Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  THREE AGAINST

  the Wilderness

  Eric Collier

  Eric Collier in 1959

  Chapter 1

  It seemed that the whole world was ablaze when first I saw Meldrum Creek. From where I sat in temporary safety on the knoll, I could hear the fire move toward the creek from the north. When it reached the meadow beneath the knoll, the flames hurled themselves at the tinder-dry grass with a crackling roar and in scarce two minutes the whole meadow was ablaze. The flames cleared the creek channel at a bound and raced toward the spruces beyond. Within a half-dozen minutes the meadow lay black and smouldering. Though the needles of the spruces were still on fire, I knew that the trees were dying. And suddenly I thought, “The creek is dying, the trees are dying, the land everywhere is dying.”

  Yet this was the very land that soon Lillian and I were to share. There in that barren, burned-over primitive wilderness that has been home to us for almost thirty years, we were to raise our son Veasy to manhood. There we tasted all of summer’s searing heat and winter’s penetrating hostility, our only neighbours the moose, bears, timber wolves and other wildlife of the muskegs and forest, some of whom seemed ever ready to dispute our right to be there at all. There we learned to accept the mosquitoes and deer flies that often drove us, our work horses and saddle stock almost crazy with their persistent thirst for blood, even as we accepted all that was good in the wilderness around us.

  There we were to share moments of tranquility—overnight camps in the deep moss-carpeted forest, or by some quiet sparkling pond whose privacy had been disturbed before only by a flock of migratory waterfowl or some sour-tempered bull moose. Pleasant enough in summer, but in winter, when the floor of the forest hibernated beneath a shroud of three or more feet of snow, life in the woods and around the ponds was a matter of spartan endurance, a time when our breath frosted almost as it came from our lungs, and the cold pried at our flesh with the edge of a keen-bladed skinning knife. It was then, when winter held the wilderness in its hard grip, that Lillian would spend many moments of watching and waiting outside the cabin, standing bareheaded in the moonlight, indifferent to the vicious stab of the sub-zero temperature, so very still, listening for the soft swish of snowshoe webbing on ice, or the heavier step of a saddle horse as it broke the snow’s crust, her lips mutely wondering, “Why aren’t they home yet? What is keeping them out in the snows at this hour of the night?” Here in the country that was now becoming a charred, smouldering ruin even as I watched, we were to endure too many a moment of bleak despondency when all our hopes seemed to have gone so calamitously astray. Here we were to savour gratefully the moments of supreme happiness, accomplishment and satisfaction that were ours when finally some of those hopes bore fruit.

  This was the Meldrum Creek where, when Lillian’s Indian grandmother was a child, the elk and deer herds came to quench their thirst, where beavers splashed their tails, trout leaped for the mayfly, and ducks and geese in their thousands glutted themselves at the pondweed beds. But now the water was stagnant; in spots there was none at all. Fire was sweeping the forest, the trees were already dead, and from my vantage point of safety on the knoll, watching the agony of it all, I could only think that the land was dying and there was not a soul to save it.

  It was in the late spring of 1922 that I first saw the creek. Its headwaters, that is. I didn’t see its mouth, where it drains into the Fraser River three hundred-odd miles as the goose flies north of Vancouver, British Columbia, until the fall of 1926.

  I was riding a pinto gelding, six years old, innocent and tame enough without, but treacherous as shell ice within. If now he slouched along the trail at a slow lazy jogtrot, ears back, eyes partly slitted, the pinto could become a whirlwind of swift and furious activity should a willow grouse suddenly take wing from beneath his feet, or a deer heave wildly away from its bed in the thickets of second-growth jack pine alongside the trail. He’d bucked with me before, had the pinto, and on two occasions anyway thrown me clear out of the saddle. Right now, I guessed that I was at least thirty miles from another human being, and should the pinto and I part company, it might be many a long day before I saw hair or hide of the rascal again. So, while my left hand held a firm grip on the bridle lines, my right hovered just above the saddle horn, ready to grab it and hang on for dear life.

  Having lived in the remote Chilcotin district of interior British Columbia now for all of a year, and having absorbed much of the ways of this strange untamed Chilcotin country into my bloodstream, I was uneasily aware of the fact that it was the matchbox carried by man himself rather than any act of God that was responsible for most of the forest fires that were now burning unchecked over so much of the land. Here it was quite orthodox for anyone wishing to cut slough-grass hay for his cattle on some as yet unmowed wild hay meadow to ride out into the meadow on some sunny day in late spring and toss lighted matches into the dead grass of yesteryear and get rid of it, so that at a later date in summer, when the hay was ready to cut, it would not clog or impede the sickle bar of the mowing machine. Perhaps the total area to be shorn of its natural grasses comprised but twenty or so acres, but in order to rid its bottom of the litter, hundreds of acres of surrounding forest fell prey to the flame.

  But that didn’t matter. In a land where fir, pine and spruce forests rolled away for mile after endless mile, and ending no one quite knew where, timber was a natural resource without economic value, save perhaps for the cutting of fence rails, logs for the quick throwing up of a sod-roof cabin or a winter’s supply of firewood.

  I think the idea was first conceived when I steered my horse across the headwaters of the creek and continued downstream parallel to its flow. It was conceived in much the same way as one who hopes someday to have a home of his own might view a vacant lot upon some street or avenue, and wishfully think, “This is where I would like to build a home.” Almost subconsciously the thought crossed my mind, “Someday I’d like to come to this creek and live.” In a few years’ time, when that idle thought became sober concrete fact, I was to lie awake many a night, turning restlessly in bed, debating the wisdom of it all, wondering was it worthwhile. But I had Lillian with me then, Veasy too, for that matter. And they, between them, were the anchorage that held me there to the creek in fair weather or in foul.

  Across the creek was a small meadow, perhaps a half-acre of it, girded by spindly willows. Beyond the willows the everlasting jack pine again came into its own. At the meadow’s edge I eased my lank six feet one and a half inches out of the saddle, tied my lasso rope to the end of the halter shank and, unbuckling the throat latch and taking the bridle off, allowed the pinto to crop the knee-high grass.

  Deer had recently bedded down in the meadow. I had cut fresh deer sign several times since nearing the creek, as well as surprising a large black bear, who was so busy tearing a log to slivers in search of succulent grubs that he neither winded nor heard my approach. I brought the pinto to a stop when finally the bear did sense my presence. I sat very still in the saddle and watched the animal break at a clumsy gallop for the closest patch of second growth in which he could speedily hide himself. At that moment, I hadn’t too much interest in the bear. A day was to come when a black bear, heavy and round with fat, was of great and vital significance indeed. But the tracks of the deer and their sign in the meadow were something for sober contemplation; there’d be no shortage of meat here anyway, if one knew how to hunt it.

  After the pinto had eaten a while, I followed the water upgrade for a half-mile. The creek sneaked away from a narrow sliver of lake a half-mile wide, maybe three long, as if shameful of its presence there in the first place. For the level of the lake was so low that only a dribble of water
flowed from its mouth. The sun, now nooning, was a blood-red ball seemingly supported in the heavens by the dense smoke that plumed up from the burning forest. It was the acrid taste of the smoke on my tongue that warned me I must soon turn back. I was not far from the flames.

  Curiosity now tugged me farther down the creek. The water seeped downgrade through the gravel and boulders as if it were spent of either hope or ambition of eventually getting somewhere in its travels. About a mile below the crossing, the creek came to an old beaver meadow, and here the water became stagnant and smelly, scarcely hiding the black muck at the bottom of the creek channel. I reined my horse into the meadow; its matted, powder-dry grasses rustled beneath the gelding’s hoofs like so much paper.

  The crumbling façade of the beaver dam loomed up where the meadow ended, and beyond the remains of the dam the watercourse fell away through a healthy stand of mature spruces. There was little life to the creek where it escaped through the breach in the dam. The water barely trickled over the gravel and slowly seeped into a small pond beyond. Here was a creek that was sick; that was as plain as the nose on my face.

  It was then that I actually heard the fire as it moved down on the creek from the north, and caution told me I’d best get my horse away from the meadow to the high knoll where I might watch the approach of the fire yet quickly get away. In another few minutes I had to.

  Up there in the pine timber, with little in the way of underbrush to feed upon, the flames were unable to generate enough heat to crown in the tops of the trees. Not until they reached the meadow did they give frightful demonstration of their full appetite for destruction when bone-dry fodder was before them.

  I knew not at the time how many years Nature requires to produce one mature spruce tree, sixty feet from root to crown and twelve inches in diameter at the stump, but across the meadow stood many such trees, each perhaps capable of yielding some one hundred and fifty feet of dressed lumber if called upon to do so. Their resinous branches thrust low to the ground, and so close was one tree to another that a moose or deer seeking the cool of their shade would surely have trouble passing between them.

  When it came to the spruces, the fire crowned in their tops. Live sparks rocketed up into the smoky overhead were borne along with the wind and fell to earth a hundred or more yards away. And wherever a spark fell, a blaze was soon kindled.

  I leaned forward in the saddle, both hands clasping the horn, and peered through the smoke at the remains of the beaver dam. And the gap in its wall, where the creek passed through, seemed to remind me of the gap in a fence that was once closed by a gate.

  A moment ago the meadow was verdant green, but now it lay in blackened ruins, its peaty soil laid bare to the whims of the elements. I sat very still in the saddle, eyes on the breach in the beaver dam. If, I thought, but a single pair of beavers had been allowed to remain in the meadow, the gate would have been there, shut. And in front of the dam, and over the length and breadth of the meadow, there would now be water instead of highly inflammable slough grass. At water’s edge the flames would have been halted, thrown back upon themselves, the spruces across the meadow spared. But there was no gate in the dam, for the beavers had long since gone, and with the beavers gone, all hope seemed to have gone from the land too.

  Chapter 2

  It was across the rough plank counter of a frontier trading post that I met the girl who was to share the wilderness with me. She came to the store leading an unbelievably aged Indian woman by the hand. It was this Indian woman, sightless and illiterate, yet possessing such a knowledge of the wilderness as few, if any, white men have, who was to tell me of Meldrum Creek as it was before ever a white man laid eyes upon the watershed, and urge me to go to the creek with Lillian and give it back its beavers.

  I was working for an Englishman at the time, Becher by name, who had crossed the ocean some fifteen years before I was born to seek his fortune trading cheap trinkets to the northern Indians in return for costly furs. He stood six feet two in his stockinged feet and was a little the wrong side of sixty when I went to work for him. But despite the load of years he carried on his broad shoulders, his powerfully muscled frame wore little spare flesh, if any. A well-groomed moustache hid his upper lip, and when I first laid eyes upon him I thought that surely here was a man who only yesterday had stepped out of a guard’s uniform.

  Becher owned a sizable stopping house and trading post at Riske Creek, its hodgepodge of log buildings straddling the one and only government-maintained road to serve all the vast Chilcotin Plateau. Riske Creek was a broiling stream that headed into the deep heart of the wilderness some thirty miles north of the trading post, and its waters too emptied into the Fraser River.

  Among other chores at the trading post, I looked after the livery barn and clerked back of the counter when the Englishman had other matters to attend to. Across the plank counter I received a primary education in the fur trade. During late fall and winter, Indians from the nearby reservation brought in their coyote pelts and exchanged them for flour, tea, tobacco, calico and other trade goods. Occasionally a handful of muskrat pelts was hauled from a gunny sack and laid upon the counter, but seldom more than a dozen at a time. There were few muskrats left in creek or pond when I first dabbled in the fur trade.

  Once in a remote while a sleek dark mink skin was held up to my eyes. “How much you give this kind?” its dusky owner would ask. And the price the trader told me to pay for mink pelts was never in cash, ever in trade. There was sense in this method of transacting business, too, for if the Indians received cash for their furs every penny of it was sure to be exchanged for trade goods. Money was of no use to an Indian unless he could immediately spend it.

  England was only two years behind me when I went to work for the trader. Even the ripe old age of nineteen has advantages all its own, particularly the ability to shed one garment, hastily step into another and become perfectly attuned to its fit. I took to the sparsely settled outlands of interior British Columbia as the sunflower takes to the sun. The hedgerows and brooks of England had always attracted far more of my attention than the wearisome matters of algebra and Latin that an equally weary schoolmaster tried to coax into my unreceptive head at Northampton Grammar School. Northampton was a manufacturing town in the Midlands of England. At fourteen years of age I was already owner of, and intimately acquainted with, the doubtful mechanism of an ancient muzzle-loading shotgun that was as likely to knock me flat on my back as the rabbit or hare at which I aimed.

  But I didn’t mind that. The hunting of rabbits and hares, plus occasional cock pheasants thrown in, soon became my real schooling grounds, the only ones I wanted, the only ones where I could learn anything.

  If my father had had his way about things, he would have made a lawyer of me. Indeed, he had in 1919 articled me to a prominent firm of Northampton solicitors, and for twelve months anyway I had wasted my time, his money and the total patience of the two partners in the practice as I applied a fractional part of my mind to the matters of conveyancing, mortgages, divorce and bastardy cases.

  But even when sitting in Borough Police Court listening to counsel for the plaintiff eloquently trying to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant was indeed the father of a child born out of wedlock, my mind was searching for some legitimate excuse whereby I could get out in the open fields, or merely tramp the hedgerows.

  One morning in mid-May of 1920 my father addressed me in his roomy office. The manufacture of boots and shoes was Northampton’s basic industry, and my father was managing director of a company that supplied the machines used in making the footwear.

  I perched myself on a stuffed leather chair opposite his own and sat there very straight and still. My father studied me silently for a few moments.

  “Tim Kingston and I were talking about you the other day,” he stated, a trifle too casually. He seemed somewhat uncomfortable and unhappy. I sat very still in the chair. Williams and Kingston was the firm of solicitors with whom I was
articled. “He informed me,” Father went on, “that in his opinion it’s a complete silly waste of time for you to continue with your law studies. You simply lack all interest in the profession.”

  I felt like crying out in exasperation, “Bastardy cases!” but kept my mouth tightly closed. My father had spent quite a sum of money in trying to make a lawyer of me, and it was hardly his fault that I had little appetite for the profession.

  “You could, of course, come here,” Father went on, but without much zest in his voice. “But I don’t think you’d like this business either.”

  I knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t. I had two older brothers in the business, but the manufacture of machinery held no enticement for me.

  After a moment’s pause Father mused, “There’s your cousin Harry Marriott over in Canada. He went out in 1912, learned the ranching business and now has cattle of his own.”

  I suddenly came to life. Leaning forward with interest, I placed both elbows firmly on the desk, cupped my chin in my hands and asked, “Harry Marriott is out in British Columbia, isn’t he?” I leaned still farther over the desk. Although I knew little or nothing of Canada’s westernmost province, I had read in school with keen interest of Mackenzie’s overland journey to the Pacific and Simon Fraser’s perilous descent of the river that now bears his name.

  Sensing my sudden interest, Father struck quickly. He nodded, “He’s at Big Bar Lake, Clinton, British Columbia. You’d get plenty of shooting out there. Fishing too. There’s capital deer hunting around his properties. Bear too, I believe. And trout in the brook that flows by his door. And of course you’d learn to ranch and perhaps in four or five years’ time—” He broke off, thoughtfully closed one eye (Father ever had one eye on finance), then quickly opening it concluded, “It would have cost more than a guinea or two to set you up in a law practice. Maybe the price of a ranch and small herd of cattle out there wouldn’t come too high if the investment was warranted.”