Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  One evening in early August, nine Canada geese winged low over the cabin, heading upstream. Watching them, I saw them set their wings and a few seconds later I heard the thrash of their wings as they braked down on the water.

  “They’re down in our first dam,” I decided. “Let’s go see if we can spot them.”

  In single file we trooped up the creek. Nearing the dam we went down on hands and knees, and cautiously peered over the top. The geese were fifteen yards away, splashing the water and punctuating each splash with a subdued honk. The geese themselves were no novelty at all. What was a novelty was the fact that not for a half-century or more had Canada geese been able to wet their breasts on that marsh. Our wastelands were beginning to produce.

  Chapter 11

  Crack! Crack! Crack! Faint and far off though the shots were, the message they bore compelled me to stiffen in the saddle, jerk the chestnut to a stop and stare anxiously into the north—that’s where the reports had come from, somewhere off to the north.

  “Rifle fire!” I muttered uneasily. “Those three shots came from a 30-30 carbine.” As their echo rolled away, Lillian and I gazed questioningly and maybe a little fearfully at one another. No doubt they’d been fired at a moose or a deer, but who would be out on our trapline this early in the spring, hunting meat for the camps?

  The morning sun was still riding the treetops. The young timber grass had a sad and forlorn look about it, wilted as it was by the overnight frost, but within a half-hour the rising sun would bring each blade to life. A robin trilled reveille from the top of an old snag, and a half-dozen cock willow grouse strutted onto their logs and began drumming love lyrics to the nearby hens.

  A moment ago I was relaxed in the saddle, ears keenly tuned to the natural sounds of the everlasting forest, eyes penetrating the timber ahead for a glimpse of some startled buck—but now the sound of those rapidly fired shots was like a needle pricking my skin, giving birth within me to a sharp pang of consternation.

  “Indians!” I jerked out. “But they wouldn’t come this far from their reservation just to hunt meat. They’re out after fur!”

  In theory it’s as simple as ABC. You have a hundred and fifty thousand acres of wilderness, ninety-eight percent of which will never—either today or tomorrow or one hundred years from now—be scratched by the share of a plow, since its soil is so stony and barren it is incapable of producing any other crop but the shrubbery and grasses and twisted scrubby timber that God put there in the beginning; one hundred and fifty thousand acres, at which man, in his wide search for new lands to plow and cultivate, took one disinterested glance and then passed on. Its creeks and its lakes and its forests did contain wealth of a sort, but it was a wealth that was soon spent. The name of that wealth was wildlife.

  But in theory it seems simple. Since all life is conceived at water’s edge, you begin by conserving the water in order to establish an environment necessary to the production of almost any wildlife population. That’s how we saw it from the start. What others before had torn down, perhaps we might rebuild. It was that simple. But cluttering the orderly path of Theory are the bothersome blowdowns of Fact. It was one thing for us to provide habitat for and conserve a wildlife crop until sheer preponderance of numbers warranted a sensible harvesting of the crop, but another altogether to prevent others stepping in to reap what our efforts had sown.

  If under the game regulations of British Columbia it is unlawful for anyone to trap or otherwise take fur-bearers beyond the confines of his own registered trapline, enforcement of that edict is a different matter indeed, especially so in a land where a single game warden must bleakly try to enforce game regulations over an area such as the Chilcotin Plateau, some two hundred miles from east to west, a hundred-odd from north to south.

  And the whole added up to a seemingly limitless wilderness through which one could travel for week after endless week with but dim prospects of bidding a fellow being “good day,” pathed mostly by only the game trails. In a land such as this most any written game regulation was one easily broken.

  It is a simple matter to prove ownership of a cow or horse with a registered brand upon its hide, but a sheer impossibility to do so with fur-bearing animals that cannot be branded in the first place and so become the lawful property of the first trapper to tack their pelt to a stretcher board. The game warden did his best, but the odds against his ever catching an offender in the act of stealing—or poaching—furs was a million to one. And the poaching of furs, where furs were there to be poached, was a profitable occupation. We were forced to the decision that from now on, within the confines of our own registered trapline, we ourselves must make our own game regulations and enforce them as God saw fit to direct us.

  We expected trouble from our Indian neighbours—to start with, anyway. For that pinprick upon a map of the Chilcotin that might indicate the whereabouts of our trapline is flanked by three Indian reservations: Aniham to the west, Soda Creek to the north and Riske Creek to the south. The Indians of these reservations were accustomed to wandering far and wide from their own barren traplines to other parts where furs might be more plentiful. Perhaps they had a plausible excuse for doing so. Theirs was the right to trap and hunt at will long before they were moved onto reservations. Game was their only road to survival, and if that road were denied them, they and their kind must vanish from the face of the earth.

  The Indians were almost totally illiterate. They had their own names for the valleys, mountains and watersheds, but such names often differed from those printed upon the white man’s maps of the Chilcotin. Each Indian family in a reservation had its own individual trapline and well they knew its boundaries. They were not quite so familiar with those of a white man’s trapline.

  For those first half-dozen years on our trapline, in early spring anyway, we assumed the habits if not the hue of the Indians themselves. As soon as the snow was gone we bade a temporary “so long” to our cabin and began patrolling the watershed, reasoning that here was a far more efficient method of protecting our slowly increasing stock of fur than by wishfully expecting any game warden to do it for us. That God helps those who help themselves was good enough for us.

  I led the way, trailing along behind me the pack horse that toted much of our worldly belongings. Lillian followed in my tracks on an old pot-bellied mare so good-natured and satisfied with life in general that she cared not a jot for the additional burden—Veasy—who rode behind on her rump. And at close of day, to the symphony of drake mallards grumbling to one another in the bulrushes, or Canada geese talking overhead, we pitched our tiny tent at the edge of some unnamed lake and while Lillian got the meal and laid a mattress of fir boughs, I began circling the water, looking for tracks that rightly shouldn’t be there. Or if the sun went down on a field of gold we did not bother with the formality of stretching tent. Instead we spread our bedding beneath the branches of some friendly tree and fell asleep with the pitchy tang of the needles pungent in our nostrils.

  The sun heaved higher, the robin was out of breath, and each blade of timber grass had long since sprung to life. In single file we neck reined our horses through the timber, heading due south. Later I turned into the west, then north, making a wide circle, eyes to the ground. Lillian and I seldom had anything to say to each other when riding thus through the woods. Talk was something best kept for the campfire, when the chores of the day were over and we could stretch out by the coals and relax. Prolonged silence when in the saddle was becoming habit with Veasy too, for the young quickly learn to mimic the habits of their elders, good or bad as the case may be. This morning, sensing that something important was afoot, he held a still tongue even when a deer jumped up and bounced off in weaving flight.

  The task of locating the whereabouts of one, two or possibly more Indian hunters in such limitless tract of forest might at first consideration seem as hopeless as finding a minnow in the ocean. But it wasn’t quite that hopeless. The Chilcotin Indians never travelled afoot. Wherever t
hey went their horses went too. And horses leave their sign behind them. And that’s why my eyes never left the ground. Maybe if I stared at it long enough I’d be rewarded by cutting sign.

  I’d just turned to the south again, and was following a game trail, when I hauled in sharply on the lines and breathed a tense “Whoa.” I leaned out of the saddle, eyes to the ground. Then slowly straightening, I glanced at Lillian and inclined my head. “Horse tracks. They cut the trail right here, and they seem to be heading south. Two of the horses are shod, the others barefoot. I reckon there are four riders altogether.”

  Lillian drew up alongside me. Veasy’s tongue suddenly came to life. “Poachers?” he piped up.

  I said, “They’re not government surveyors.”

  The tracks of the four horses did not follow the game trail as loose horses might, but momentarily cut it at that single spot. A born tracker himself, the Chilcotin Indian is too shrewd to follow the path of a game trail when abroad over the traplines, intent on poaching fur.

  Turning with the tracks, eyes on the crushed grass stems, I urged the chestnut slowly under the trees. For the next couple of miles my eyes never deviated from their fix on the ground ahead. Then, abruptly halting the horse, I shot a glance back over my shoulder and said crisply, “At Rawhide Lake, that’s where we’ll haul up to them. They’re out after muskrats.”

  It was the spring of 1934. On the creek itself a half-dozen minor saucers had again been dammed and reflooded. As soon as a marsh overflowed, life, furred and feathered, came back to it. But we’d also dammed some of the landlocked lakes, and Rawhide was one. We ourselves gave it the name on finding a scrap of rawhide at an old Indian camping ground close to the shoreline. In the summer of 1932 we repaired an old beaver dam at the outlet of the lake and by thus holding back the spring freshets of snow water that drained away from the lake to lose themselves in the gravelly soil beyond, we succeeded in raising its level to a point where the dry marsh around it lay under eighteen inches of water. Now the lake was beginning to produce a crop of muskrats, but a night or two of indiscriminate trapping could quickly destroy much of the foundation of breeding stock that we had been almost two years in establishing.

  There was no need now to bother about any tracks. I was certain the horses were being reined toward the lake, and there was a huge impatience in me to get there ourselves as quickly as possible. I booted the chestnut into a trot, then a gallop. The nose of the pot-bellied mare was at Mr. Binks’s tail, Lillian crouched forward on its withers, face almost touching the mane. She’d been wearing an old straw hat when last I looked back at her, but now the hat was gone, and the wind was playing with her hair as if it wanted to carry it off too.

  “Where’s your hat?” I shouted back at her.

  “Don’t ask silly questions.” Lillian’s face lifted long enough to toss that at me, then went back to the mane.

  The horses plowed through thickets of second-growth, cleared windfalls without breaking stride, responded instantly to pressure of bridle line against neck as we piloted them through the rocks. And so we came to Rawhide Lake.

  There, all seemed as innocent as innocence could possibly be. Surely there was no one but ourselves within miles and miles of the lake. But fifty yards back from the shoreline, in a grove of young aspen, were horse droppings, and trampled ground where the horses had been tied to trees. Moving away from the aspens we hitched our own horses well out of sight among the jack pine. Leaving Lillian and Veasy squatting at timber’s edge where they could see without being seen, I began circling the lake, knee-deep in water. Now and then I splashed out through the bulrushes and picked up a trap. Occasionally the limp body of a muskrat dangled at the end of the chain. The Indians had set thirty-six traps in Rawhide Lake, and eleven of them held muskrats.

  Yet there was neither dismay nor anger in me when I dumped the traps at Lillian’s feet and took their catch from their jaws. This was all part of the game, and if we couldn’t play it through we had no business starting.

  Though five of the muskrats were females, heavy bellied with young, I felt no rancour toward the Indians responsible for their destruction. Any more than I would hold a grudge against a little child who climbs up on a stool and helps himself to the cookies. In fact, I smiled as I dropped down at Lillian’s side. “Bimeby I t’ink we see a leetle fun,” I said, aping the pidgin talk of the Indians themselves.

  For a half-hour or more we lay flat on our stomachs under the trees, chins in our hands, not a word to say to one another. Then I came up on my elbows. Out of the timber came a coyote, running hard, tail stiffened. It stopped for a split second at timber’s edge and glanced back over its shoulders. Then, wheeling sharply right, it entered a copse of willow, not to be seen again.

  Carefully I hoisted to one knee. “They’re coming now,” I said in muted tones.

  The four of them came noiselessly out of the woods a little down lake from us. They reined their horses into the aspens and there tied them up. Then they split into pairs, two going around the lake clockwise, two counterclockwise. At that time, three dozen No. 1 traps, the size used for the trapping of muskrats, would cost about fourteen dollars at any trading post. Those I had picked up had seen little use, which indicated that the Indians had but recently purchased them. To me it seemed foolish for the Indians to wade all around the lake when on finding their first few sets gone they must surely realize that someone else was there ahead of them. But circle the lake they did, completely, then they joined forces and after a moment or two of consultation they came around the water and hurried toward the horses. But before they reached the aspens I was standing there, between the trees and their ponies.

  They dragged to a halt a few yards away from me, eyes on the ground, soggy moccasins nervously scuffing the dirt. There was neither hostility nor fear in their faces, just an indifferent apathy. They had been caught red-handed in the act of poaching furs and, like a coyote caught stealing the bait from a trap, were now resigned to whatever the consequences might be.

  Two of the Indians were middle-aged, the others not yet out of their teens. All wore faded blue denim overalls and threadbare flannel shirts. Their caps were “store” caps, ill-fitting and shoddy. Only their buckskin footwear bore any resemblance to the clothing their forebears had worn before cloth and button supplanted skins and sinew. The moccasins came halfway up their legs and were decorated with multicoloured beads. Both eyes of one of the youngsters were disfigured by a cataract of sorts, and I guessed that he’d be stone blind before reaching middle age unless the cataract was removed. Which of course it wouldn’t be.

  Holding Veasy by the hand, Lillian too moved away from the timber and was there by my side when I broke the awkward silence. “What place your home stop?” I mildly inquired of one of the older Indians.

  After a strained silence the Indian falteringly replied, “Tingley Creek.”

  “He belongs to the Alexandria reservation,” I thought.

  My eyes flicked across to the other. “And you?”

  Without looking up from the ground: “Pelican Lake,” he informed me. Pelican Lake lay forty miles west of the western boundary of our own trapline.

  I then scrutinized the two lads, who restlessly shifted from one foot to another as if not quite sure which was the safest to rest upon. Suddenly I asked. “Young feller, you ever see beaver?”

  There was no movement of the lips, just a shake of the head. So turning to one of the oldsters, I went on, “Maybe one of you fellows see beaver some time?”

  This brought a stony silence from the one, a jumble of words from the other. They poured out of his mouth like chatter from a magpie. “Me just leetle boy when one tam’ my father find where one beaver stop in Chilcotin river. He set trap for that beaver and bimeby kill ’um. Then he take skin to store and make lots good trade, and we all eat beaver meat and he good meat too. That one only beaver me ever see.”

  I looked at Lillian. She was looking at me. And then I knew that her thoughts were my
thoughts too.

  Before us stood four Chilcotin Indians whose ancestors had known the land when its watersheds teemed with beavers, yet only one had seen a beaver himself and that was perhaps all of thirty years ago.

  “Why,” I suddenly wanted to know, but of no particular one, “you not stop your own trapline instead of coming to steal fur from me?”

  A quick reply of “No damn fur stop” was the reply I sort of expected. “No damn fur stop,” I echoed softly. “No, it was all trapped out before any of us were born.”

  My eyes kept shifting from one brown face to another. Veasy stared boldly at all four. Lillian was blankly watching the lake. A drake mallard rich in the plumage of the mating season paddled in off the water and began preening his feathers. From deep within the bulrushes came the subdued quacking of his mate.

  My tongue was groping for words, the kind I had to use. Here was no occasion for long-winded rhetoric. What I must say must be brief and something the Indians would understand. A great deal hinged on what I said and did in the next minute or two. Indians, not only these four, but Indians in general, could cause us a great deal of harm unless we handled this situation right. Not bodily harm, for where their dealing with the whites were concerned the Chilcotin Indians were passive enough, and never went on the warpath. But harm to the fur-bearers we were trying so hard to conserve, harm to almost everything that had brought us to the creek in the first place. And suddenly my mind cleared and I knew just what I must say, just what I must do.