Part 15 (2/2)
”Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez ici--bien--so--I tole you 'bout heem,” begins some French-Canadian trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
”Bigos.h.!.+ He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go stumble t'rough snow--how you call dat?--hill, steep--steep! Oui, by Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de--de gran'
rapeed, see?” emphasizing the snow-slide with ill.u.s.trative gesture.
”Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem fall--so--see? Tonnerre! Bigos.h.!.+ for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
Sacre! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg ol' bear sleep in snow.
Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear--diable!
'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man--he not scare--he say wan leetle prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'--sacre--dat grab hees knife out hees belt--sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her breat'--diable!--for sure he fin' de place her heart beat--Tonnerre!
Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat bear! Dat bes' t'ing do--for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best t'ing do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over too--leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigos.h.!.+ de bear she got dat; dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!”
And with a finis.h.i.+ng flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the credit of Montagnais's heroism.
But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the chase as long as ”the sun rises and the rivers flow”; but the fur-trader can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every season. The little hayc.o.c.k houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.
The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime beaver. If satisfied, the Indian pa.s.ses over the furs and the trader gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is effected.
But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's dollars and cents, his s.h.i.+llings and pence, his tokens of currency.
South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of sh.e.l.l, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down, stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures 1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.
First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000 blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.
Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to the store counter where begins interminable d.i.c.kering. Montagnais's squaw has only fifty ”beaver” coin, and her desires are a hundredfold what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At the termination of each bargain, so many coins pa.s.s across the counter.
Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many ”beaver”
against the trapper's next hunt.
Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no compet.i.tion, whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer, for which the Indian has as keen an appet.i.te, both for the exigencies of hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they considered the more dangerous.
Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white, according to the lat.i.tude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as Christmas.
Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder; but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be handled differently.
Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for s...o...b..rd or rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a full-grown ermine with hair too coa.r.s.e to be damaged by a snare. The man suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground, strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.
If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small, the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be worth only some few ”beaver” at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife. But alas for the resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the ermine.
Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at a leading fort would amount to:
Bear of all varieties 400 Ermine, medium 200 Blue fox 4 Red fox 91 Silver fox 3 Marten 2,000 Musk-rat 200,000 Mink 8,000 Otter 500 Skunk 6 Wolf 100 Beaver 5,000 Pekan (fisher) 50 Cross fox 30 White fox 400 Lynx 400 Wolverine 200
The value of these furs in ”beaver” currency varied with the fas.h.i.+ons of the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500 rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.
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