Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Moleese was worth every cent of his hire. Sparing of words as so many Indians are, breath that might have been frittered away in small talk was given to loading the barrow. The work proceeded swiftly and efficiently. Six miles downcreek from the cabin were two of the largest marshes on the watershed, one containing some two hundred acres, the other slightly less. In two weeks the gates in the two dams were closed, and slowly the water in front of the first began spreading out over the marsh and creeping higher up the face of the dam. How very different now were aquatic conditions on the watershed than those that had existed when Lillian and I hesitantly began work on our very first dam. Then the creek was so anemic it seemed that only a miracle could succeed in restoring its health and vigour. Perhaps miracles had happened, and the winter of the heavy snows was one. Anyway, now we had water to work with, plenty of water, and not a drop of it was permitted to make its escape to the river. Our recently constructed dams upon these two larger marshes stopped it in its tracks, forcing it to drop its plunder of precious topsoil that was being carried toward the river and dump it on the marshes, where soon it would enrich the bottoms of the lakes, thus making sure all forms of life that moved into them to breed and multiply would always have plenty of food. So, with the help of the hunchback Indian Moleese, the freshets of 1935 were harnessed and put to use.

  In the meantime, and for five hours every day excepting Saturdays and Sundays, the cabin became a classroom. The pencils, scribblers and textbooks travelled from Riske Creek to Meldrum Lake on the back of a pack horse. Promptly at 9:30 A.M. Veasy sat down at the table and applied his mind to the work Lillian set before him. Promptly at 11:30 he shoved away from the table and ran outdoors to stretch his legs and his lungs. Sharp at 1 P.M. he was again seated at the table, there to remain until 3:30, when Lillian sang out, “School’s out for today.”

  One morning around 10 A.M., shortly after “school” had opened, I walked into the cabin to scrounge a cup of coffee. Veasy glanced up at me as I entered and then, without a word, his eyes went back to his books. I poked Lillian playfully in the ribs and told her, “You missed your true vocation in life. You should have been a school marm.”

  Lillian replied with a quick laugh, “I could teach you a thing or two,” and she meant it.

  Save for the patch of land we’d cleared for the vegetable garden, the three- or four-acre flat around the cabin was a jungle of aspen and willow. A few hundred feet upstream from the flat was the beaver meadow that so far had supplied us with winter feed for the horses. The remnant of the beaver dam was four hundred and sixty feet long, and shaped something like a horseshoe, as beaver dams often are. Either end of the dam tied into a steepish bank that would, I judged, provide an ample source of easy-shovelling dirt and gravel. If for the moment we hadn’t the vaguest idea as to how or when a pair or two of beavers could be brought back to the creek, never for a moment did we waver from the firm conviction that someday, and in our time too, they would come back. I had already made a few inquiries as to how one went about purchasing live beavers, but with negative results. So thoroughly had the watersheds of British Columbia been ransacked of their beavers that in 1920 the B.C. Game Department prohibited any further trapping of beavers throughout most of the province. With a situation like this existent, what hope had we of ever getting a pair of beavers to begin the restocking of Meldrum Creek? If the question was without answer at the moment, we knew that somehow that pair would be found. And furthermore, we believed with all our hearts that someday the meadow that now supplied us our hay would again be occupied by beavers.

  With one eye on the tangle of brush and the other on the beaver meadow, I decided that the aspens and willows must go, the tough sod be plowed and the flat seeded down to a permanent crop of hay. But any time spent in clearing and plowing the flat would be wasted unless water could be brought to the land to irrigate it.

  With the use of a somewhat crude triangle and plumb bob, I surveyed the right-of-way for a ditch that would carry water from the dam to the projected hayfield. In order to raise the water high enough on the meadow so that it would flow of its own free will into the mouth of the ditch, the dam itself had to be raised almost four feet above its present level. I don’t rightly recollect how many spruce trees were cut down for their branches, or how many hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of dirt and gravel were wheeled away from the pit and dumped on the boughs before at last the job was finished, and the entire length of the dam raised four feet. But finally, with the help not only of Moleese, but also that of Lillian and Veasy when the school day ended, we were able to lay down our axes and shovels and watch the water spread out of our hay meadow.

  Then came the digging of the ditch, and it took most of a week. By that time the dam had filled and I was able to test the accuracy of our survey work. There was nothing wrong about that survey; the water flowed serenely along the ditch, and if some seeped away through the gravel, a sufficient amount reached the end of the ditch to ensure that as long as the dam held, our hay crop would not wilt for lack of irrigation.

  Clearing the brush from the flat was the hardest task of all, for every aspen and willow had first to be chopped off well above the ground and the tops cut into lengths and packed away and windrowed up in piles, ready for burning. Then, with the help of our work team and cable and blocks, the stumps were lifted from the ground and hauled off too. Then all hands pitched in to grub out the network of roots, with only one mattock and bare hands for tools. With most of the roots removed, the ground was not too hard to plow, and when the very last furrow was turned I hitched the team to the wagon, journeyed out to Riske Creek and obtained temporary use of a set of spring-toothed harrows from the trader. By late June all was done. Except, that is, paying Moleese his wages.

  One had to be careful about this when dealing with an Indian who was as primitive as he was independent. You didn’t hand him a check or a roll of bills as you would a white man, and say, “I’ll not need you any longer.” At least, not if you wanted his respect. But between us, Lillian and I had all this figured out several days before the moment of parting. On the night of the pay-off, we’d ask Moleese and Cecelia down for supper and treat them like royalty if they came.

  Moleese wore a clean, unpatched pair of denim overalls and an equally plain, though badly faded, black silk shirt with the head of a horse embroidered in pink thread upon the flap of its breast pocket. Obviously the decoration hadn’t been there when the shirt was purchased at a trading post. Cecelia’s gnarled fingers were no doubt responsible for the artistic design. His face and hands were clean too, and his black coarse hair plastered straight back over his forehead. That was unusual; as a rule it was as dishevelled as a magpie’s nest. Cecelia was dressed for the occasion in a snow-white cotton blouse and print calico skirt. The raven-wing, braided ropes of hair that trailed almost to the thin buckskin belt about her waist were at least partly corralled by a huge yellow handkerchief. Cecelia was obviously several years older than Moleese. You could tell that by the miniature gulleys that lined her face. Cecelia’s face somehow reminded me of an eroded patch of dusty ground that has long lost hope of growing anything bright and beautiful.

  Lillian had opened two jars of her precious willow grouse, canned the previous fall, and made a dandy stew of them, complete with feather-light dumplings. For dessert she had a deep blueberry pie. The berries too had been preserved the previous summer.

  As Lillian and Cecelia were cleaning up the dishes, I handed Moleese a cigar—in mid-May the trader had given me a pack of five for a birthday present—and lit one myself. Then I spent two tedious hours teaching Moleese how to print his name with the stub of one of Veasy’s pencils. He learned surprisingly fast, and at the end of the lesson could sign his name in crude but readable fashion. Then with a simple “Thanks Moleese,” I paid him off.

  The two Indians stepped out through the cabin door. There was yet light in the sky. Moleese hesitated. He scowled, as if he was thinking of something he couldn’t put into
words. The scowl evaporated, and he grinned from ear to ear. “Goddam, you one damn good white man” was his parting. Coming from an Indian, that was a compliment indeed!

  Chapter 15

  One night we had a visitor, one that didn’t knock at the door as visitors properly should, but instead stepped silently up to the window and stood there surreptitiously peering in at us. We didn’t hear its approach through the slightly crusted snow, which was strange since it weighed close to fifteen hundred pounds. And the face in the night might have been the face of a horse, or a mule, or a camel, or a likeness of all three.

  Through December and January there was seldom a night that the cabin windows weren’t frosted over. As one’s breath came in contact with the glass, it moisturized and instantly froze. But on Monday nights the frost on the panes was thicker than on any other night of the week, maybe an eighth of an inch thick. And with the nail of the index finger you could write your name on the window, or draw a fine picture, or a map of the whole world if you had the urge and inclination. For Monday was washday, when steam billowed up from the large wooden tub in which Lillian did the weekly washing. As soon as the steam came in contact with the window, it became ice.

  According to Lillian, packing boughs to the dam sites was far easier work than bending over the wooden tub, knuckling the sheets and shirts and other whatnots against the corrugated face of the washboard. “Makes my back ache,” she complained.

  “The mail-order catalogue lists a washing machine powered by a gasoline motor,” I said somewhat vaguely. “One of these days when the fur business picks up, I’m going to buy you one of those machines. Then come Monday nights you’ll have no sore back. The machine does everything for you.”

  “Washing machine indeed!” Lillian sniffed disdainfully. She was darning socks, had been for the last hour and, judging by the size of the pile with holes in them, would be for quite some time yet. Snowshoes and skis were hard on socks; the rub of the harness soon wore heels out. “There’s lots of things to come before that. And anyway,” she went on, “I wouldn’t know how to wash with one if I had it.”

  “You could learn, couldn’t you?”

  She held the needle up to the light, threaded another length of wool through its eye and retorted, “I think I prefer my washboard. It keeps me trim.”

  It was Monday night, and tonight the frost on the glass was thicker than it usually was even on a wash night. A January moon was ripe and full, and the sky was built of stars, and there was no need for me to look at the thermometer outside to tell whether it was forty below or fifty; all I had to do was step outside and take a deep breath. If it was fifty below or colder, I couldn’t drag air into my lungs without throwing violent fits of coughing. During the bitter winter of 1934–35 my lungs got touched with frost, not badly, but sufficiently to now start me coughing when I breathed air made brittle by a fifty-below cold snap. And tonight, when I went to the barn after supper to fork the horses some hay, I coughed all the way there and back.

  I was sitting at the table, writing in my journal by the light of the coal-oil lamp. The lamp was all right in its way, but it was sparing with its light. Now, pen travelling over the foolscap, I wished that there was an electric light bulb over my head instead of the coal-oil lamp on the table.

  The table was against the window, and on it, beside the paper and coal-oil lamp, was a houseplant that Lillian ever hoped would bloom in our wilderness in winters. She was a great one for messing around with houseplants, and I told her that someday, some winter, if she could only wait long enough, one of the plants would really bloom at a season of the year when no plant in its right senses should be blooming.

  But it was frustrating work. Invariably, just as a bloom was about to be born, some exceptionally cold night it froze. But Lillian never gave up trying.

  Veasy was stark naked in the washtub, taking a Monday-night bath. I’d pushed the plant quite close to the window, to make more room for the writing material. I dipped the nib into the ink, ready to start on another paragraph, when something dragged my eyes to the window. I stiffened, and dropped the pen. There on the glass, an inch or two from the plant, the frost was actually melting. It had never done that before, not on Monday nights. I leaned forward, catching at my breath. No mistake about it, the frost was melting, and on one pane anyway was almost all gone. And pressed tightly against the glass was a huge, ungainly nose, a thick, pink tongue touched the glass and then disappeared. I watched the nose for a second or so and then relaxed back in the chair. “If it breaks that glass, it’ll be that houseplant of yours that’s to blame,” I growled.

  Lillian put down her needle. Veasy dropped the soap with a noisy splash. They both looked at the window and Veasy sang out, “It’s a moose!”

  “And its breath has melted the frost,” said Lillian.

  “You’d better move that plant,” I suggested, “or that darned moose will break the glass for sure and hike away into the woods with the plant dangling from its mouth, pot and all.”

  “If it does it’ll have company,” Lillian retorted. “No moose will munch on my plant.”

  “Where do all the moose come from, anyway?” Veasy wanted to know.

  So I moved the plant from the window, out of temptation’s way, rolled myself a cigarette and sat back in the chair and told him how the moose first came to the Chilcotin:

  In late summer of 1916 an Indian of the Riske Creek reservation, hunting mule deer a few miles north of the trading post, suddenly riveted his eyes upon an animal the likes of which he’d never before seen. Almost jet black was the huge beast’s body, and there were grayish stockings on its hind legs. At the high point of its withers it was taller than any saddle pony that the Indian had ever seen and would maybe equal the weight of any horse too. But it was the massive horns and grotesque head of the animal that compelled the Indian to catch at his breath and then expel it in a noisy belch of excitement and astonishment.

  Instinct perhaps informed the hunter that the flesh of the thing must be edible, and he levered shells into the barrel of his 30-30 carbine, firing them as fast as he could pull the trigger. At his fourth shot, the animal turned slowly around in its tracks; at the fifth, it dropped dead in the timber grass.

  The Indian whacked off the lips and tongue of his kill with his hunting knife, tied them behind his saddle, galloped his horse every ell of the way back to the reservation and in excited gutteral grunts told the others of his tribe what had taken place. And they sucked at their breath and saucered their eyes as they beheld the size and weight of the lips and tongue.

  Then, throwing riding and pack saddles on their horses, a dozen of the menfolk returned to the scene of the kill and loaded meat, hide and head, as well as parts of the intestines that are choice tidbits in the diet of any well-bred Chilcotin Indian, on the pack horses and trooped back to the reservation with their spoils.

  Every son and daughter of the tribe, ancients and youngsters alike, spilled out of their log huts when the cavalcade came in sight. They darted among the pack horses like crows around carrion, getting in one another’s way in their hurry to unlash the pack ropes and rid the horses of their weight of bloody meat. Stropping their hunting knives on the soles of their moccasins, they hacked off pieces of the meat, eating it raw and blinking questioningly at one another. Never had any of them seen such a huge deer as this.

  Presently a withered crone, blind in one eye and drooling tobacco juice, clapped her hands and cried, “Ask Tenasstyee, the Old One! Let him feel of the horns and smell of the skin that perhaps he might tell us what kind of a deer is this that has come to live in our forests.”

  So they toted the hide and the horns over to the doorway of a hut where Tenasstyee, the Old One, blind now for fifteen years gone, sat plucking whiskers from his chin with a homemade pair of tweezers. And they dumped them at the Old One’s feet and then stepped back, waiting in tense and respectful silence for him to render his verdict.

  First the old hunter ran his bony finge
rs over every tine of the horns. Then hefted part of the hide, plucking the hair and smelling the skin. For all of five minutes the Old One stared vacantly off into the empty distance, muttering inaudibly to himself. Finally he spoke aloud.

  “The big deer white man call elk me kill lots of long, long tam’ ago, before white man come this country. This one,” tapping the horns, “he no that kind meat.”

  Here the venerable hunter paused for a few seconds, as if his brief recital had sapped him of both energy and inclination for further talk. But after a moment of rest he gathered his wits and breath and continued, “Lots more deer stop this country then all same lots that kind stop now. This one white man call mule deer. Before my eyes go mamaluse (dead) me kill more that kind of deer than leaf stop tree in springtime.”

  Again his tongue was mute while his hands probed doubtfully at the hide. Then wearily, and with a bewildered shake of the head, he informed his tense audience, “But this kind, the biggest deer of them all, I never before see.”

  And if Tenasstyee, the Old One (reckoned to be 106 years old when he died), who could look back to a day when the only clothes he knew were stitched from the skins of wild animals, and when a white face in the Chilcotin country was as rare as an albino porcupine, was unable properly to identify this biggest deer of them all, who else was there abroad hunting and trapping in the forests qualified to do so?

  Eventually it was Becher, the Englishman at the trading post, who solved the riddle. Around the turn of the century Becher was a factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with the Indians of the Peace in northeastern British Columbia. Moose were beginning to migrate into the northerly regions of the province at that time, and Becher had bartered with the Indians of the Peace for their meat and hides. So when the Indians of the Riske Creek reservation brought the horns and the hide to the store to find out if they had any trade value, he gave them a dollar’s worth of tea for the hide, sixty cents worth of chaw tobacco for the horns, and tossed in the true biological name of the species to boot.