Part 4 (2/2)
Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds, clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the _voyageurs_ hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze like a seagull.
Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and racing leaps each _voyageur_ knows what to expect. No man asks questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It vaults--springs--bounds, with a s.h.i.+ver of live waters under the keel and a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids of Slave River without unloading.]
But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges; and the _voyageurs_ are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.
Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to _sauter les rapides_, as the _voyageurs_ say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps, some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the crew, got his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.
One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.
Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a _portage_. Coming back this way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.
If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is ”tracked” up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all dangerous, each _voyageur_ lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps across his forehead, and runs along the sh.o.r.e. A long _portage_ is measured by the number of pipes the _voyageur_ smokes, each lighting up meaning a brief rest; and a _portage_ of many ”pipes” will be taken at a running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine miles is the length of one famous _portage_ opposite the Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa.
In winter the _voyageur_ becomes _coureur des bois_ to his new masters.
Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick; sometimes to the _marche donc! marche donc!_ of the driver, with crisp tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.
These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.
At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining--the Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two important centres of trade in furs which are not imported--St. Paul and St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for the great companies a hundred years ago.
The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the cla.s.s who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a by-word.
And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound from the steerage pa.s.sengers. What was the matter? ”Oh,” said the captain, ”the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as usual!”
As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those _chansons populaires_, which have been sung by every generation of _voyageurs_ since Frenchmen came to America, _A La Claire Fontaine_, a song which the French trappers'
ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then--was it possible?--these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were singing--what? A song of the _Grand Monarque_ which has led armies to battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern wilds--
”Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?”
Three foes a.s.sailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known outside the range of human criminals.
Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carca.s.s. He recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He may even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.
Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager; so the man sets a circle of traps round the carca.s.s.
The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up, sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.
Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length away.
The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on _le sacre carcajou_.
Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.
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