Читать книгу Trails and Tales in Cobalt - W. H. P. Jarvis - Страница 6

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I met Pard on Monday in the railway cutting at the north of Cobalt.

“Good morning,” I said, as he did not notice me.

“Good morning,” he replied, bringing his eyes up from the ground and fixing them with an intent gaze into mine.

“What do you think of the camp?” I asked.

He sat down on a point of rock and I did the same. He had seen but little of the camp, but was pleased with it.

“Now, Pard,” I said, “what do you think of the proposition of getting into the bush for a while and seeing if we can dig up anything? Suppose we hit up the game for a week east of Cross Lake?”

“I’ll go you,” he replied.

“All right,” I said. “What grub and outfit have you got? I’ll get what you have not.” He then gave me a list of his blankets, cooking utensils, etc., and I found that to complete it and add sufficient grub for a week would make me about half owner of the whole. So, accordingly, we returned to Cobalt and made the purchases, Pard doing considerable grumbling the while.

“They charge enough for their outfits here. Why, they taxed me seven dollars for a 5 x 7 ‘A’ tent, and I have bought them for five dollars at Barkerville, in the Cariboo country, where they had to be hauled two hundred miles by teams.” He admitted that the tent he had purchased in Cobalt was of better quality, but continued: “There is no need to have heavy duck in prospectors’ tents; drill is good enough and it is lighter to pack.”

There were grounds for his criticism, but his persistency showed a decided grudge against the East.

Half an hour after meeting we were again leaving the settlement, Pard with a bag of bread and other provisions thrown over his shoulder, and I with a pack containing an additional blanket and more grub in a pack-strap. On coming to Pard’s camp it was quickly demolished and our two loads added to the heap. We now faced the problem of making the whole into two packs of practically equal weight, and these two packs were to contain our tent and our blankets, several picks and a shovel and a week’s food, besides changes of underclothes, etc. It is wonderful how many things really do enter into one’s life, even in a week, but our selection had been made by an experienced head and was reduced to a minimum.

To moralize with a sixty-pound pack on one’s back on a heartbreaking trail is easy, but conversation is not inspired, unless it is profanity, when the flies are bad. The flies were gone for the season, so we said not a word until we reached Cross Lake.

The northern forest, when it first breaks into green in early summer, is a refreshing sight. When ripeness is upon it and it lies resplendent with its autumnal colorings in golden sunlight, it is a noble sight. The latter was ours.  A friendly acquaintance put us across the lake in his canoe, and the way Pard handled a paddle showed him to be an expert.

Having reached the east side of the lake we decided on dinner. Words are few among experienced campers. Packs are thrown off, and the man who first gets the tea-kettle in his hands is immediately constituted cook, and while his fellow makes the fire, he fills it with water from the supply which is never far distant from the point selected for camp. If the tent is to be set up and camp made for the night, one man generally allots himself to making camp, while his fellow builds the fire and cooks supper. If it is only lunch, the partner who makes the fire generally, after he has finished that job, constitutes himself assistant cook.

Our meal was cooked and eaten with great satisfaction. After the meal my companion made himself comfortable and filled his pipe. As he lay reclining I noticed he had a revolver strapped round his waist, which now became exposed owing to his position. On the holster was printed in irregular order, “Ed. N. O’Neil.” I now learned for the first time the name of my new friend.

“Pard,” I said, as I got my pipe going, “a little grub does make life look better once in a while, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he drawled, “it does.” He gazed at the fire embers, and I saw coming into his eyes for the first time that look which afterwards I learned to know as indicating the flow of reminiscence through his mind. He then began one of those stories which none but the Western man can tell. His was the Western humor, and his language was affected in that half-serious way by the use of long words and unwieldy phrases which go far to make up the diversion in such tales. Long winter nights and even days in the mountains give ample opportunity for reading, and the Western prospector often has a volume of Shakespeare in his pack as a highly condensed mass of reading, and he has learned that heavy reading furnishes the greatest abstraction. So it is that the trapper and the prospector often has a vocabulary replete with terms and words uncommon in the vulgar tongue, which, coming into a conversation ungrammatically, lends, perhaps, the greater part of the humor of the Western tale.

“I was only once,” began my partner, “real short of grub, and that was in the Selkirks years ago. Me and my partner was camped over the divide from Toby Creek putting in the winter trapping, and one day along in early March I hit the trail for town to get a few little things we needed and to get a little fresh news. Well, it had been snowing heavy for some days back, but it showed signs of clearing up the night before, and the morning I left the stars showed some, though kind of hazy. It was twenty-five miles into town, and this with soft snow makes travelling slow and heavy, even with snowshoes. Well, along about noon I was getting towards the summit and out of the timber, and I noticed the weather was looking real bad again. The sun had risen behind a cloud, for it did not show in the peaks when it ought to have, and that cloud was all over the sky again by ten o’clock.

“Now the snow was beginning to sediment its beautiful canopy through the ethereal in a high-class business fashion that started me contemplating if another glacial age was not pretty soon due on earth. If I was wise I would have right-about-faced right then, but I was more than half way to town, and I don’t like turning tail to any sort of a proposition, so I kept right on to negotiate the divide when I couldn’t see ten feet ahead of me, thinking I could cross from the canyon I was in to the valley of Toby Creek as easy as falling off a log. In looking over that divide again when spring’s gentle zephyrs was playing hide-and-seek through the saw-teeth, I never could rightly make out how I came to get off the track; but I did, and just about the time I was beginning to think it was time I should quit climbing, I ran into a perpendicular cliff and realized I was nowhere. There was no such proposition as this on the trail from Bear Creek (that was the creek I had come up and which our cabin was on), and I realized I had got up a draw either to the right or left of the pass. I stood for a while and looked back, and then at the rocks on each side, and back again to those which first blocked my way. The crystallized aqueous vapor was falling the size of goose feathers, soft, slow and persistent. They seemed to make a slight rustling, silky sort of noise as they came to rest on their predecessors, but this did not, if it was real and not my fancy, break the silence of the place. I hollered, just for fun, and did not get an echo, but the sound was drunk in by the snow, and I felt as if I had lost something. I was too old a hand not to realize that I was lost, and lost bad, and perhaps it was the full realization of this that kept me from losing my nerve. When a feller is plumb up face to face with death where he knows that his only chance is keeping his head, he will generally do it. It was now a case of turn back for sure, so I slid along down hill a bit, and then kept working a bit to the right. Every now and again I would run up against rock going right in the air. Once I took my knife and cut the moss off the rock, and looked at it close and saw it was granite. Both Bear Creek and Toby Creek were in the granite, so this didn’t tell me much. However, it’s always well to keep watching. You see, I always size up the formation of the country as a sort of principle. After travelling about ten minutes I again started to edge up hill a bit, and worked round into another draw. Up this I started for all I was worth, for if it was a pass I wanted to get into timber at least before it got dark, although the night couldn’t do much harm.

“It was not very long before I quit climbing, for the ground was level. I made good time and travelled about a mile, doing the best I knew how to keep going straight in the direction I had come up. Finally, I began to go down hill again, and I heard the trickle of water deep down under the snow. The level ground I had passed over was a lake and this was draining it. Here was a puzzler to me; there was no lake draining into Toby Creek. I kept on, however, when pretty soon I heard a gurgling, roaring sort of a noise under the snow. I concluded it was a pretty good notion to go slow a bit, but too late. The whole canyon seemed to be moving with a kind of grinding noise, only softer. The next thing I knew all was over and I was digging myself out of the snow. I had come over a precipice about twenty feet high. No bones broken.

“This was not Toby Creek, and where I was then God only knows. So I ate what lunch I had left, for I had been chewing at it all along, and after that I got my pipe going and felt better. I took out my knife and scratched the rock. It was not granite, but a sort of slate.

“There was nothing for it but to keep going. The snow continued and the creek only gurgled once in a long while. After I got over my disappointment I liked that creek; it was sort of company. Other times the stillness kind of seemed to feel as if it was the mountains themselves bearing a fellow down.

“That night I made a sort of camp under a big spruce tree in which I found a porcupine, which I killed. I cut some brush with my hunting knife and got a fire going, but I had no axe. Next morning I hit the trail again, but that was the last thing I remember distinctly. I know I killed more porcupines, but they ain’t much better than nothing to eat.

“The next thing I remember was that one morning I ran up against a cabin with smoke coming out of it. I looked at it and it seemed familiar, and I opened the door and walked in.

“ ‘Hello, Ed,’ says Bill, my partner. ‘You’ve been a long time away. Got drunk?’

“I was back home, though how I got there God only knows. I never got drunk and Bill knew it. I was trying to make out whether I was on earth or whether I had gone plumb bughouse, so I says: ‘What day is this?’

“ ‘Wednesday, the 14th.’

“ ‘And I set out?’

“ ‘Last Thursday,’ answers Bill.

“ ‘Well, I ain’t had a meal since, so you better dish up anything you have cooked quick.’

“ ‘Not by a d—— sight, if your story’s right,’ says he, and he came over and caught me by the arm and hauled me round to the light. My eyes was kind of staring, and he says I had something of the look of a wolf left a couple of days in a trap. This kind of made him realize that I had been up against it hard, and he soon got me to bed, where he began feeding me as you would a baby. He started with a little condensed milk and water, and gradually led up to some boiled goat after feeding me a little of the broth.

“After he got me resting a bit, Bill went out and followed my tracks for a mile or two and found I had come up Bear Creek, not down. I bet if you could map my travels those six days the plan would beat the pons asinorum struck by a cyclone.”

The story was ended and my companion put away his pipe and manipulated himself into harness, and I did the same. We travelled along an old trail cut for timbering operations years ago, and after following this some distance we took to a concession line, which we followed until we reached a spot which suited us for a permanent camp. The concession line ran east and west and a trail ran north and south. We were at the intersection.