Part 28

It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed him.

“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”

“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost anywhere?”

“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”

* * * * *

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:

Flour 16 cents per pound

Sugar 25 cents per pound

Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound

Butter 75 cents per pound

Oatmeal 30 cents per pound

Dried fruits 25 cents per pound

Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin

Bacon 50 cents per pound

Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen (In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)

Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin

Bread 25 cents per 1-pound loaf (Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)

Potatoes $3.00 per bushel

Chickens $4.00 each

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.

The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako to Burns Lake was uneventful.

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:

“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.

“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see the car again.”

What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could see.

“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t get traction.”

As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded “mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.

“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.

“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House. Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”

“How far is it from here?” I asked.

“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three mile.”

“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”

Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.

“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,” he said.

“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.

“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to stand in the road bargainin’.”

I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.

That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three _perfectly awful_ miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. _It had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles._

Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable litter of small children.

“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads, unless ’twould be in the loft.”

“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”

Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”

But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and left in darkness everything.

We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however, the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon, ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.