Chapter 8

They drew back now into the cover of the surrounding valleys, where it is true the mosquitoes annoyed them unspeakably, but where they remained with such patience as they could possess. The caribou seemed to be slowly feeding out from the opposite edge of the forest, but they were very deliberate and uncertain in their progress. The two watched them for the best part of half an hour.

"Too bad!" said Alex, at last, as he peered out from behind the tree which shielded them. "Four hundred yards at best."

Rob also ventured a look at this time.

"Why, there's only three," said he.

"Yes, the two stags went back into the woods."

"But we can't kill the cows," said Rob, decisively.

"Why not? They're just as good to eat."

"Maybe better," said Rob, "I don't doubt that. A young, fat cow is better meat than an old bull any time, of course. But Uncle Dick said we mustn't waste anything, and mustn't kill anything except what had horns in this kind of game."

"Well," said Alex, "I don't much feel like going back to camp without any meat."

"Nor I. Let's wait here awhile and maybe the stag'll come out again."

This indeed proved to be the case, for in a few minutes the smaller stag did show at the edge of the wood, offering a dim and very uncertain mark at a distance of several hundred yards. Rob began to prepare his rifle.

"It's too far," said Alex. "No Injun would think of shooting that far. You might only cripple."

"Yes," said Rob, "and I might only miss. But I'd rather do that than shoot at one of the cows. I believe I'll take a chance anyhow, Alex."

Adjusting his rifle-sights to the best of his knowledge, Rob took long and careful aim, and fired at the shoulder of the distant caribou, which showed but indistinctly along his rifle-sights. The shot may have come somewhere close to the animal, but certainly did not strike it, for with a sudden whirl it was off, and in the next instant was hidden by the protecting woods.

Now, there was instanced the truth of what Alex had said about the fickleness of caribou nature. The three cows, one old and two young ones, stood in full view in the open, at about half the distance of the stag. They plainly saw both Alex and Rob as they now stepped out from their cover. Yet instead of wheeling and running, the older cow, her ears standing out high and wide, began to trot steadily toward them instead of running away. Rob once more raised his rifle, but this time not to shoot at game, but only to make an experiment. He fired once, twice, and three times in the air; and even up to the time of the last shot, the old cow trotted steadily toward him, not stopping until she was within fifty yards of him. Here she stood staring wide-eyed, but at length, having figured out something in her own mind, she suddenly wheeled and lumbered off again, her heavy, coarse muzzle straight ahead of her. All three now shambled off and soon were lost to view.

"Well, what do you think about that, Alex?" demanded Rob. "That's the funniest thing I ever saw in all my hunting. Those things must be crazy."

"I suppose they think we are," replied Alex, glumly; "maybe we are, or we'd have taken a shot at her. I can almost taste that tenderloin!"

"I'm sorry about it, Alex," said Rob, "but maybe some of the others will get some meat. I really don't like to shoot females, because game isn't as plentiful now as it used to be, you know, even in the wild country."

Alex sighed, and rather unhappily turned and led the way back toward the river. "It's too late to hunt anything more," said he, "and we might not find anything that just suited us."

When at length they reached camp, after again crossing the river in the _Mary Ann_, twilight was beginning to fall. Rob did not notice any difference in the camp, although the keen eyes of Alex detected a grayish object hanging on the cut limb of the tree at the edge of the near-by thicket. John and Jesse pretended not to know anything, and Alex and Rob, to be equally dignified, volunteered no information and asked no questions.

All the boys had noticed that old hunters, especially Indian hunters, never ask one another what success they have had, and never tell anything about what they have killed. Jesse, however, could not stand this sort of thing very long, and at length, with considerable exultation, asked Rob what luck he had had. Rob rather shamefacedly admitted the failure which he and Alex had made.

"We did better," said Jesse; "we got one."

"You got one? Who got it?" demanded Rob. "Where is it?"

"There's a ham hanging up over there in the brush," answered Jesse. "We all went out, but I killed him."

"Is that so, John?" asked Rob.

"It certainly is," said John. "Yes, Jesse is the big chief to-night."

"We only went a little way, too," said Jesse, "just up over the ridge there, I don't suppose more than half a mile. It must have been about noon when we started, and Moise didn't think we were going to see anything, and neither did we. So we sat down, and in an hour or so I was shooting at a mark to see how my rifle would do. All at once we saw this fellow--it wasn't a very big one, with little bits of horns--come out and stand around looking to see what the noise was about. So I just took a rest over a log, and I plugged him!"

Jesse stood up straight, his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, a very proud young boy indeed.

Moise, strolling around, was grinning happily when at last he met the unsuccessful hunters.

"Those Jesse boy, she'll been good shot," said he. "I s'pose, Alex, you'll not make much hunter out of yourself, _hein_?"

"Well," said Alex, "we let some mighty good cow venison get away from us, all right."

"Never mind," said Moise, consolingly, "we'll got fat young caribou now plenty for two--three days, maybe so."

Rob went up to Jesse and shook him by the hand. "Good boy, Jess!" said he. "I'm glad you got him instead of myself. But why didn't you tell us when we came into camp?"

"Moise said good hunters didn't do that," ventured John, who joined the conversation. "How about that, Alex?"

"Well," said the older hunter, "you must remember that white men are different from Injuns. People who live as Injuns do get to be rather quiet. Now, suppose an Injun hunter has gone out after a moose, and has been gone maybe two or three days. He'll probably not hunt until everything is gone in the lodge, and maybe neither he nor his family is going to eat much until he gets a moose. Well, by and by he comes home some evening, and throws aside the skin door of the lodge, and goes in and sits down. His wife helps him off with his moccasins and hands him a dry pair, and makes up the fire. He sits and smokes. No one asks him whether he has killed or not, and he doesn't say whether he has killed, although they all may be very hungry. Now, his wife doesn't know whether to get ready to cook or not, but she doesn't ask her man. He sits there awhile; but, of course, he likes his family and doesn't want them to be hungry. So after a while, very dignified, he'll make some excuse so that his wife can tell what the result of the hunt has been. Maybe he'll say carelessly that he has a little blood on his shirt, which ought to be washed off, or maybe he'll say that if any one were walking a couple of miles down the river they might see a blazed trail out toward the hills. Then his wife will smile and hurry to put on the kettles. If it isn't too far, she'll take her pack-strap then and start out to bring in some of the meat. Every people, you see, will have different ways."

"But the man who doesn't kill something goes hungry, and his family, too?"

"Not in the least!" rejoined Alex, with some spirit. "There, too, the 'First People' are kinder than the whites who govern them now. Suppose in my village there are twenty lodges. Out of the twenty there will be maybe four or five good hunters, men who can go out and kill moose or bear. It gets to be so that they do most of the hunting, and if one of them brings in any meat all the village will have meat. Of course the good hunters don't do any other kind of work very much."

"That isn't the way white people do," asserted John; "they don't divide up in business matters unless they have to."

"Maybe not," said Alex, "but it has always been different with my people in the north. If men did not divide meat with one another many people would starve. As it is, many starve in the far-off countries each winter. Sometimes we cannot get even rabbits. It may be far to the trading-post. The moose or the caribou may be many miles away, where no one can find them. A heavy storm may come, so no one can travel. Then if a man is fortunate and has meat he would be cruel if he did not divide. He knows that all the others would do as much with him. It is our custom."

XIV

EXPLORING THE WILDERNESS

IF Rob, John, and Jesse had been eager for exciting incidents on their trip across the mountains, certainly they found them in plenty during the next three days after the caribou hunt, as they continued their passage on down the mountain river, when they had brought in all their meat and once more loaded the canoes.

Rob had been studying his maps and records, and predicted freely that below this camp they would find wilder waters. This certainly proved to be the case. Moreover, they found that although it is easier to go down-stream than up in fast water, it is more dangerous, and sometimes progress is not so rapid as might be expected. Indeed, on the first day below the caribou camp they made scarcely more than six or eight miles, for, in passing the boats down along shore to avoid a short piece of fast water, the force of the current broke the line of the _Mary Ann_, and it was merely by good fortune that they caught up with her, badly jammed and wedged between two rocks, her gunwale strip broken across and the cedar shell crushed through, so that she had sprung a bad leak.

They hauled the crippled _Mary Ann_ ashore and discharged her cargo in order to examine the injuries received.

"Well, now, we're giving an imitation of the early _voyageurs_," said John, as he saw the rent in the side of the canoe. "But how are we going to fix her? She isn't a birch-bark, and if she were, we have no bark."

"I think we'll manage," Rob replied, "because we have canvas and cement and all that sort of thing. But her rail is broken quite across."

"She'll been good boat," said Moise, smiling; "we'll fix heem easy." So saying, he took his ax and sauntered over to a half-dead cedar-tree, from which, without much difficulty, he cut some long splints. This they managed to lash inside the gunwale of the canoe, stiffening it considerably. The rent in the bottom they patched by means of their cement, and some waterproof material. They finished the patch with abundant spruce gum and tar, melted together and spread all over. When they were done their labors the _Mary Ann_ was again watertight, but not in the least improved in beauty.

"We'll have to be very careful all the way down from here, I'm thinking," said Alex. "The river is getting far more powerful almost every hour as these other streams come in. Below the Finlay, I know very well, she's a big stream, and the shores are so bad that if we had an accident it would leave things rather awkward."

None the less, even with one boat crippled in this way, Rob and John gained confidence in running fast water almost every hour. They learned how to keep their heads when engaged in the passage of white water, how to avoid hidden rocks, as well as dangerous swells and eddies. It seemed to them quite astonishing what rough water could be taken in these little boats, and continually the temptation was, of course, to run a rapid rather than laboriously to disembark and line down alongshore. Thus, to make their story somewhat shorter, they passed on down slowly for parts of three days, until at last, long after passing the mouth of the Pack River and the Nation, and yet another smaller stream, all coming in from the west, they saw opening up on the left hand a wide valley coming down from the northwest.

The character of the country, and the distance they had traveled, left no doubt whatever in their minds that this was the Finlay River, the other head-stream of the Peace River. They therefore now felt as though they knew precisely where they were. Being tired, they pitched their camp not far below the mouth of the Finlay, and busied themselves in looking over their boats and supplies. They knew that the dreaded Finlay rapids lay only two miles below them.

They were now passing down a river which had grown to a very considerable stream, sometimes with high banks, again with shores rather low and marshy, and often broken with many islands scattered across an expanse of water sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile in extent. The last forty miles of the stream to the junction of the Finlay had averaged not more rapid but much heavier than the current had seemed toward the headwaters. The roar of the rapids they approached now came up-stream with a heavier note, and was distinguishable at much greater distances, and the boats in passing through some of the heavier rapids did so in the midst of a din quite different from the gentle babble of the shallow stream far toward its source. The boom of the bad water far below this camp made them uneasy.

"Well," said Rob, as they sat in camp near the shore, "we know where we are now. We have passed the mouth of the McLeod outlet, and we have passed the Nation River and everything else that comes in from the west. Here we turn to the east. It must be nearly one hundred and fifty miles to the real gate of the Rockies--at the Cañon of the Rocky Mountains, as the first traders called it."

"It looks like a pretty big river now," said Jesse dubiously.

"I would like to hope it's no worse than it has been just above here," said Rob, "but I fear it is, from all I know. Mackenzie got it in high water, and he only averaged half a mile an hour for a long time going up, along in here. Of course coming down we could pick our way better than he could."

"We have been rather lucky on the whole," said Alex, "for, frankly, the water has been rather worse for canoes than I thought it would be. Moreover, it is still larger below here. But that's not the worst of it."

"What do you mean, Alex?" inquired John.

"You ought not to need to ask me," replied the old hunter. "You're all _voyageurs_, are you not?"

"But what is it, then?"

"Look closely."

They went to the edge of the beach and looked up and down the river carefully, also studying the forking valleys into which they could see from the place where they were in camp.

"Well, I don't know," said Rob, "but it seems to me she's rising a little!"

Alex nodded. "We've been in camp here three hours now," said he, "and she's come up a little more than an inch."

"Why, how do you know that?" asked John.

"I set a stick with a notch at water-level when we first came ashore."

"How did you happen to think of that?"

"Very likely the same thing which made Rob guess it."

"Yes," said Rob, "I saw that the Finlay water coming down seemed to be discolored. But at first I supposed it was the natural color of that river. So you think there has been a thaw?"

"Maybe some sort of rain or chinook over in there," said Alex. "What do you think, Moise?"

Moise and Alex talked for a time in the Cree language, Moise shaking his head as he answered.

"Moise thinks there has been a little rise," interpreted Alex. "He says that below here the river sometimes cañons up, or runs between high banks with a narrow channel. That would make it bad. You see, the rise of a foot in a place like that would make much more difference than two inches in the places where the river is spread out several hundred yards wide. We know a little bit more about the river from here east, because we have talked with men who have been here."

"I suppose we'll have to wait here until it runs down," said Jesse.

"Maybe not. If we were here earlier in the season and this were the regular spring rise we might have to wait for some time before we could go down with these boats. But the big flood has gone down long ago. There isn't anything to hinder us as yet from dropping down and watching carefully on ahead as we go."

Rob was again consulting his inevitable copy of _Mackenzie's Voyages_.

"It took Mackenzie and Fraser each of them just eight days to get this far up the river from the west end of the Cañon of the Rocky Mountains," said he. "Fraser must have built his boat somewhere west of the Rocky Mountain Portage, as they call it. That must be seventy-five miles east of here, as near as I can figure it from the Mackenzie story, but Uncle Dick's friend, Mr. Hussey, said it was one hundred and thirty miles--and only two big rapids, the Finlay and the Parle Pas. I wish we could run it every foot, because Mackenzie did when he came down. At least, he doesn't say he didn't."

"It was done by the traders for a long time," said Alex, "all but those two rapids and that cañon. There is no trail even for horses between Hudson's Hope and Fort St. John, but that is easy water. They serve St. John now with steamboats, and the old canoe days are pretty much over. But, anyhow, there is the main ridge of the Rockies east of us, and we've got to get through it somehow, that's sure. Back there"--he pointed up the valley down which they had been coming now for so long--"we were between two ranges of the divide. The Finlay yonder comes down out of some other range to the northwest. But now the doubled river has to break through that dam of the eastern rim. I suppose we may look for bad water somewhere. Look here," he added, examining the map, "here are the altitudes all marked on by the government surveyors--twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level at Giscombe Portage, twenty-two hundred and fifty at Fort McLeod. I suppose it was about three thousand feet where we started across. At the mouth of the Finlay it's only two thousand feet--a big drop. But she drops nearly three hundred feet more to the west end of the portage, and two hundred feet more at the east end. That's going downhill pretty fast--five hundred feet in less than one hundred and fifty miles--and some of it not very fast water."

"Well," ventured Rob, "why don't we drop down as far as we can, and if we get caught by a flood then stop and take a little hunt somewhere back in the hills? You know, we haven't got that grizzly yet you promised us."

"Sure enough," said Alex, with no great enthusiasm; for he did not relish the idea of hunting grizzly bear in company with such young companions.

"But we have come through good grizzly country already," ventured John.

"Very likely," Alex smiled. "I've seen considerable bear sign along the shores, as well as a good many moose tracks close to where we camped."

"If you think we're afraid to go bear hunting, Alex," Rob began, "you certainly don't know us very well. That's one of the reasons we came on this trip--we wanted to get a real Rocky Mountain grizzly."

"It is not too late," the old hunter rejoined, "and I shouldn't wonder if there was as good country east of here as any we've come to. The grizzly is a great traveler, anyhow, and is as apt to be found one place as another. At this time of year all the bears come out of the mountains and feed along the valleys on red willow buds and such things. They even swim from the shore to the islands, in search of willow flats. Besides, there are plenty of saskatoons, I don't doubt, not far back from the river. The bears ought to be down out of the high country by this time, and if you really care for a hunt, there ought to be plenty of good places below here."

"It isn't dark yet," said Rob; "suppose we break camp and run down just a little farther this evening. If the flood comes in behind us, we're just that much ahead."

They acted on Rob's suggestion, and, passing rapidly on down the now slightly discolored water, they soon left the Finlay gap behind them. Their journey was but brief, however, for soon they heard the boom of the rapids below them.

"On shore, queek!" called Moise to Rob, who was in the bow of the leading boat.

XV

IN THE BIG WATERS

The sound and sight of the Finlay rapids, at the head of which the leading boat now paused, gave Rob his first real idea of how wicked a great mountain river can be. He looked back to see whether the _Jaybird_ and her crew were well warned of the danger. But Alex soon brought the other boat alongside at the landing place, on the south side of the stream, above the rapids.

"Well, here we are," said he. "Now you may see what some real rapids are. Those little ripples up above didn't amount to much."

"She looks pretty bad," said Rob. "Could anybody run a boat through there?"

"Old Sir Alexander probably did it, but he had a big birch-bark. I'd take it on with a good man and a good boat. We could very possibly even get one of these boats through if we were obliged to, but there is no use taking any risk. We can line down through the worst of it, or even run the boat ashore if we like."

"Me, I'll rather ron the rapeed than walk on the bank with boat," said Moise.

"Never mind, Moise," said Alex, "we'll not have to walk far with her. We'll camp here to-night and look it over in the morning. It's always better to tackle rough work in the morning rather than in the evening."

The young travelers slept none too well that night. The sound of the rapids coming through the dark and the feeling of remoteness here in this wild mountain region proved depressing to their spirits. They were glad enough when at length toward dawn they heard Moise stirring about the camp. By the time they had their breakfast finished and camp broken Alex had already returned from a trip along the side of the rapids.

"It's not so very bad," said he, "although the river has come up an inch or so during the night. The whole rapid is about a quarter of a mile long, but the worst place is only a couple of hundred yards or so. We'll drop down to the head of that strip on the line and portage around there."

They followed this plan, loading the boats and dropping down for a short time, saving themselves all the portage work they could. In places the water seemed very wild, tossing over the rocks in long, rolling waves or breaking in foam and spray. The boys scrambled alongshore, allowing Alex and Moise to care for the first boat when it became necessary for them to double up on each trip over the worst water. Part of the time they bore a hand on the line, and were surprised to see the strength of the current even on a boat without a load.

"You see," said Alex, when at length they came to a place where the water seemed still more powerful and rough, and where it seemed necessary to haul the boat entirely from the water for a carry of some distance over the rocks, "it's better to take a little trouble and go slow rather than to lose a boat in here. If she broke away from us we'd feel a long way from home!"

After they got the _Mary Ann_ again in the water and at the foot of the rapids, the men went up after the _Jaybird_, while the boys did what they could toward advancing the cargo of the _Mary Ann_. In less than an hour they had everything below the rapids and saw plain sailing once more ahead of them. Moise expressed his disappointment at not being allowed to run the Finlay rapids.

"My onkle, she'll always ron those rapeed," said he. "S'pose I'll tell heem I'll walk aroun', he'll laugh on me, yes!"