Agnes Deans Cameron

“ No, Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let England see to it that she, too, is loyal.
Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace, are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land. God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. ”

“ But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home. The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that she may present as friend. ”

“ On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the little Mee-wah-sin, and in the tiny tug Messenger of the H.B. Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing cranes are flying.
Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect and created for herself a warm place in every heart. ”

“ The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,—a boon more prized by them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not. ”

“ In England it takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat elevator, red against the setting sun.
The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and fetid alleyways. ”

“ Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are cached, and the trail strikes into the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and eerie. ”

“ Canada is a country with a meagre past, a solid present, and an illimitable future.
She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's sky,—where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in are not dreamers but workers. "The world's greatest wheat-farm," says the economist. ”

“ The trail leads us through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the very berry we are popping into our mouths. ”

“ In spring, the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the cliffs above.
As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted, our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. ”

“ Their children are the most fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness, letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in evergreen boughs for their summer bedding—a delightful Ostermoor mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in summer, and in the winter they haul hay. ”

“ As the Indians were on their return journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again. But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that luxurious garment. ”

“ To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass, become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. ”

“ The July sun stabs into activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads" in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend out in the track of the big Bowhead.
Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for "Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel all unprepared. ”

“ Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where, amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company, a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey." ”

“ From the lowest form of life to the highest it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great hunter, man.
In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. ”

“ Now and again a splash breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly south to kinder skies, the inconnu hurry northward seeking the sea. ”

“ The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake, it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates starting on a quest of their own seeking. ”

“ Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the shadow of the cut-banks. ”

“ A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps. Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and salmon in the Pacific. ”

“ Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use their own word, "as a bird on the wing," has just succeeded in extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Misère Bonnet Rouge. ”

“ North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is nothing but pure translucent ice. ”

“ Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife, Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter. ”

“ At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant blood—the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. ”

“ The Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel. The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. ”

“ This new Province, carved out of the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would you?
The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan. ”

“ Scraping the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of Kennedy. ”

“ Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of the animal he snares. ”

“ Only one man has less need to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo. The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. ”