Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  They navigated the ice of one beaver pond without mishap, and now Lillian decided to risk it all the way. She’d hold the horses to the ice of the beaver ponds wherever she possibly could, and so cut the time it would take to get back home.

  The team travelled the length of two beaver ponds safely and were halfway across a third when suddenly there was a sickening crash, and the ice gave beneath them, and they were floundering in dark water. They reared up, lunging, trying to get their forefeet on solid ice, but the more they struggled, the deeper they sank in the water.

  It was now around 1 A.M., and pitch-dark except for the thin light of the lantern. The sleigh runners were still on sound ice, but Lillian realized the utter futility of her ever hoping to get the sleigh moving again now. Her thoughts and her strength must be dedicated to saving the horses. For without the horses, the only other way of getting back home was afoot. And Veasy hadn’t the strength to walk fifty yards.

  Lillian set her teeth. She had to get the horses out, just simply had to. There was a double-bitted axe in the sleigh, and grabbing it she stepped out of the box and onto the ice. The flood water was above her ankles. The old ice cracked as she crawled along its rim to the heads of the frightened team. Speaking quietly to the horses, she cut the martingales and pole straps with the axe. Then she uncoupled the lines and took the bridles from the horses. She tried to unhook the traces but couldn’t, so she cut them with the axe, too.

  Now that the team was free of the sleigh, she brought the whip down on Ben’s back, and snorting and puffing the gelding lunged up and managed to hoist his front hoofs onto ice. Lillian allowed him to rest there a moment, to regain his wind, but as soon as he started to slide back into the water she again used the whip. With one huge lunge Ben heaved straight up from the water, this time with all four feet on the ice. He lay there a minute, then slowly got to his feet.

  But with Gipsy it wasn’t so easy. The mare was considerably older then the gelding, and her first wild lunge had drained her of wind and strength. She now lay very still in the water, flanks heaving and falling, eyes closed, chin on firm ice, but lacking the will or the strength to make the one effort necessary to bring her front feet out of the water.

  Ben stood shivering and trembling, body frosting over. Taking the lead rope from his halter, Lillian crawled to the edge of the water and fastened one end of it around Gipsy’s neck. She next took several half hitches around Ben’s tail with the other end. Then: “Ben!” she shouted with all her might, using the whip for emphasis. As the gelding lunged forward Lillian brought the whip down on Gipsy’s shoulders. The mare’s front feet contacted firm ice, and before the horse could slip back again Lillian again urged Ben on. And soon Gipsy was dragged out of the water and onto ice that supported her weight.

  Taking the harness from the horses, Lillian dumped it in the sleigh box. She knew that the sleigh could be chopped out whenever the flood water froze solid again. Somehow she managed to get Veasy up on Ben’s back and cover him with blankets. Veasy lay there, hands clasped in the horse’s mane. Then, pulling herself onto Gipsy’s back and leading Ben, Lillian trotted the horses home.

  For four days and nights Lillian hovered between my bed and Veasy’s, utterly worn out herself but unable to find rest in sleep. For if she did close her eyes for a minute or two, the torment and uncertainty that was needling her quickly brought them open again. Finally the fever—caused perhaps by an attack of viral pneumonia—abated and both Veasy and I began to mend. But not until Lillian was certain that all was going to be all right did she stretch out on the bed alongside me and sleep for sixteen straight hours.

  It was the end of the first week in January, almost three weeks since Lillian had made her unforgettable dash for the cabin. The team stood at the edge of the ice, hitched to willows. There was no flood water now; all was solid ice. All, that is, save for a few feet around the sleigh. It had taken Veasy and me an hour or more to chop the sleigh clear, but at last the job was done.

  “Go get the team, son,” I bade him, and hitching the chain at their doubletrees to the end of the tongue, I murmured, “Giddup,” and tightening the traces, the team hauled the sleigh out of the water.

  I stood there, looking at that dark hole in the ice. Slowly I turned to Lillian and said, “I was just thinking about Cal Wycott.” Wycott was a half-breed, riding for Charlie Moon. Three winters ago he had been spurring his horse up the middle of Meldrum Lake—it had snowed heavily two days earlier—when suddenly the ice gave way, and he and the horse were in the water.

  Later that night Wycott dragged into our house, afoot, clothes a sheet of ice. He’d spent an hour or more trying to save his unfortunate horse, but all to no avail. The horse perished there in that ice cold water.

  Now I shook my head. I looked wonderingly at Lillian. “Just how, I would like to know, did you manage to get them out?”

  “Remember what I told you, long, long ago, when we were riding our one hundred and fifty thousand acres to see what they had to offer us?” And she laughed aloud as she reminded me, “One can do most anything if they’ve just the will to try.”

  Chapter 27

  Water! It leaped down the gullied hillsides, quickly filled shallow ponds wherever it could find a minor depression in the awakening floor of the forest. No matter where one might be at the moment, whether anxiously watching the beaver dams or perched upon a boulder at the crest of some naked hogback, all other sounds that made up the symphony of the wilderness—the piercing lament of a coyote, the sharp bark of a fox, the insane chatter of a loon, the soft grunt of a cow moose—were subordinated to the clamant rumble of the freshets as they hurtled toward the river.

  Water! It nourished man’s crops, quenched his thirst, turned his turbines, cleansed his skin, bore the products of his industry across the length and breadth of the universe. It guarded man, it restored him with the healing balm of its bounty. But water could destroy as well as heal, snuff out a life as easily as give birth to one.

  Only a week or two ago, the wilderness about us had been silent, immobile beneath the solid mass of snow that had crushed it for so long. Then, with scarce a warning at all, had come the metamorphosis. All that clutching depth of inanimate whiteness became a crazed, muddy liquid that swept down through the land in noisy, threatening tide.

  Even the most ancient of the ancients said that they’d never seen such a winter before, although once in a while one would scrub his chin with the palm of his hand, gather his dimming wits and vaguely recollect: “The winter of ’91–’92 was a real hell-born heller, but I don’t hardly believe it was a patch on this one.” And that was a statement indeed, because usually no matter how hostile or long-lived a winter might be these days, you could pretty well bet your boots that there was at least one Methuselah around, who’d come to the Chilcotin when it mostly belonged to the Indians, whose mind would wander back across the years trying to recall a worse one. Of one thing, though, I am certain: that winter of 1947–48 was the cruellest winter we’d lived through since we first came to the creek.

  From the fifth of January through to the twentieth of February it seldom got any warmer than thirty below, even at high noon, and at sundown the mercury would drop like a plummet just as far down the glass as it could possibly get, to the fifty minus mark, or maybe sixty below if the thermometer would let it, and stay that way until along in the following morning. And the wind puffed down from the chops of the north with an appetite on its tongue that nigh cut a man in half as he faced it, then neatly quartered the halves. And the snow lay so heavy and deep on the game trails that when I flushed a deer from the thickets about my snowshoe paths through the woods, about all I could see of the animal above snow level was its head and a thin line of its back.

  By the middle of March a half-dozen moose calves were curled up in the snow within a couple of hundred yards of the house, frozen hard in their beds as they lay there. Down on the sidehills that sheered off to the Fraser River, there was scarcely a fir tree of any
size that didn’t claim at least one fawn deer as a casualty beneath it. There was no shortage of deer browse along those sidehills, but the snow lay so deep and heavy about them, it was impossible for the fawns to paw down through it and get at a mouthful of feed. So they bedded under the spread of the trees where the snow wasn’t quite so deep and lay there, bellies shrunk, the iron clutch of the cold freezing the blood in their veins.

  Even many of the cattle, belly deep in hay on the feed grounds, lost all will to survive against the relentless pressure of that cold, and those that didn’t die limped around come morning with frozen hocks, ears or tails. And after a bit the hocks began to peel, or the ears and tail to drop off. There’s never been a winter like it since we came to the creek to live.

  Nor spring either, for that matter. There wasn’t a smear of bare ground in sight anywhere when on the twenty-fifth of April we loaded the fur on the pack horses and lined out for Riske Creek. Two or more feet of snow still smothered the hayfield, and it was a solid snow too, and first thing in the morning when the frost was on it you could gallop a horse over it just as though the horse was cantering along a hardtop highway. It was the kind of snow you’d maybe expect to find at this time of the year in the higher mountains, but not down where we were, at the three- and four-thousand-foot levels.

  It was the twenty-fifth day of April, 1948, and still we hadn’t heard the honk of a single goose, and there wasn’t a bluebird or robin in the country. And it all seemed crazy for us to be riding out to Riske Creek on horses with the fur when rightly we should have been taking it out in the Jeep. But no motorized vehicle could buck that much solid crusted snow, and no horse-drawn one either. We’d kept a sleigh road of sorts open to Riske Creek until the end of January, then overnight, and where there was no timber to make shelter, it had all blown in, and the drifts on Island Lake Flats piled up twelve and fifteen feet deep. And now, although May was almost within beckoning distance, the drifts would still be there, and even to get out to Riske Creek with horses that were lugging no sleigh behind them we’d have to follow the high ridges in order to outwit the drifts.

  “The old creek will be running wild when all this turns to water,” I sang out to Lillian, tailing one pack horse behind the other and tightening the cinch straps.

  “The sooner it runs, the better I’ll like it,” she flung back. “I’m that sick of snow I never even want to see a Christmas card again.” And for the umpteenth time since March was peeled from the calendar, she complained, “Isn’t it ever going to come spring?”

  “Spring?” I repeated, grinning. “There’ll be no spring this year. All of a sudden like, the snow will start to melt and by then it will be summer.” And things turned out I wasn’t far wrong at that.

  This morning a little of winter still clung to the wind. It drifted in from the northwest, sharp and probing, and Lillian was bundled up in a creamy turtleneck sweater and a bright red mackinaw coat that she’d made from the remnants of an old one of mine. Lillian could take a coat or pair of pants of mine that I figured should rightly be thrown out on the trash pile, and with a few snips of the scissors and half a spool of thread make a real smart garment for herself from it. It was a trick she learned in the lean years, when dollars were scarce as diamonds, and when no scrap of cloth was thrown away if needle, thread and know-how could put it to use again.

  Veasy bridled his roan gelding and buckled the throat latch. He legged into his batwing leather chaps, buttoned his sheepskin coat, fixed his ear flaps so they half covered his ears and then stood by the horse’s head, straight as a ramrod, all five feet eleven and a half inches of him. The bridling of the horse and the pulling on of his chaps had been done almost mechanically, as if horse, bridle and chaps were leagues away from his true thoughts. Nowadays almost everything Veasy did was done mechanically, although none the worse for that. And every once in a while Lillian or I would see him stop in the middle of what he was doing and stare off into space, as if right that very moment his mind was over the hills and far away, busy with things that had no bearing at all on what he was doing at the moment. But I never trespassed on his inner thoughts and neither did Lillian. In his own good time Veasy would come right out and tell us what it was that he saw over the hills and far away, and although we rather dreaded the moment of his telling us, we knew that someday he’d have to.

  If the winter had snuffed out the lives of no one knew how many deer and moose, and left many a rancher short on his last fall’s count of cattle, it hadn’t treated us too unkindly. Between them the two pack horses toted some eleven hundred muskrat pelts, good for a dollar and a half apiece. The marshes had flooded over in late February and promptly frozen tight again. And the muskrats had retopped their push-ups, and since scarcely a flake of snow fell in March, one could stand at the edge of a marsh and see push-ups everywhere without looking for marker sticks. The way the winter clung on, refusing to let go, kept the ice sound and solid too, and we’d trapped right up to the twentieth of April, and might have been trapping yet if Veasy and I hadn’t got tired of tending the traps and skinning the catch, and Lillian of tacking the pelts to the stretcher boards.

  It took us thirteen hours to get through to Riske Creek what with having to twist around here, bypass there, to avoid getting our saddle stock belly deep in the drifts. There we tagged up our bundles of fur, shipping the lot off to the auction sales. Eleven hundred muskrat pelts was just too much fur to haggle about with any local trader. And with the fur on its way to the sales, and after two or three days of lazing around at Riske Creek, listening to and participating in discussions all relating to the hardships of the winter, and when in hell was it ever going to come spring, we saddled up the horses and returned home to our creek.

  There was no spring at all in the true sense of the word. It was as if winter, ashamed of itself for having plagued everybody and everything for so long, suddenly died, leaving summer to come along to fill and tamp the grave. The first string of geese headed north high over the house along toward the end of the first week in May. Then the robins came hopping along, and a pair of bluebirds followed them with bits of last year’s grass right there in their beaks, ready for the nest building. And crowding the bluebirds came the swallows, and right on their tails the hummingbirds. Never in our memory had so many migratory birds come back so close on one another to our wilderness to nest. Usually the robins were two weeks ahead of the bluebirds, and the latter a week ahead of the swallows. But in that spring of 1948, each crowded in on the other, all in frantic haste to get the nests built in the least possible time, ready for the eggs.

  By the middle of May the thermometer, which such a short time ago had told a bitter story of fifty or sixty below, now said eighty above in the shade when we went and took a peek at it. Snowdrifts ran away as water even as you watched them. Meldrum Creek lifted four feet in one night, fed as it was by a thousand lusty rivulets pouring away from the forested hillsides. And as it was on Meldrum Creek, so was it on countless other creeks, some named, some yet to be named, that ran down through the land to make common rendezvous with a single mighty river.

  It made us uneasy to stand outside the house at sundown and listen to the almost deafening roar of the creek as it hurled itself at the facades of the beaver dams and sluiced over their tops. There were so many dams, so much water tumbling down the creek, probing here, seeking there, watchful for a weak spot somewhere in the dams that could be breached and pushed aside.

  And what if the beaver dams gave, unable to withstand the shock of water battering them any longer? What would happen down in the valley at the mouth of the creek where folks were plowing their garden patches, or harrowing their hayfields, or drilling down a crop of oats, if the beaver dams were pushed aside and the tens of thousands of acre-feet of water they contained was suddenly free to run off in one mighty avalanche down through the land and into the Fraser River? If those beaver dams gave, the garden patches and the hayfields and the acres of newly sown oats would all be lakes.
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br />   There was scarce a pause between the runoff of the snows at the three-, four- and five-thousand-foot levels and that at far higher altitudes. All became water at the selfsame moment, and into the Fraser River poured the water.

  Not for a half-century or more had the Fraser overflowed its banks and inundated the reclaimed lands about its mouth, where, in the spring of 1948, thousands of people were at work, tilling and seeding their farms, secure in their belief that the dikes and embankments that had been built since last the river went on the rampage were now formidable enough to bridle and hold it in check no matter how high might be the crest of its flood water. But the very ground upon which so many of their homes sat was stolen from the river in the first place. Drained and diked, and moistened by subirrigation, the soil produced bumper crops of hay, grain, vegetables and fruits, but that soil was mostly silt, deposited there in years long gone by the flood waters of the river itself. And in that late May and early June of 1948, the river was again to claim its own.

  Fed and fattened by a thousand minor creeks, as well as by the flood waters of such major rivers as the Nechako, the Cottonwood, the Quesnel, the Chilcotin and the North and South Thompson, the Fraser inched ever higher up the dikes, seeking a spot to breach them. Like ants busy about a hill, mankind swarmed along the tops of the embankments, working the clock around with sandbags and dump trucks and earth-moving equipment of every design in an endeavour to strengthen the barricades and subdue and contain the rampant sweep of the river. But all their labour was in vain. For forty years man had been the master, the river his servant. Now, for a moment, the river was again the master, and man stood baffled and impotent before the impetuous strength of its flood.

  Levees became sodden with the weight of the water probing them. Seepage occurred in countless different places. Rivers inched slowly higher. Now it was lapping at the tops of the dikes, and unable to deny it any longer, the embankments gave way and a turgid tide of water hurled through them, inundating the reclaimed lands beyond.