by Stan Krumm
At about two o’clock the weather cleared, or at least the snow stopped falling for a few hours, and I thought we might have a chance at making it down from the higher elevation before nightfall, but just when the contours of the land began to suggest that we were starting our long last descent to the plateau, the sky opened again, this time with a steady downpour of freezing rain.
Darkness fell early, so we were delighted when around five o’clock we saw, at the edge of a field, perhaps fifty yards from the road, a sort of hay barn or large open-walled shed. It was only a feed station for range cattle, but to us it resembled a grand hotel.
The sheltered area was about twenty feet by twenty, but three-quarters of this was covered by hay—loose and in bundles. The unused space was liberally spotted with droppings—from both pack animals and deer—so our mule was definitely not the first four-footed creature to gorge himself at the unknown rancher’s expense. I would have been quite content to squirrel down into the hay until I was warm enough to sleep, but Rosh had sufficient energy left to make a clear spot on the shed floor and pull together the makings of a fire.
Being officially still in the process of recuperation, I was permitted to stretch out on the hay and watch while he did all this, then cropped together a pot full of slush from the grass outside to heat for tea. The only drawback was that Rosh therefore felt it expedient that I should continue being dosed with his vile elixirs. I believe he derived some sort of perverted pleasure from forcing these noxious liquids on me, for he brewed them even before he cooked supper. The odour that lingered on my body made my rice and venison taste like rotting weeds.
We had finished our meal and were just scrubbing pot, bowl, and cup, when I heard voices from out in the evening gloom. Someone else was arriving at our crude hostel. There was no chance to hide. We could only hope that whoever had found us would not cause us trouble.
Down from the high hills and in from the darkness and the sleet strode a group of Indians—three adults and a baby. They seemed to carry little in the line of baggage, although I got the impression that they were some distance from home. The woman carried the child in a sort of sling against her stomach. The old man had a single light bag over one shoulder; the younger man who walked in the lead and sat closest to our fire carried an old army-issue carbine.
This fellow, obviously their leader, gave us a friendly smile as he dragged a hay bundle closer to the circle of warmth, but gave no other greeting or sign of deference. He was tall, dressed like any miner or trail hand, with long black hair and a broad-brimmed hat, bedraggled now with the rain and snow. He had about half his teeth.
Two Indians had travelled part of the way in the company with which I had come north eight months previously, and I knew enough about those people to be unsurprised at the casual way he made himself at home.
There had been some hostilities between white men and these Indians in the past few years. A few of the early gold seekers had lost their lives, in fact, but that was farther south and some time ago, when the Indians were still confused and worried by the unknown pale-skinned invaders. As a culture, the Indians of the interior were gentle and easygoing. Far from considering their land a harsh one, they were almost lulled into lazy indifference by the ease with which they could survive. They seemed to be basically nomadic, but wherever they tethered their pony and propped up their tepee, they knew that ample fish and game would be at hand, so they lived a leisurely, undemanding life, with the men doing the hunting and the women covering all other forms of work.
The little group had been seated for some time, with the younger man close to the fire, and the others back in the shadows in what seemed to me a subservient pose, when the first words were finally spoken.
“I’m Red Antoine.” It was said with another ingratiating toothless grin.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Beddoes. He’s Rosh.” I realized after I said it that I probably shouldn’t have supplied my real name, but I thought it wouldn’t matter in this case anyway.
The conversation ended there for another half hour. The Chinaman and I watched the fire, dozed, and let our clothes dry, and the three Indians did much the same.
They are a great people for sitting still without a word, those inland natives. They seem to be able to squat down and pass any amount of time, punctuating the wait only with a shuffle of the feet and a chuckle at some unspoken thought. Orientals are generally considered difficult to understand; the red men are nearly impossible.
“I suppose you wonder why I speak such good English.”
Since our new friend Red Antoine had not actually spoken more than his name, that question had not, in fact, been troubling me, but he offered an explanation anyway.
“I did a lot of guiding for the Englishmen.” He whispered it as if it should really be kept secret. “Englishmen are kind of funny, you know. They get lost real easy, but they can always find an Indian. Then they try to get the Indian lost. They usually want you to take them to places that aren’t really there, and then, when they don’t get there, they get mad as dogs.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they taught me the language plenty good.”
I couldn’t think of any way to respond to that line of conversation, and in reality I felt much too tired to try.
We returned to silence for a few minutes, then I went to the mule and got the bottle—Ned’s Scotch whisky. I knew it was unwise, perhaps even illegal, to give liquor to an Indian, but I had been looking forward to that draught of internal warmth for the past four hours or more, and if Antoine decided to ask for a turn at the spout, I was not ready to refuse him. He was a big fellow and I hoped he would not take offence one way or the other.
I took a good mouthful and passed the mug to Rosh, who accepted a swallow appreciatively and smiled thanks. Sure enough, Antoine reached for the cup, took it, and drank thoughtfully. He offered none to his friends but drained the cup, reached past me for the bottle, and refilled it to the brim. I glared at him, which I don’t think he noticed, and removed the container to the pile of packing beside the mule. The big Indian drank down another few inches and passed the mug back to Rosh.
“That’s very good whisky,” he judged. “You must be quite rich.”
That startled me. As usual, I could not read his expression at all. When the mug reached me, I kept it until I finished it, and again we sat in silence. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock but I felt exhausted, and I moved outside the building to relieve myself preparatory to sleep. When I returned, Rosh had his eyes closed and was singing quietly. I grimaced, thinking that he sounded like a goose trying to imitate a robin, but Red Antoine looked at me and said, “It always makes me and my old brother happy to hear music. At first we only stopped just to be friendly. My brother always says we have to be friendly. I’m glad we stopped though, because of the music, you know.”
I shrugged and yawned—almost, but not quite, sure that he was joking. As he continued speaking, I concluded that he was quite serious and was enjoying our company in his own way.
“Weather like this makes people happy to see each other, no matter what. Life is good when one person builds a fire and five people get warm. I don’t know who made this fine wood building either, but I think I like him too. Maybe he was an Englishman, but that’s all right. You aren’t an Englishman I don’t think, but I can’t always tell with you white men.”
I was dreadfully tired and just about to inform him that I had had enough of his frivolous meanderings, when he said something that demanded more of my attention.
“You’re either English or Yankee, I know, and I know that your friend is an Indian. I can tell that. It’s a good thing too, because some people might think he was a Chinaman, and everyone is supposed to be on the lookout for a Yankee and a Chinaman. Some sort of crooks. That’s what my old brother heard back at Wingdam.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stood with my mouth wide open until eventually old Antoine looked at me and said, “You’re pretty tired, aren’t you? You go to bed if you want. I’m going to stay u
p and listen to the music.”
For the moment, I responded with only a silent nod and crawled into the hay to consider what had been said, leaving the Indians to savour Rosh’s bleating songs to their hearts’ content. An unruly variety of questions presented themselves for my analysis. Was this Indian something other than he seemed? Were the sheriff’s agents already close behind me? Evidently the man we had stumbled past at Beaver Pass had heard about Zachary Beddoes and discussed his suspicions with others when he had a chance, but who had he told, and how much did they care about a mysterious pair of travellers? Would a troop of Royal Engineers descend on us immediately, or would the authorities choose to ignore us? These weren’t questions I could easily dismiss.
By now Rosh had stopped singing, and it was Antoine and his brother who were droning painful monotones into the night. As if he knew of my mental distress and wanted to reassure me, the big Indian stopped for a moment and said loudly, “I know the difference between a Chinaman and an Indian real good, but it’s too bad I don’t remember names like other people.”
I appreciated the implications of his statement, but I still found it hard to sleep.
I had decided to ask some direct questions of the Indian in the morning, but when I roused myself just as the sky was hinting at daybreak, the little group of natives was gone.
We walked quickly, without taking time to eat. Rosh knew I was worried about something, but of course he had no idea what that might be. The weather had cleared a little, although the road was still muddy. After travelling seven or eight miles, we saw the first twisted strands of smoke rising from the settlement at the river junction, and I decided I should explain. With our usual miming language, I described Red Antoine as “tall man, floppy hat, back there,” and said that he had seen me and knew me. Legal authorities were looking for me. I was worried. Rosh understood. Did Red Antoine know about the gold? No, only about me. He knew the authorities were looking for me.
We both understood the implications of a stray Indian knowing me, particularly since I had made the unforgivable mistake of giving him my name.
At mid-morning we were standing on a well-situated bluff, overlooking the townsite of Quesnelle Mouth, trying to decide on a route. We wanted a road or track that would lead us around the inhabited area without actually ploughing through the bush surrounding the river forks. We would have to come close to the town to cross the Quesnelle River, since I knew of no other ferry or fording place, but I had no desire to pass through the populated area itself. So far that day, we had passed several houses set back from the road, and waved to a settler who seemed to be working on a wagon, but had yet to come into real contact with any of the locals.
I had the feeling that the sheriff, or whoever was in charge of apprehending me for questioning, would probably focus the main part of his attention on the stretch of road ending at this point. Logically, the two ferries—both the larger Soda Creek Ferry and the smaller, locally operated one where the road crosses the river—would be good places to keep watch. I didn’t know whether those searching for me were sufficiently informed and organized, or sufficient in numbers to be doing this by now, but I had to take the chance. Once beyond Quesnelle Mouth, the land would be so vast, and traffic so scarce, that finding a single man there would be like hoping to snatch a particular flea off a dog’s back.
From our viewpoint, we couldn’t see any route that skirted the town, so we returned to the main road and started our descent following it, but kept our eyes open for a promising side track.
With still a mile to go, we passed numerous houses and buildings, some with people coming and going, and I grew extremely nervous.
A wagon track split off to the left a half mile or so from the townsite proper, and we followed this. It snaked left and right for a hundred yards and seemed to be going roughly the proper direction, when we suddenly found ourselves in the yard of a log house on the edge of a meadow. A dog barked angrily from the porch. Before we could consider whether to turn around or cut across the meadow, a woman, large and of middle age, dressed in trousers like a man, stepped out of the front door of the house.
“Good morning, ma’am. I wonder if you could help us,” I began, but she interrupted me with a most unladylike curse and shouted instead:
“I can help you off my land, you miserable vagrant. I’ll help you with a shotgun, if you like. You stinking gold grubbers just keep moving wherever you like, but get off my property before you find yourself here for permanent. You start digging around my land and you’ll be digging your own graves, by gosh! Get moving!”
We struck out across the meadow, while behind us the lady of the house continued to rant and scold.
“If you were any kind of a decent dog,” she decried to the animal, “you’d have gone after those two and took a chunk out of somewhere.”
Past a screen of trees at the edge of the meadow we found the river bank and followed this downstream to the crossing. One man was panning the river gravel, but he didn’t even look up as we passed above him.
Near the ferry we paused and waited, watching both banks of the river from a place of concealment in the short poplars. We saw a child with a dog cross over into town, then a farmer with a small wagon. Finally we emerged from the bush and tramped across the pebbled flats to the river crossing. We could see no one watching, but both of us felt the glare of a hundred eyes upon us and expected shouts and gunfire momentarily.
The crossing was accomplished without incident.
Travelling south all that day, we covered the first twenty miles of the route along the Fraser under cloudy skies that gave no rain. The next day was also successful for us. My strength seemed to have totally returned, although I saw no need to change the status quo and left the carrying of the gold to the Chinaman and the mule. If I had judged that such a weight of supplies and precious metal could be carried by one man and one animal, I would probably not have thought it necessary to include a partner in my plans. In that case, however, I would presumably have died from the fever before I ever made it out of the mountains, so everything seemed to be working out for the best.
Towards the end of that second day, as the sun slipped out between the cloud layer and the hilltops, we approached the Soda Creek area, and the geography changed somewhat. The trees were mostly pine now, scattered in clumps across rolling open country, or forming light, easily travelled forests along the hillsides. The ground was, in fact, so nicely passable that the road was often not clearly delineated. One simply followed the general direction of the mighty brown Fraser River, which carved its great canyon through sand and sandstone alike.
We had not seen a single soul since leaving the Quesnelle Mouth region, so our guard may have been a bit low, and we were taken by surprise when we topped a rise and found a company of range hands making camp in the little valley below us.
We paused and looked at each other, then again at the scene before us. A half-dozen men were spread out there, some setting up camp, some tending to horses, while one pair headed in the direction of the river. They may have been workers on some ranch nearby, for a few people had already set up homesteads or ranches in the vicinity, or they may have been driving the herd of animals on the hill behind them towards Barkerville, for auction at the goldfields. One way or the other, they presented a problem.
Two men working with a pile of packs and saddles were looking towards us, screening their eyes from the setting sun with their hands. It would have been suspicious for us to make a long circle around the valley to avoid passing through their midst, but I did not wish to spend an entire evening being polite to a group of curious cowboys.
I have never feared unlikely schemes, and I had one at the back of my mind that seemed to fit the situation. I just had to communicate to Rosh what his part in it was. Once I had convinced him to start singing, we started down the hillside directly towards the trail hands.
I wore a long grey wool scarf that Rosh had given me. It appeared to have been made out of a bl
anket at some time, and it kept my neck and shoulders warm, but now I pulled it up over my head and around my cheeks, leaving only the space around my eyes visible. Walking bent over like this, in the deepening evening shadows, I should, I thought, be able to pass for a Chinaman, especially once I began to sing along with Rosh.
He stopped his own song when I began to wail away with what I thought was a fair rendition of a Chinese ballad, and I had to coax him to start again. I gather he eventually figured out the gist of my plan, for we sang out a most unpleasant harmony all the way through the cowboy camp and up the other side of the draw. Rosh paused long enough to chatter some Chinese greeting, and I kept my head bowed and hung close to the mule’s flank.
It was dark when we made our own camp a mile or two farther along, but even in the blackness of night I could sense that I had offended my partner with my use of his music in our little scheme. He avoided me that evening, and I never heard the man sing again.
We had been late in choosing the site for our camp that night, and because of darkness we had set up in a little grove of pines that offered minimal protection. Before full morning light we were thus up and on our feet, hastily loading packs and mule when a steady rain began to soak both our clothes and bedding. It is a depressing thing indeed to find your socks are wringing wet even before you put them in your boots.
We trudged along without fluctuation as the downpour continued. Like a mountain stream in flood, it neither slowed nor increased from daylight to noon.
Two normal travellers would probably have agreed to hide under a tree until the worst was past, regardless of the danger behind them, but our communication was not good enough for us to justify it to each other. Because of this we made ten or twelve miles before we were mercifully delivered.
Somewhere around midday we walked along the base of a section of stark rock cliffs—basalt, or some type of slate—when we saw, more or less simultaneously, a cave. Perhaps it might better be described as an angular cleft in the rocks, but it was a protected spot big enough for two men and their gear, and it was so naturally inviting that we both headed for it without hesitation.