Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  I had to drop the neck yoke and fasten a chain to the doubletrees to pull the casualty off the right-of-way. After recoupling the horses I jumped back into the box and told Lillian, “There’s no sign of any cow track around.”

  “Maybe the wolves got the mother,” suggested Lillian with a sigh.

  “Could be.” I shook the lines and got the team moving again. When next we paused to give the horses their wind, I stated grimly, “There’ll be more than one moose dead in the woods before this snow has melted.”

  The watch that Lillian had given me for Christmas in 1931 still kept good time. I had wound it when leaving the cabin but hadn’t looked at it since. The very thought of peeling a mitt and feeling for the watch was an unpleasant one, and one quickly discarded. The matter of keeping the fingers warm was far more urgent than just knowing the time.

  As the sun went down, a patch or two of gray smeared the northern horizon. As near as I could reckon we’d now covered eight miles, in about the same number of hours. Icicles, twelve inches of them, hung from the noses of the horses. Their bodies were gray with sweat that had frozen to their hair almost as quickly as it came from the pores of their skin. Alongside the track stood a lone fir tree that had probably been a sturdy sapling when Columbus came to America. It had a girth of five feet, with limbs so stout that the snow on them scarcely bent them at all. As if sensing my own weariness, the team stopped alongside the tree and stood with drooping heads and heaving flanks, breaking their icicles against the neck yoke.

  “They’ve had it,” I reasoned aloud. “The team is beat.”

  Lillian pushed the blankets aside and peered around. “I’m that stiff I doubt that I ever will be able to walk again,” she said. For the past hour Veasy had been buried beneath layers of blankets and hay. Now, with a sudden heave, he came to sight again, complaining, “I’m hungry.”

  The boughs of the fir tree had broken much of the snowfall, and beneath them it was only a couple of feet deep. “It’s as good a place as any,” I said, “and a great deal better than some. Here’s our hotel. You and Veasy had better stay in the sleigh while I unhitch the horses.”

  I unhitched the team, blanketed them and fed them an armful of hay. There was no nearby lake or creek in which to cut a water hole, so for tonight anyway the horses would have to eat snow instead of drinking water.

  The horses attended to, I shovelled a space some ten feet by twelve beneath the tree. Now Lillian and Veasy were able to crawl down from the sleigh box without miring in snow. It was darkening, with no prospect of a moon to give us any light, so I decided against wasting time or energy on pitching the tent; instead we spread it out beneath the tree and dumped blankets and cooking utensils on top of it.

  Even in several feet of snow and at below-zero temperature, a camp without benefit of stove or tent can be made tolerably warm and comfortable if you know how. Inhospitable though the forest might seem to be in its frigid winter garb, the north woods hold an abundance of material that, with proper use, makes inhospitality thaw and a scowl become a smile.

  Quick action was the answer to the cold that knifed our bodies as soon as we forsook the shelter of the sleigh box. We’d fetched dry kindling wood along from the cabin to meet the needs of just such a situation as this, and in seconds a campfire was spitting and blazing. Now both Lillian and I stepped onto our snowshoes and, with me breaking track, plowed a trail to a nearby thicket of young fir. It took but a single slash of my axe to topple a tree, and after a half-dozen were felled Lillian gathered them up in a bundle and packed them over to the campfire. To Veasy belonged the chore of pushing their butts down into the snow so that they stood erect once more. In the wilderness, the offspring of the wild creatures are not the only youngsters who must learn to fend for themselves.

  In ten minutes’ time the camp was protected by an almost solid wall of the “Christmas” trees. Not only would the brush act as a windbreak, but it would also serve as a sort of reflector to the campfire within, throwing its heat back against the girth of the tree. And providing we had enough dry wood stacked within the windbreak to keep a fire on all night, our camp should stay reasonably warm no matter what the weather said outside.

  Leaving Lillian to her pots and pans, I axed down dry pines, chopped them into three-foot lengths and stacked them inside the windbreak. By that time moose steaks were done to a turn in the skillet, and a gallon of strong tea brewed in its pail by the coals. And so in Indian fashion, half kneeling, half sitting, we squatted by the fire and gave our attention to the food.

  Not only does travel in sub-zero temperatures give one a ferocious appetite, but too much of it at one time also numbs the body and mind. Squat down by a heated stove after being exposed to such weather all day and within seconds the head starts to loll, and within a minute or two you are asleep. Here, the campfire was our stove, the fir tree and wind-break our cabin. And primitive though the shelter was, no sooner had we eaten supper and washed the dishes than our senses were befuddled and our heads started to loll. And we burrowed deep into the bedding that Lillian had arranged on a mattress of fir boughs and within seconds were sleeping, utterly exhausted.

  It was only half light when I stoked the fire in the morning. Lillian stuck her head out of the blankets as I scooped up snow in a pail and placed it on the fire to melt. She coughed as the cold air bit her lungs. Wind bansheed through the treetops, and snow drove in against the windbreak.

  “Better stay covered up until I’ve got the coffeepot boiling,” I advised, shrugging into my sheepskin coat. It was a suggestion she wasn’t hesitant about accepting.

  I packed her a cup of coffee. “Snowing again,” I grumbled. “Damn the snow anyway. Wind is getting up, smack out of the north. Yesterday was bad enough, but today will be a real heller.”

  And a heller it certainly was. We broke camp with the daylight, snow stinging our faces. The horses balked a moment or two when the pull of the cold collars came against their shoulders, then snorting and prancing they took up the slack in the traces and the sleigh began to move.

  In between frequent pauses for rest, they hauled the outfit through another five miles of timber, and then the trees began thinning out. Dimly ahead loomed the drab monotony of a gently undulating stretch of prairie.

  “Island Lake Flats,” I grunted. I might have been announcing our arrival at the gates of hell itself.

  A pleasant enough spot in summer is Island Lake Flats. Blessed with an adequate supply of drinking water in the form of several landlocked lakes, the Flats are also dotted with minor stands of aspen and pine, which provide plenty of shade spots for livestock grazing them. In early fall thousands of ducks and hundreds of Canada geese come quacking and honking to the ponds, and prairie chicken crouch low in the grass when the threshing of wings above warns of the approach of hawk or owl hunting an easy meal. And even on the hottest August afternoon a breeze ruffles the tops of the grasses, now from east, now from west, or south or north, but cooling just the same.

  But in winter all is different. The ponds are cemented over by two or more feet of ice. The ducks and the geese have departed for points far to the south. The prairie chicken have fled to the deep woods; only the wind is left.

  Though there might not seem to be a breath of wind in the forests, out on the open flats it always blows. It stirs the snow, lifts it up and bears it along several hundred feet or yards before relaxing its grip and dumping it in some gully or gulch, until finally there is no gully or gulch, just the seemingly innocent snow.

  Out on the edge of the flats, the forest behind us, we braced ourselves to meet the onslaught of that wind. A scum of drifting snow careened across the prairie, cutting visibility to a scant fifty yards. The cold was deadly. There was no sign of any track, not even a boulder in sight to remind us where one had been. “Get going!” I shouted at the horses, who had suddenly started to flounder.

  “You’re driving them into a gulch!” cried Lillian.

  But the warning was a second too la
te. What with the frost on my eyelashes and the snow driving in against my face, I hadn’t noticed the gulch drifted over with snow. Neither had the horses, who sometimes have the knack of sensing, if not seeing, such traps.

  The team broke through the snow, went down on their bellies, then rolled easily over on their sides as if to inform me, “We’ve had enough of this.”

  “Have to unhitch now,” I mumbled, dreading the thought of getting out of the sleigh and wallowing around in the drift. “Must try and get the horses and doubletrees over to the other side and then pull the sleigh over on the end of the chain.” I began throwing blankets and other gear around. “Logging chain—where the devil is that logging chain?” I asked impatiently.

  “Here.” Lillian knew just where the chain was because she ever made it a habit to know the whereabouts of such sometimes vital things.

  “Good little woman.” I grinned. I took the chain, got down on the sleigh tongue and pulled the pin from the doubletrees. Then I crawled precariously along the tongue and dropped the neck yoke. And standing aside, waist-deep in snow, I sang out, “Get going there.”

  The horses raised up and lunged forward, and relieved of the lug of the sleigh they got across the gully. Halting them, I again fastened the chain to the sleigh tongue. Again I shouted, “Get going!” this time emphasizing the words with a crack of the whip. And the sleigh runners screamed, and Lillian and Veasy hung on to the sleigh box for dear life, and the horses heaved and grunted, and pulled with all that was in them. And then that gully was behind us with heaven only knows how many more ahead.

  We had got halfway across the Flats when the horses stopped dead in their tracks. “Get going there!” But it was no use. The team was at the point of utter exhaustion. They’d given us all they had, but it wasn’t quite enough. I looked stupidly at Lillian and she looked blankly at me. “What now?” Lillian beat me to the words by a breath.

  “Bareback, I guess,” I said glumly. “We’ll have to leave harness and sleigh here and try to get through to Riske Creek riding the horses bareback.” It wasn’t an enticing proposition, but it was the only choice we had.

  Suddenly Lillian stood up in the sleigh box. She stared southward with an intensity that watered her eyes. “It’s smoke,” she sang out. “I believe I can smell smoke.”

  I had one foot on the doubletrees, the other in the sleigh box.

  “Smoke!” I burst out. “Out here on these flats—in this? You’re crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she snapped. “It is smoke. Can’t you smell it?”

  Then I could smell it myself. Yet couldn’t believe my nostrils. Smoke, on Island Lake Flats—in this!

  “There’s a fire somewhere—” Lillian broke off and stood very stiff, staring ahead. “I can see it. It’s a campfire. It’s Indians!”

  I too stared hard into the south. Rubbing my eyes to make sure they weren’t fooling me, I gasped almost incredulously, “It is Indians!”

  Ahead of us, some four hundred yards away, was a campfire, and beside the fire a team and sleigh. A half-dozen figures were grouped about the sleigh, and my eyes gradually discerned something large and dark also close to the sleigh. “It’s a moose,” I guessed. “Someone has killed a moose.”

  I shook the lines and cracked the whip. “Get up out of there, horses. Tighten those traces, lift that sleigh! There’s company up ahead.” And as if understanding just what I said, the horses wallowed up out of the snow, lifted their tired heads and inched the sleigh forward.

  And Indians they all were. There was Redstone Johnny and his plump, giggling woman, Lizzie. There was old Azak, who squinted up at us through weakened eyes and muttered, “White man come.” And there was Eagle Lake Johnny, who derived his name from the large lake a hundred miles to the north, where he was born. And there were four scantily clad papooses who seemed totally oblivious to the sting of a cold north wind that fairly chilled our own warmly clad bodies to the very marrow of our bones. Indians from the Riske Creek reservation, all of them, and we were informed with much gusto that Redstone Johnny had shot the moose late yesterday evening, and today all had come back to haul the meat home. Redstone Johnny had often dropped in at our cabin to share a meal or a cup of tea with us, and tell of his woes—as Indians ever will if they can strike a sympathetic audience. Now the carcass of the moose was axed up into quarters, and all were standing about the fire, roasting huge slabs of the rib meat on spits stuck in the snow.

  No white man would ever hunt meat in weather such as we’d had for the last month. He’d live on straight beans before he’d get out and hunt in weather like that. Then again, white men usually killed enough game in fall to last all winter. But not the Indians. Living only for the present, they never thought or worried about the future. The menfolk were hunters born and could kill a moose or a deer in weather when a white man might tramp the woods for days without firing a shot. Once he cut fresh sign, the Indian stayed with that sign until he caught up to his quarry and shot it.

  “More better you get out of sleigh and eat,” Redstone Johnny now greeted us. Then, rolling with laughter, he asked, “Why in hell white man like you travel in this no good weather?”

  The fire was warm and the smell of roasting moose ribs drew saliva to my lips. “I’m crazy, Johnny,” I laughed back. “Crazy all same loon. S’pose me not crazy, me and my woman and kid never get out of cabin ’til spring come back again. More better s’pose white man all same bear: crawl down hole in fall and not come out until snow all gone.” And borrowing Redstone’s hunting knife, I carved three huge slabs of meat from the backstraps of the moose and set them on sticks before the fire to barbecue.

  Our Indian hosts had a ten-pound syrup can of scalding tea by the fire, and Redstone’s woman filled three tin cups and handed them to us. Never has tea tasted better, no matter what sort of a cup it was in.

  Heeling back by the fire, we bit into our steaks before they were properly cooked, inwardly thanking a kindly fate that had enabled Redstone to shoot his moose so close to the road. Shamelessly belching as the fresh meat digested in their bellies, the Indians loaded the quarters onto the sleigh. The four papooses burrowed down under a mass of rabbitskin robes, chuckling and jabbering away at one another in their own gutteral tongue. Redstone gathered up the lines, then fired a question at me. “White man want to go ahead?”

  “Not by a damn sight,” I returned. “Indian horses more better than mine. Mine he just about played out. More better you go ahead and I follow behind.” For the Indians would have to go past the trading post to get to their reservation three miles farther on.

  The broken track ahead of us put new life into the horses. No longer was the neck yoke pushing snow, and if the footing was poor, the horses managed to move steadily along at between two and three miles an hour. By sundown we reached the trading post.

  The Riske Creek Store and Post Office seethed with activity. A six-horse freight team had just pulled in with its load of trade goods destined for the trading posts farther upcountry. “Goddamnest trip I ever done made since I’ve been freighting on the roads,” grumbled the teamster, as I led our team into the barn and found a couple of vacant stalls. “Nary a sign of a track back on Becher’s Prairie, everything drifted over plumb to hell. Took the horses ten hours to pull the load in from the Bristol place where I stabled them last night.” The Bristol place was another roadside stopping place ten miles east of Riske Creek.

  “You had better luck than we did at that,” I consoled him, stripping the harness from the horses. “We parked under a fir tree for the night.” The freight-team skinner was tall and lean, and his eyes were red and swollen from staring too long at the snow.

  “The hell you don’t say!” he ejaculated. “Your woman and kid too?” And when I nodded, he put a finger against his nose, cleared a nostril and said, “That reminds me of the winter of ’21–’22 when I was freighting a four-horse load of grain for one of the ranchers upcountry a piece. Well, sir, you know that piece of road between
Harper’s Meadow and Hance’s Timber? Talk about drifts! Never have seen the likes of such drifts neither afore nor since. And damn me if one of the wheelers didn’t go and cork itself and go lame on me. And there I was in the drift with close to four tons of grain, and it colder than billy be damned and—”

  And he was still stuck in the drift when I left the barn and headed for the sitting room of the trading post.

  An itinerant Roman Catholic priest, bearded, side-whiskered and fat, shook hands with Lillian and me as we dragged our chairs alongside the heater stove. Known throughout the Chilcotin as Father Thomas, and by no other name, the priest concerned himself mostly with the spiritual affairs of his Indian flocks. Here in the sitting room, all conversation pivoted on a single subject: the weather. A cowboy trying to warm his feet at the stove said, “Jesus Christ! My feet ain’t been thawed out for a month.” A wild-horse chaser, praying for a warm-up in the weather so’s he could pitch camp over at Bald Mountain and start hunting up horse sign, chipped in with, “Goddamn country sure is going to hell.” He was short and stooped, and his legs were slightly bowed from too much gripping of saddle leather. Deafening his ears to the blasphemous grumblings of the cowboy and horse chaser, the priest told Lillian and me of his own troubles. He’d been due at one of the reservations farther west a week ago, but the severe cold of the last several days had kept him holed up at Riske Creek, awaiting the arrival of the Indian-driven team and sleigh that was long overdue to haul him on another leg of his journey. Maybe the Indian teamster had arrived at the conclusion that his soul would be none the dirtier if he kept his team in the barn until more favourable weather came along.