Читать книгу The Wild North Land - William Francis Sir Butler - Страница 11

Table of Contents

Our Winter Home.—A Welcome.—I start again.—The Hunter’s Camp.—In quest of Buffalo on the Plains.—“Lodge-poling” leads to Love.

At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of the two Saskatchewans, deep in pines and poplars, through which vistas had been cut to give glimpses along the converging rivers, stood the winter hut of which I have already spoken. From its chimney blue smoke curled up amongst the trees into the lower atmosphere, and the sound of wood-cutting came ringing from below, a token of labour not yet completed in our wild and secluded resting-place.

I stood for a moment looking down on this scene—a home in the great wilderness—and then a loud shout echoed into the valley to carry tidings of our arrival to the inmates of the hut. In an instant it was answered from below, and the solitudes rang with many a note of welcome, while half a dozen dogs bayed furious defiance at my pack, already become boisterously jubilant on the ridge above. When friends meet thus, after long travel and separation, there are many questions to ask and to answer, and the autumn evening had worn to midnight ere the pine-log fire threw its light upon a silent hut.

The winter season was now at hand; our house was nearly completed, our stores put away, our dogs kennelled; but one most pressing want had yet to be supplied—our winter stock of meat had to be gathered in, and there was no time to lose about obtaining it.

It was the last of October, just one day after my arrival at the Forks, when we turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. They were said to be a long way off—200 miles nearer to the setting sun—out somewhere on that great motionless ocean, where no tree, no bush breaks the vast expanse of prairie; land to which the wild men of the West and those who lead wild lives there have turned for many an age in search of that food which nature once so generously scattered over the plains of Central North America.

Journeying slowly towards the west—for already the snow had begun to fall in many storms, and the landscape had become wrapt in its winter mantle—we reached in five days one of those curious assemblages of half-breed hunters which are to be found in winter on the borders of the great plains.

Huts promiscuously crowded together; horses, dogs, women, children, all intermixed in a confusion worthy of Donnybrook Fair; half-breed hunters, ribboned, tasselled, and capôted, lazy, idle, and, if there is any spirit in the camp, sure to be intoxicated; remnants and wrecks of buffalo lying everywhere around; robes stretched and drying; meat piled on stages; wolf-skins spread over framework; women drawing water and carrying wood; and at dusk from the little hut the glow of firelight through parchment windows, the sound of fiddle scraped with rough hunter hand, and the quick thud of hunter heel as Louison, or Bâtiste, or Gabriel foot it ceaselessly upon the half-hewn floors.

Unquestionably these French half-breeds are wild birds—hunters, drinkers, rovers, rascals if you will—yet generous and hospitable withal; destined to disappear before the white man’s footprint, and ere that time has come owing many of their vices to the pioneer American, whose worst qualities the wild man, or semi-wild man, has been ever too sure to imitate.

After a delay of three days in this hunter’s camp, which by some strange anomaly was denominated “la mission,” its sole claim to that title being the residence of a French priest in the community, we started on our journey further west.

The winter had now regularly set in; the broad South Saskatchewan was rolling thick masses of ice down its half-closed channel, the snow-covering had deepened on the landscape, the wind blew keenly over the prairie. Many of our horses had been too poor to take upon this journey, and the half-breed whom I had brought from Red River, dreading the exposure of the plains, had taken advantage of the hunter’s camp to desert our service; so another man had been engaged, and, with three fresh horses and an urchin attendant in the shape of a little half-breed, designated by our new man as “l’homme capable,” and for whose services he demanded only the moderate sum of five shillings per diem, we held our course along the South Saskatchewan towards the Great Prairie.

Xavier Bâtoche was a fair sample of his class. The blood of four nationalities mingled in his veins. His grandfather had been a French Canadian, his grandmother a Crow squaw; English and Cree had contributed to his descent on his mother’s side. The ceremony of taking a wife in the early days of the north-west fur trade was not an elaborate performance, or one much encumbered by social or religious preliminaries. If it did not literally fulfil the condition of force implied by the word “taking,” it usually developed into a question of barter; a horse, a flint gun, some white cloth and beads, could purchase the hand and heart of the fairest squaw in Prairie land. If she did not love after one of these valuable “presents” had been made to her father, the lodge-poles were always handy to enforce that obedience necessary to domestic happiness—admirable idea, the roof-tree contributed to the peace of the hearth-stone, and jealousy fled before a “lodge-poling.” To return to Bâtoche; Crow and Cree, French and English, had contrived to produce a genial, good-humoured, handsome fellow; the previous year had been one of plenty, buffalo had once more appeared in vast herds on the prairies of the Saskatchewan; wolf-skins, robes, and pemmican had fetched high prices, and Bâtoche was rich and prosperous.

Two days’ journeying brought us to the edge of the great prairie; silent, vast, and desolate it spread away into unseen space; the snow but scantily covered the yellow grass, and the November wind sighed mournfully through the wrecks of summer vegetation as it sped along its thousand leagues of unmeasured meadow. At the last copse of poplar and willow we halted for a day, to bake bread and cut wood sufficient for a week’s food and fuel, and then we launched our ocean ships—horses and sleds—out into the great meadow.