In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice--a matter of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."

But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out of sight amid the goose gra.s.s and reeds with the sleigh and his garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoa.r.s.e without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.

Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superst.i.tion with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it--make offerings of tobacco to the Granny G.o.ddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the slow keel.

One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky--a far honk--then stillness. Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted against the lonely red sunset sky--a lob stick--a dark evergreen stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck--eighty years old he was--squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperor--the first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars--trading Sam Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been storm-stead camping in the goose gra.s.s for three days. Do you think he was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north--more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar.

Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and care-free than you are--peace to his aged bones!

Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun, only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe.

Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.

Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and by seven in the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles--all three were speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred miles to this lagoon of dead water?"

"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks--it isn't drift--it's birds--it's duck and geese--I have never seen anything like it--I have lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of anything--of anything like it."

Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as I have never seen cla.s.sified or named in any book on birds. We sat very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south.

That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe--the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft--with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.

That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit and ermine, the furs that clothe--not princes and millionaire, who buy silver fox and sea otter--but you and me and the rest of us whose object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since 1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game--save in the year of the unexplained rabbit pest--shows no sign of diminishing.

Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.

To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer, "Poor--poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not make that answer.

To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world, especially Canada and the United States, would pa.s.s and enforce laws prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.

"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.

V

I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been penned of the company since it was established away back in the year 1670.

s.p.a.ce permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to meet us. That spiritual face--such a face as you might see among the preachers of Westminster or Oxford--and the little shy Indian girl-wife and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy--I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.

I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school where he taught he had met his Fate--the thing he probably scouted--that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer encampments, where white vices have not polluted the very air. He fell in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white sots who ever seek hiding in the very wilderness. He married her and had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took a position with the company and lived no doubt in such happiness as only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease which gave her such unearthly beauty ripened. She died. What was to become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's daughter--the little half-breed girl--and chained himself to his rock of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he lives to-day. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer; only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery island two hundred miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come to the Ridge, or the Indian agent arrives with the treaty money once a year.

And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written"?

"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong men set forth to traverse lone places with no defense but their own valiant spirit.

The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul--Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words--in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia--a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter.

Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.

He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran on winged feet--feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail--you are hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to s.n.a.t.c.h handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness off, heard the m.u.f.fled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on.

By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow. He had also reefed in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he ran. And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward.

Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy. It was the snow blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had become weighted with lead.

He knew it was all up with him when he fell. He knew if he could get only a half hour's sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on.

Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have taken the half hour's sleep; and another half hour's; and have never wakened. Anyway, something wakened Hall. He heard the crackle of a branch. That was nothing. Branches break to every storm, but this was like branches breaking under a moccasin. It was unbelievable; there was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire, surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.

With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment. Then a tingling went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to life--blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his presence, very terribly still. His first thought was that he had come on some camp hopeless from the disaster of ma.s.sacre or starvation.

Then he knew this was no earthly camp. He could not tell how the figures were clothed or what they were. Only he knew they were not men. He did not even think of ghosts. All he knew was it was a death fire, a death silence, death tepees, death figures. He fled through the woods knowing only death was behind him--running and running, and never stopping till he dropped exhausted across the fort doorstep at two in the morning. He blurted out why he had come. Then he lapsed unconscious. They filled him with rum. It was twenty-four hours before he could speak.

"I don't know these modern theories about hallucination and delusions and things," concluded Mr. Hall, gazing reflectively on the memories of that night. "I'm not much on romance and that kind of thing! I don't believe in ghosts. I don't know what it was. All I know is it scared me so it saved my life, and it saved the lives of the rest, too; for the relief party got out in time, though they didn't see a sign of any Indian camp. I don't know what to make of it, unless years ago some Indian camp had been starved or ma.s.sacred there, and owing to my unusual condition I got into some clairvoyant connection with that past. However, there it is; and it would take a pretty strong argument to persuade me I didn't see anything. All the other things I thought I saw on that trip certainly existed, and it would be a queer thing if the one thing which saved my life did not exist. That's all I know, and you can make anything you like of it."

So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the North sends down something more than roaring winds--though winds are good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees.

Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals. It rears a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation. A man who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will "come out"--as they say in the North--and study medicine at her own expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives--are not types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate. Canada will do things in the world of nations shortly. She may do them rough-handed; but what she does will depend on the national ideals she nurtures to-day; and into those ideals has entered the spirit of the Domain of the North.

CHAPTER XVIII

FINDING HERSELF

I

One of the questions which an outsider always asks of Canada and of which the Canadian never thinks is--Why is Newfoundland not a part of Canada? Why has the lonely little Island never entered confederation?

On the map Newfoundland looks no larger than the area of Manitoba before the provincial boundaries were extended to Hudson Bay. In reality, area has little to do with Newfoundland's importance to England's possessions in North America. It is that part of America nearest to Europe. If you measure it north to south and east to west it seems about two hundred and fifty by three hundred and fifty miles; but distance north and south, east and west, has little to do with Newfoundland's importance to the empire. Newfoundland's importance to the empire consists in three fundamental facts: Newfoundland is the radiating center for the fisheries on the Grand Banks, that submarine plateau of six hundred by one hundred and fifty miles, where are the richest deep-sea fisheries in the world; Newfoundland lies gardant at the very entrance to Canada's great waterways; and Newfoundland's coast line is the most broken coast line in the whole world affording countless land-locked, rock-ribbed deep-sea harbors to shelter all the fighting ships of the world.

What have the deep-sea fisheries of the Grand Banks to do with a Greater Britain Overseas? You would not ask that question if you could see the sealing fleets set out in spring; or the whaling crews drive after a great fin-back up north of Tilt Cove; or the schooners go out with their dories in tow for the Grand Banks fisheries. Asked what impressed him most in the royal tour of the present King of England across Canada and Newfoundland several years ago, a prominent official with the Prince answered: "Newfoundland and the prairie provinces."

"Why?" he was asked. "Men for the navy and food for the Empire." That answer tells in a line why Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas. You can't take landlubbers, put them on a boat and have seamen. Sailors are bred to the sea, cradled in it, salted with it for generations before they become such mariners as hold England's ascendency on the seas of the world. They love the sea and its roll and its dangers more than all the rewards of the land. Of such men, and of such only, are navies made that win battles. Come out to Kitty Vitty, a rock-ribbed cove behind St. John's, and listen to some old mother in Israel, with the bloom of the sea still in her wilted cheeks, tell of losing her sons in the seal fisheries of the spring, when men go out in crews of two and three hundred hunting the hairy seal over the ice floes, and the floes break loose, and the blizzard comes down! It isn't the twenty or thirty or fifty dollar bonus a head in the seal hunt that lures them to death, in darkness and storm. It is the call, the dare, the risk, the romance of the sea born in their own blood. Or else watch the fishing fleets up off the North Sh.o.r.e, down on the Grand Banks! The schooner rocks to the silver swell of the sea with bare mast poles. A furtive woman comes up the hatchway and gazes with shaded eyes at pa.s.sing steamers; but the men are out in the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the sea, drawing in--drawing in--the line; or singing their sailor chanties--"Come all ye Newfoundlanders"--as meal of pork and cod simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of the boat. It isn't the one or two hundred dollars these fishermen clear in a year--and it may be said that one hundred dollars cleared in a year is opulence--that holds them to the wild, free, perilous life.

It is the call of the sea in their blood. Of such men are victorious navies made, and if Canada is to be anything more than the hanger-on to the tail of the kite of the British Empire, she, too, must have her navy, her men of the sea, born and cradled and crooned and nursed by the sea. That is Newfoundland's first importance to a Greater Britain Overseas.

Perhaps, if the present war had not broken out, Canada would never have realized Newfoundland's second importance to a Greater Britain Overseas as the outpost sentinel guarding entrance to her waterways. It would require shorter time to transport troops to Newfoundland than to Suez.

Should Canada ever be attacked, Newfoundland would be a more important basis than Suez. Two centuries ago, in fact, for two whole centuries, St. John's Harbor rang to the conflict of warring nations. If ever war demanded the bottling up and blockading of Canada, the basis for that embargo would be Newfoundland.

It may as well be acknowledged that Canada's east coast affords few good land-locked harbors. Newfoundland's deep-sea land-locked harbors are so numerous you can not count them. Your ship will be coasting what seems to be a rampart wall of sheer black iron towering up three, four, six hundred feet flat as if planed, planed by the ice-grind and storms of a million years beating down from the Pole riding thunderous and angry seas. You wonder what would happen if a storm caught your ship between those iron walls and a landward hurricane; and the captain tells you, when the wind sheers nor'-east, he always beats for open sea. It isn't the sea he fears. It is these rock ramparts and saw-tooth reefs sticking up through the lace fret. Suddenly you twist round a sharp angle of rock like the half closed leaf of a book. You slip in behind the leaf of rock, and wriggle behind another angle--"follow the tickles o' water" is, I believe, the term--and there opens before you a harbor cove, land-locked, rock-walled from sea to sky, with the fishermen's dories awash on a silver sea, with women in brightly colored kirtles and top-boots and sunbonnets busy over the fishing stages drying cod. Dogs and hogs are the only domestic animals visible. The sh.o.r.e is so rocky that fences are usually little sticks anch.o.r.ed in stones. There are not even many children; for the children are off to sea soon as they can don top-boots and handle a line. There is the store of "the planter" or outfitter--a local merchant, who supplies schooners on shares for the season and too often holds whole hamlets in his debt. There is the church. The priest or parson comes poling out to meet your ship and get his monthly or half-yearly mail, and there are the little whitewashed cots of the fisher folk. It is a simpler life than the existence of the habitant of Quebec. It is more remote from modern stress than the days of the Tudors. On the north and west sh.o.r.e and in that sea strip of Labrador under Newfoundland's jurisdiction and known in contradiction to Labrador as The Labrodor--are whole hamlets of people that have never seen a railroad, a cow, a horse. They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon men in Queen Elizabeth's day. You hear such expressions as "enow,"

"forninst," "forby"; and the mental att.i.tude to life is two or three centuries old.

"Why should we pay for railroads?" the people asked late as 1898. "Our fathers used boats and their own legs." And one hamlet came out and stoned a pa.s.sing train. "Checks--none of your checks for me," roared an out-port fisherman taking the train for the first time and lugging behind him a huge canvas bag of clothes. "Checks--not for me! I know checks! When the banks busted, I had your checks; and much good they were." This was late as '98, and back from the pulp mills of the interior and the railroad you will find conditions as antiquated to-day.

If Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas, why is she not part of Canada? Because Canada refused to take her in.

Because Canada had not big enough vision to see her need of this smallest of the American colonies. For the same reason that reciprocity failed between Canada and the United States--because when Newfoundland would have come in, Canada was lethargic. n.o.body was big enough politically to seize and swing the opportunity. Because when Canada was ready, Newfoundland was no longer in the mood to come in; and n.o.body in Newfoundland was big enough to seize and swing an opportunity for the empire.

It was in the nineties. Fish had fallen to a ruinous price and for some temporary reason the fishing was poor. There had been bank kiting in Newfoundland's financial system. She had no railroads and few steamships. Her mines had not been exploited, and she did not know her own wealth in the pulp-wood areas of the interior. In fact, there are sections of Northern Newfoundland not yet explored inland. Every bank in the colony had collapsed. Newfoundland emissaries came to Ottawa to feel the pulse for federation. The population at that time was something under two hundred thousand.

Now Canada has one very bad British characteristic. She has the John Bull trick of drawing herself up to every new proposal with an air of "What is that to us?" At this time Canada herself was in bad way. She had just completed her first big transcontinental. Times were dull.

The Crown Colony of Newfoundland did not come begging admission to confederation. No political party could do that and live; for politics in Newfoundland are a fanatical religion. I have heard the warden of the penitentiary say that if it were not for politics he would never have any inmates. It is a fact that out-port prisons have been closed for lack of inmates, but long as elections recur, come broken heads.

So the Crown Colony did not seek admission. It came feeling the Ottawa pulse, and the Ottawa pulse was slow and cold. "What's Newfoundland to us?" said Canada. One of the commissioners told me the real hitch was the terms on which the Dominion should a.s.sume the Crown Colony's small public debt; so the chance pa.s.sed unseized. Newfoundland set herself to do what Canada had done, when the United States refused reciprocity.

She built national railways. She launched a system of national ships.

She nearly bankrupted her public treasury with public works and ultimately handed her transportation system over to semi-private management. Outside interests began buying the pulp-wood areas. Pulp became one of the great industries. The mines of the east sh.o.r.e picked up. There was a boom in whaling. World conditions in trade improved.

By the time that the Dominion had awakened to the value of Newfoundland no party in Newfoundland would have dared to mention confederation, and that is the status to-day. One can hardly imagine this status continuing long. The present war, or the lessons of the present war, may awaken both sides to the advantages of union. Sooner or later, for her own sake solely, Canada must have Newfoundland; and it is up to Canada to offer terms to win the most ancient of British colonies in America. British settlement in Newfoundland dates a century prior to settlement in Acadia and Virginia. Devon men came to fish before the British government had set up any proprietary claim.

II