and gone, those lonely, wild, and heedless days in the vast and empty silences, when I had been sufficient unto myself, leaving death behind me everywhere. I was beginning to ponder more and more deeply on the unfairness and injustice of trapping these animals. The influx of hordes of incompetent amateur trappers that high fur prices had inflicted on the country, I had looked on with uneasiness for some years past as a menace to the profession, and had constantly deplored the brutality of their methods. The regular trapper, if he knows his business at all, sets for beaver only under the ice, so the animal is invariably and cleanly drowned, or else escapes the trap uninjured. A dead animal, decently killed was no great matter, but a crippled beast was a crime and the woods were full of them.

A number of incidents had contributed to this line of thought. About the first of these was the sight of a mother beaver nursing one of her kittens whilst fast by one foot in a trap. She was moaning with pain, yet when I liberated her, minus a foot, she waited nearby for the tardy and inquisitive kitten, seeming by her actions to realize that she had nothing to fear from me. Suspended in the air by a spring-pole, I found another female — a beast that cried out in a voice strangely human when I took her down, and died with one of my fingers tightly grasped in her uninjured paw. She had been about to become a mother. This spring-pole is a particularly fiendish contrivance that jerks the unfortunate creature out of the water to hang there. The animal is uninjured and may remain there for days until it dies of thirst and exhaustion. Frequently birds will pick out the eyes before the animal is dead. These and other methods equally brutal are adopted by unskilled hunters who can get their beaver no other way, and these instances were only two out of dozens to be seen on every hand.