Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  “Why don’t you put the whole project before Mr. Moon?” she suggested, after the opinion of Water Rights had been digested and forgotten.

  “Charlie Moon?” I lifted my eyebrows. “Darn it, yes, Charlie Moon.” Then, heaving up from the chair and walking to the door and back again: “Why not?”

  Charles Moon was the largest landowner in the valley. His Meldrum Creek ranch was only one of a half-dozen other such holdings scattered about the cattle ranges of the lower Chilcotin. He walked with a slight stoop as men nearing the three score years and ten mark are likely to walk, especially when fifty of those years have been given to hard but honest labour. An Englishman by birth, Moon came to the Chilcotin near the close of the nineteenth century and went to work for one of the cattle outfits of the day for a wage of thirty dollars a month and board. From such modest beginnings he lived to carve himself a miniature cattle empire that in 1931 ran some three thousand head of Hereford cattle, and had thousands of acres of deeded land under fence. This achievement was not a matter of luck at all, but of hard work, sound reasoning and good management.

  His Meldrum Creek irrigation licence had first right on the creek for water and until its requirements were met all others must go without. It was to the rancher Moon, then, that we now turned for the encouragement that the Water Rights Branch would not or could not give us.

  And with vastly different results. “Anything you do up there,” wrote Moon in reply, “can’t make matters much worse down here. I always have believed that the extermination of Meldrum Creek’s beavers is largely responsible for the fix we are all in now. As far as I am concerned, go ahead with what you have in mind and let’s see how it works.”

  This reply was all we wanted at the moment. If the largest landowner on the creek gave our plan his blessing, what more could we ask? Nothing, save that perhaps the Almighty Himself would send us a winter of heavy snows or a summer or two of prolonged rainfall. We were to get all the snows we wanted before many more winters had gone. In the meantime, we had to live. We had to live off the woods, and if they hadn’t much to offer they were generous with what they had. Improvisation became the keynote of existence itself. Nothing was wasted that could be put to any use. Deer were not only to furnish us meat, but clothing too of sorts. The hide of the buck I’d shot at the water hole was still hanging on the limb of the tree where I’d thrown it, well out of reach of the coyotes. It was a bedraggled and smelly hide, too, what with the blood caked on it and the maggots crawling over it. But the maggots wouldn’t hurt it any; there’d been precious little meat left on the hide when Lillian and I got through skinning the deer out. Anyway, not enough to keep a maggot healthy.

  Lillian had been eyeing the hide for quite some time, in a contemplative sort of a way, before reminding me that “Veasy needs some footwear.” And guessing that there was more to come I said nothing, just studying her face.

  It wasn’t slow in coming. “I’m going to try my hand at tanning the deer hide.” The way Lillian said it, tanning a deer hide was simple. “And make Veasy a pair of buckskin moccasins.” That sounded simple too.

  Skeptically I asked, “You ever tan a deer hide before?” guessing that she hadn’t.

  “No, but I’ve watched Lala tan them.”

  “Oh yes, Lala.” And the way I said that fetched a glint of stubbornness into her eyes and thrust her jaw out a little.

  I half closed my eyes and ruminated, “Lala set out snares for blue grouse and caught them too. And she dug up wild sunflower roots with a sharpened stick, and roasted them in the campfire ashes like we’d roast a spud.” An eyelid lifted. “Think you could snare a blue grouse?”

  “Could if I had to,” she snapped.

  So I called a truce by saying, “Of course you could, but there aren’t any blue grouse around here. Just willow grouse and fool hens. And I can shoot them with the .22 rifle.”

  “Lala never had a .22, all she had was snares.” After firing that one at me, Lillian softened a little and smiled. And to keep things that way, I said, “We’ll start tanning the hide tomorrow, just like Lala tanned them. But you’ll have to tell me what to do because I wasn’t around when Lala was fixing buckskin.”

  It wasn’t so hard after all. First we soaked the hide in a tub of lukewarm water for all of three days, then threw it over a peeled cottonwood pole and, with a drawknife made from the blade of an old scythe, scraped it of all hair, flesh and grime until it was almost snow-white. Following this, the hide was soaked for another two days in a solution of heavy soapsuds, and then wrung dry. Now the skin was ready for the greasing. Lala had always used the rendered grease of a bear for this, but we had no bear grease just then and had to use precious lard instead.

  After another immersion in soapsuds to rid it of all grease, the skin was now ready to be stretched. Lacing the hide to a stout pole frame and taking up the slack in the laces until they were as taut as a fiddle string, we next devoted an entire day to probing the skin methodically with a flat, U-shaped, bevel-edged stone inserted and bound into a cleft stick. Following this mauling, the hide was now as soft and as pliable as the finest velvet, and ready for the final operation of smoking. To obtain just the right amount and quality of smoke, I dug a shallow pit, kindled a fire in it and then smothered the fire with fir cones. Over the pit we built a teepeelike structure, and wrapped the skin around its poles and covered it with saddle blankets. After several hours of smoking, the hide took on a golden brownish hue and was ready for processing into gloves, moccasins or a coat.

  It took Lillian a couple of days to make Veasy his moccasins, but they were a success from the very first stitch. “My turn next,” I said. “When are you going to make me a pair?” Lillian took careful appraisal of what was left of the buckskin.

  “I want to make him a pair of gauntlet gloves too,” she explained, “and after that there won’t be enough left to make any more moccasins.”

  “I’ll go shoot another buck.”

  Her eyes went to her stone meat crocks and she shook her head. “There’s plenty of meat left in them yet. We don’t need a buck now. Wait a while until we really need meat. Then you can hunt a deer, and I’ll fix you some moccasins too.”

  It was Lillian’s scheming mind that found profitable use for the squawfish. The three of us were sitting at the shore of the lake, watching them turn flip-flops in the water. It seemed as though there was a squaw-fish around for every square foot of space on top of the water.

  ‘”We must grow all our own vegetables,” she suddenly decided.

  “Vegetables?” I scuffed the ground with the toe of my boot. “In that, and without fertilizer? Maybe it will grow hay of sorts, but vegetables, never.”

  “I’m going to have a flower garden too,” she blithely rattled on. “No home is home without a flower garden.”

  At that I burst out laughing. “Sure, we’ll have roses and orchids, and gladiolas and every other whatnot. See here, apart from the matter of altitude—we’re somewhere around the thirty-five-hundred-foot level here, and it freezes almost every month of the year—this soil is so shallow that I doubt you’d even grow a spud in it; at least, it wouldn’t be much bigger than a marble if you did.”

  She stamped her foot. “We’ll grow potatoes and good ones too. And carrots and beets, and peas and cabbages. Don’t you see, it’s just a matter of fertilizer.”

  “Just a matter of fertilizer,” I mimicked. Then went on: “In the first place, we’re a long way from any commercial fertilizer, and in the second, it would come sort of high for our pocketbook even if there was any around to be bought. Of course there’ll be some horse manure from the barn next spring, but—”

  “Not nearly enough,” she cut in. Then, pointing to the lake: “There’s all the fertilizer we need, and the very best too.”

  “Lake—fertilizer?” It all sounded crazy to me.

  But Lillian just nodded. “The squawfish.”

  “Squawfish!” It wasn’t at all crazy now. “Well I’ll be dam
ned. Who’d ever think of that. Maybe you’ve got something.”

  Lillian said nothing for a moment, but just sat there, as if savouring her triumph. But after a bit she went on, “In the spring, when they leave the lake and begin moving up the creek to spawn, we can dip them out by the sackful. And spread them in layers on the ground and plow them under. Now can we grow ’most all of our own vegetables?”

  I’d never thought of the squawfish as a possible source of fertilizer. Lillian had already tried her hand at frying them, but the experiment was a dismal culinary failure. There was nothing wrong about their taste, but they had so many little barb-shaped bones you’d starve to death separating bone from meat.

  The following spring Lillian made a large dip net out of twine, and when the squawfish began moving up the creek to spawn we built rock dams in the channel, leaving a gap in their middle. Lillian held the net in the gap while Veasy and I went upstream a short distance, then waded down toward her, beating the water with sticks, shouting, falling over the slippery rocks, but forever driving swarms of fish into the mouth of the net. When piles of them flapped and squirmed on the bank, we loaded them into gunny sacks, toted them on our backs to the quarter-acre of ground already cleared of its brush, plastered it with fish and then plowed them under. Though that patch of ground stank to high heaven for three weeks after the sowing of the seed, by the time the smell was gone, young plants began thrusting up through the warm, gravelly soil, and by midsummer we had a vegetable garden that might have evoked the admiration and envy of any professional market gardener.

  Lala never had mentioned the squawfish, perhaps because in her day on the creek there had been few if any there. But then there were plenty of trout. She explained to me how the Indians laid their gill nets across the narrow waist of Meldrum Lake and hauled them in next morning heavy with plump, red-fleshed trout. At a later date, when exploring the shoreline ourselves looking for mink or other signs, we discovered the water-logged remains of many a pole raft used by those earlier Indians in their fishing. But all that lay with the heyday of the beaver, when every lake was kept at a constant level, and a swift cold stream of water flowed over the dams all summer, ensuring a continuous supply of well-oxygenated water from source to mouth of the creek.

  With the extermination of the beavers and subsequent loss of precious water impounded by their dams, the creek became shallow, and in the summer much of its bed was dry. There was no longer a clear, cool flow moving between its banks, and without that flow, no trout could survive for very long. And as the trout perished, squawfish began multiplying, no doubt to fill a vacuum that was caused by the passing of the trout.

  One evening, when squatted upon a block of wood at the cabin door, turning such matters over in my mind, I absent-mindedly remarked to Lillian, “Think we’ll ever see the day when you and I will be able to sneak down to the creek, sink a baited hook into the water and catch us a mess of trout?”

  Lillian was brushing her hair, fixing it tidy-like for the night. Not until that chore was done to her complete satisfaction did she give me any reply. Then: “If the beavers come back, yes.” And there was something in her voice that made me glance sharply at her and say, “You really think there will be beavers here again, someday?”

  Her face was deadly serious as she retorted, “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

  Chapter 7

  It was noon of a hot cloudless day in late July. Veasy was a hundred yards from the cabin by a dead cottonwood, watching a woodpecker fly in and out of a hole in the tree, feeding grubs and other morsels to the fledglings in the nest. Suddenly he turned away from the tree and ran helter-skelter for the cabin. He reached the door, puffing and panting, eyes agape. Then, looking back over his shoulder, he panted, “Someone come.”

  A horse and rider emerged from the timber, hesitated a few seconds at the edge of the clearing, as if undecided whether to keep coming or turn back into the forest. I solved the problem for him by waving a hand and shouting, “Hello there!” And speaking low and soothingly to his horse, which reared up on its hind legs at the sudden sight of me, the rider neck reined the animal toward the cabin.

  Our visitor was a full-blooded Indian, one whom I didn’t remember ever seeing around Riske Creek. Later we found out that he belonged to the Aniham reservation, which lay a good many miles west of Meldrum Lake. He was wearing heavy mooseskin chaps and a buckskin coat with long fringes at the shoulders and sleeves. The coat was spotlessly clean except for a smear or two of blood on the right sleeve. And since the carcass of a freshly killed deer was tied behind the saddle, the blood no doubt had a legitimate excuse for being there. The Indian was short and blocky and his face betrayed nothing of what was taking place within his mind.

  Smiling a welcome, I pointed to a tree and said, “Pretty quick we eat. More better you tie your horse up and come eat too.”

  Then the Indian’s sphinx-like face relaxed in an easy grin.

  “T’ank you,” he grunted, coming down from the saddle.

  Our visitor didn’t seem to have very much to say for himself. When forced to converse in a primitive form of English, the true Chilcotin Indian is frugal with his words. Such little talk as did take place centred on game in one form or another.

  “Lots coyote tracks up in creek bottom,” I began in an effort to un-limber his tongue.

  “You betcha! Coyote him bugger to kill young duck and goose now no more water stop in creek.” Although the Indian lacked proper understanding of the word bugger, which the white man had introduced to his vocabulary, he guessed that it meant something bad.

  After a moment or two of deep contemplation the Indian asked, “How much you t’ink fur buyer pay one good coyote skin bimeby he get prime?”

  I grinned. “Fur buyer he cheat trapper to beat hell. S’pose one pale silky pelt worth ten dollars cash, fur buyer at store give you seven dollars’ worth trade goods for it.”

  It was the Indian’s turn to laugh now. “Ey ya! Fur buyer he bugger to cheat.”

  The deer on his saddle prompted me to ask, “You see much mowitch (deer) sign in timber where you ride?”

  He nodded. “Lots. Him up an’ down creek, try to find water. Fly give ’um hell now, and deer lie down in water with just his head stick out. That way fly can’t hurt him.”

  In discussing wildlife of any kind, even with an Indian, it is hard to avoid the word “water.” In summer water offers the mule deer their only means of escape from the persecution of the flies. There in the water of creek or lake the deer will lie for most of the day with just its nose and ears protruding above the surface. Not until shadows begin to lengthen and the cooling winds of night take over from the ardent heat of day will the deer leave water’s edge and return to the timber to feed.

  After filling his belly and belching, the Indian grunted a “T’ank you” to the tobacco and cigarette papers I shoved across the table, and rolled himself a smoke. Between long and thoughtful puffs at the cigarette there was more small talk of deer, moose and other meat animals of the forest. Meat was the prime essential of any Chilcotin Indian’s life. Money he could get along without for weeks at a time, but meat he and his family must have wherever they made an overnight camp. Consequently, little of anything else ever occupied their thoughts. We were slowly acquiring much of the Indians’ philosophy ourselves. It had its points at that.

  The Indian was in no hurry to go now that he’d got acquainted. After finishing his cigarette he went outside and squatted on a block of wood, firing quick glances at the cabin, the wagon, at me and at Lillian and Veasy. If deep within his mind he was wondering why we were here and what we were doing, he didn’t bother to ask.

  Finally he got up and said, “Me go my camp now.”

  The inquisitiveness of the white man now asserted itself. “Whereabouts your camp?” I asked with curiosity.

  With a jerk of the thumb into the north, he mumbled, “There.” And since “there” was surrounded by several hundred thousand acres of timber, musk
eg and pothole meadow, I was none the wiser for the question.

  But we couldn’t altogether shut ourselves off from the remainder of the world—that wouldn’t be fair to Veasy. He had to learn that there were other people in the world besides his mother and father. So once a month anyway I wrangled the work team from the pasture and hitched them to the wagon and we drove out to Riske Creek.

  These rare trips to the post office were events of huge delight to Veasy since they held certain promise of candy. It was a promise never denied him, even though its fulfillment did entail the serious economic matter of filching another precious two bits from the pocketbook. But youth must be served. Even the Indian children knew all about the large wooden candy buckets that the trader kept under the counter. Their method of making trade consisted of poking a finger into their mouths and banging a five- or ten-cent piece down on the counter. In winter, a weasel pelt was apt to suffice for the coinage.

  After attending to Veasy’s trade, and purchasing another pound of tea or a couple of tins of tobacco, I gave my attention to the mail. Any letters smacking of importance—there were few of these—I dealt with then and there, availing myself of the trader’s noisy typewriter to do so. Then, perched on the counter, I glanced through the papers. There was little of good cheer to be found there. The activities of an Austrian named Hitler seemed worthy of a little space in the large provincial dailies. But who in the hell was Hitler?

  “A house painter,” snorted Becher in reply. “Yes, sir, a goddam Austrian house painter who reckons he’s another Bismarck.”

  The trader had a radio in his office that, between prolonged fits of static, gave forth with some music or news commentaries. Possession of the radio made the trader a veritable prince of learning. Indians consulted him on whether it was a good hunting moon or a bad one. If a rancher was out nine yearling steers on the fall roundup, he sought advice from the trader as to their possible whereabouts. And a homesteader’s wife from up the crick a piece, who’d begat six sturdy sons in seven years of effort and was now bloated for the seventh time, consulted Becher as to whether this time it would be a girl or a boy. And the radio told all.