Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Lillian poses with the Colliers’ Labrador retreiver in front of the one-room, sod-roofed cabin that they lived in for sixteen years. At this point, the cabin served as a garage for the Jeep.

  Lillian’s eyes clouded with disappointment. “Eric, you don’t think we can make it across Island Lake Flats yet, do you?” she asked.

  “Veasy maybe could. But me—” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t like to even try. Maybe we’d get stuck and be afoot out there in the snow.” I never had much faith in myself when it came to driving the Jeep over a questionable passage.

  “Veasy.” She said it so softly I could scarce hear her. “Veasy,” she repeated. “I wonder where he is right this very moment.”

  It was close to a month since we’d last been out for mail. We went out on horseback, and it was a tedious, miserable journey what with all the drifts and crusted snow making travel terribly slow. Seemed that nowadays riding bothered Lillian, did something to her back. But it was saddle horse or nothing. I didn’t like trying to buck heavy snow with the Jeep.

  There’d been a letter from Veasy at the post office then, mailed in Inchon, Korea. The boy had heard rumours that his battalion might be returning to Canada, though just when he didn’t know. That was in mid-March.

  Now, backing out of the drift and re-garaging the Jeep, I said, “If the next three or four days are warm ones and the snow melts some, we can maybe then get out with the Jeep and try again.”

  Lillian was very quiet for the remainder of the afternoon. It was a quietness born of her disappointment. And she was worrying about Veasy.

  After supper we both strolled down to the lake and walked out on the ice. The ice hadn’t started to rot. It would still support a six-horse freight outfit. I stopped, looking toward the south, listening.

  “What is it?” asked Lillian.

  I grinned sheepishly. “I thought I heard geese. Must have been something else. Guess these old woods were fooling me again.”

  “I do wish the geese would come back,” she sighed. “Then we’d know for sure that it was spring.”

  “What the heck—?” I dropped down on one knee, shading my eyes with a hand and peering intently at the southeast end of the lake.

  “You see something?” Lillian was looking now.

  “Yes, in the fir timber. See? Coming toward the ice. Moose maybe. No, not a moose. Say, it’s a horse. With a rider too. What the heck—?”

  “He’s riding out on the ice.” Lillian too shaded her eyes. “Look, he’s reining the horse right up the middle of the lake.”

  “He knows the country,” I said. “Knows that the ice is safe yet.”

  We could see the rider’s red mackinaw coat and blue denim overalls. He sat loosely in the saddle, left leg crooked around the horn, as cowboys often ride when the seat of the saddle begins getting hard. “Not scared of the ice at all,” I muttered again.

  Then the rider waved his arm. I waved back in reply. “Who the heck?” Then recognition came to me. I heaved up from the ice. “It’s—it’s—”

  “Veasy!” The name shot from Lillian’s lips. All the disappointment vanished like a snowflake on a campfire. “Veasy!” And she raced along the ice toward him, flinging herself into his arms as he came down from the saddle.

  I grasped the lad’s right hand, pumping it. My eyes raked his outfit. The mackinaw coat and overalls were far too small for him. The horse was an ancient gelding, a sorrel, with little fat on its ribs. “Where’d you steal the outfit?” I asked.

  “Borrowed them from one of the ranchers. I got to Williams Lake last night, hitched a ride to Meldrum Creek with the stage this morning. Left down there around four this afternoon and have been pushing the poor old sorrel mortal hard through the woods to get here before dark.” He laughed. “Of course you never got my telegram?”

  With uplifted eyebrows I said, “Did we ever get a telegram back here in these woods?”

  “Didn’t figure you would when I sent it from Vancouver. We docked there three days ago and—”

  I didn’t give a hoot whether the ship docked at Vancouver or Montreal. “You through with the army?” I interrupted.

  “Will be in about three weeks.”

  That’s all I wanted to know. I said, “Veasy boy, you go on ahead to the house with your mother, and I’ll look after the horse.”

  I reached for the bridle lines and was about to hoist into the saddle when I suddenly stiffened, left foot in the stirrup, right still on the ice. I looked to the south and said tensely, “Listen!”

  “You and your listening,” scoffed Lillian impatiently.

  “I hear geese,” I whooped.

  It was only a faraway murmur at first, one that we could hear for several seconds before the dots showed against the horizon. The murmur became a raucous, strident clamour; the dots took on definite shape. There were two hundred or more of them, the formation of their squadron etching a perfect V against the blue vault of the sky. They passed high over our heads, beating steadily northward.

  I swung up into the saddle and headed for the barn, musing, muttering happily over and over again, “They all come back to the wilderness!”

  Chapter 30

  It was a June evening of the year 1956. Though the aftermath of an incarnadine sunset still lay on the forests, long strips of shadow were already reaching out here and there across the lake and lay as dark fans upon the water. The evening patrol had come away from the lodge a half-hour ago, and a few minutes after the beaver broke surface, I thought I heard a soft thud or two as if the beaver’s sensitive guard hairs had detected a trickle of water escaping through the dam that rightly shouldn’t be escaping at all. But, since the dam was a half-mile from where I sat, and out of sight too, I couldn’t be sure whether the beaver had plugged such a trickle or not. I could only presume that he had.

  This was the third night in succession that I’d walked through the screen door, quietly closed it behind me, crossed the strip of hay ground between house and lakeshore, and squatted down at water’s edge, eyes and thought fixed on the large cottonwood that still somehow managed to remain upright at the other side of the bay. The tree stood some fifteen feet back from water’s edge and about fifty yards from where I sat. Even in the failing light I could still see the dark, packed and narrow path between it and the water, and the scattering of white chips surrounding the tree. The path had been indented into the soft and muddy ground by the old beaver’s weight, and the chips chopped from the tree by his chisel-edged incisor teeth. By rights the tree had no business standing there at all, since so many chips had been whittled out of it that even a slight puff of wind would start it swaying and send it crashing down. But for the last three or four days there had been no wind at all, and a few more chips would have to be taken from the tree before it went down.

  The screen door swung gently on its hinges, closed softly again. A second or two later Lillian perched beside me. Though the longest day in the year was only a week away, the air began to chill as soon as the sun went down, and she was bundled up in a soft, woolly sweater and had tied an old silk handkerchief around her head.

  Without pulling my eyes from the cottonwood tree I said, “Hullo. You going to watch too? It will surely go down tonight. If the beaver takes another dozen chips out it just has to go down.”

  “And maybe lodge,” stated Lillian thoughtfully.

  I tried to suppress a chuckle. “You believe in seeing the dark side of things as well as the bright, don’t you?”

  “Where beavers and cottonwood trees are concerned, yes.” Then, smiling a little herself, she observed, “There’s a mosquito on your cheek, and it’s having a feast.”

  Absent-mindedly I palmed my right cheek. “No, not the right cheek,” she pointed out. “The other one.” Which only seemed to prove that if we’d accomplished little of anything else in the last twenty-five years, we’d at least learned to ignore the itchy sting of a mosquito.

  But she was absolutely right about the cottonwood tree, an
d it was the tantalizing doubt about it that had fetched me down to the lakeside these three nights in a row to sit there quietly in the grass until it was so pitchy dark there was no sense in my sitting there any longer. I wanted to be there at water’s edge when finally the tree went down.

  Inland from the cottonwood, and only twenty feet away from it, stood three large, tall and stately spruces, huddled in a clump. Should the cottonwood fall away from the water and into the spruces, it would hang up, and all the persistent work of the beaver would avail it nothing. It was an old cottonwood, one that perhaps had taken its first peep at the sun a half-century ago. Its bark was gray with age, and it was two feet through at the stump. Almost every night for the last week, the beaver had waddled up the path from the water, gone erect on his hind webs and, moving around and around the tree, gnawed out the chips. Had there been any lean to the tree at all, it would have gone down three or four nights ago, but there was no lean, and the tree would have to be cut right through before it would topple. Then the chances were even that instead of falling into the water, as the beaver wanted it to, it would go the other way and hang up in the spruces. When beavers felled a tree they did not undercut it as a man would; they just went around and around it, slicing out the chips and trusting entirely to chance that it would fall where they wanted it to.

  At the mouth of the bay and out in the water a few feet was the beaver lodge. Short lengths of aspen, some peeled of their bark, some yet to be peeled, littered the water around it, and often at sundown if you watched the lodge real closely, you’d see the mother beaver surface, pick up a length of unpeeled wood, then swiftly dive again. And a few seconds later you’d hear the soft, hungry grunts of the kits as their perfectly formed incisor teeth gnawed away at the bark.

  Again the screen door opened, then closed with a jarring bang.

  “You two going to sit there all night?” Veasy called.

  It was darkening fast now. I could scarcely see the foot of the tree, though its top still stood out against the skyline. “You want to go in?” I asked Lillian.

  She replied, “I’d like to sit here just a few minutes longer.”

  “Put the coffeepot on the stove and give us a call when it’s ready,” I sang back to Veasy.

  As Veasy’s footsteps thumped back through the sitting room, my thoughts returned to the cottonwood tree. If it fell as the beaver wanted it to, it would go down in the water, and after a while, when the little ones in the lodge were old enough to get out in the water and hunt up food for themselves, they’d be able to swim in to the tree, reach up with their paws at a limb and go to shucking it of its bark without having to get out on land at all. So long as they were in the water, no skulking coyote or razor-clawed lynx could harm them, but on land such little fellows as they were too clumsy and inexperienced to escape the tooth or claw of any watchful predator that was out for an easy meal. Maybe that’s what the old buck beaver had in mind when he began to whittle away at the tree: to fall it into the water so the little ones could eat in safety.

  Veasy and I had trapped a hundred beavers in the spring of 1956. Neither of us really liked trapping the beavers because, as I told Lillian, “They do far more good in the water than as fur on some woman’s back.” But there were so many beavers on Meldrum Creek now, and we were forced to trap them just to hold their numbers in check. So many beaver colonies that if man didn’t check their further increase with use of his steel traps, they’d go to killing one another as beavers will when they become too numerous, or maybe disease would become rampant in the colonies, as disease ever will where any wildlife population is outbreeding its food supply.

  In this spring of 1956 our trapline and two nearby had yielded some four hundred beaver pelts. That seemed like an awful pile of beavers to trap when only some fifteen years ago there was scarcely a living beaver to be found throughout all the Chilcotin. But now the beavers were pushing out every which way, wherever there was a watercourse for him to follow, and many an Indian trapper was catching beavers too. And wherever there was a good-sized beaver pond, there were so many ducks of all kinds that in the fall of the year they lifted from the marshes at sundown in clouds that hid the skyline. And sleek, velvet-furred otters preened their guard hairs atop the beaver lodges, and moose came down to the ponds to drink and wallow just as in Lala’s childhood the elk had come. Though there weren’t too many trout in Meldrum Creek yet, there were one or two beaver ponds and the odd stretch of foam-flecked creek where you could drop a baited hook and catch a plump, red-fleshed rainbow on almost every other throw. In early July the ranchers pushed close to three thousand head of Hereford cattle onto the timbered summer ranges about the creek, and the grass grew so high and lush around the beaver ponds that the cattle waxed fatter every day as they cropped it, and never a one perished in the slimy muck of a boghole. Far below us, in the valley at the mouth of the creek, a rancher with weather-tanned face and work-calloused hands, a spade over his shoulder and a bit of a tune on his lips, moved slowly along his irrigation ditch, turning the water onto his alfalfa fields and thinking to himself, “There’ll never again be a shortage of irrigating water on this creek as long as the beavers take care of things.”

  “I’m getting cold.” Lillian’s complaint suddenly interrupted my thoughts.

  I got up and flexed my legs. “Too dark to see anything now anyway,” I retorted.

  “Coffee’s ready!” Veasy’s clarion summons erupted from behind the screen door.

  I grabbed Lillian’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, let’s go.” I peered into the night, looking for the top of the cottonwood. Not a limb of it was to be seen over there in the darkness. Maybe it would still be standing there with the dawning.

  We were almost at the screen door when from out of the night and across the bay there came the grate of a beaver’s teeth as he gnawed the chips from a cottonwood tree. I held Lillian’s hand a little tighter. “Wait!” I breathed tensely.

  One—two—three— The night was that calm and still I could almost count the toothings of the beaver as he notched deeper into the heart of the tree. Six—seven—eight— Then, following a few seconds of pent-up silence, I beard the almost explosive crack as the tree started down. With a resounding splash it settled in the water. Then all was quiet again.

  We stood there in the night, rigid, looking toward the lake. Suddenly a tumultuous splash shattered the silence. It was the old beaver’s tail, flailing the water. My eyes found Lillian’s. We smiled at one another. I cleared my throat. “Something attempted, something done.” That’s all I could think of to say. Yet somehow those words expressed everything. And we joined Veasy in the kitchen and sat down to our coffee.

  About the Author

  Eric Collier was born in Northampton, England, in 1903. He moved to Canada in 1920, where he worked at several jobs in the interior of B.C. He married Lillian Ross in 1928, and a year later son Veasy was born. The Colliers eventually settled at Meldrum Creek, where they built their own cabin and lived off the land, Eric eking out a living as a trapper.

  By the late 1940s, Collier had become well known for his wildlife expertise and his advocacy of humane trapping methods. He also began writing articles for such publications as Northwest Digest in Quesnel, the Williams Lake Tribune and Outdoor Life in the U.S. In 1949 he became the first non-American to win Outdoor Life’s Conservation Award. It was, in fact, Outdoor Life staff who encouraged him to write a book about his experiences.

  Collier moved his family to Riske Creek in 1960 and sold his trapline in 1964. He died at Riske Creek on March 15, 1966. Lillian moved to Williams Lake, where she died in 1992. The Colliers’ second cabin at Meldrum Creek, built in 1946, is now a historic site after being restored in 1994.

  All of The Classics West Series is available in both ebook and printed editions at touchwoodeditions.com

  Capturing the spirit, appeal, and cultural heritage of the Canadian West.

  A Journey to Northern Ocean by Samuel Herne
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br />   Three Against the Wilderness by Eric Collier

  Harmon’s Journal 1800-1819 by Daniel Williams Harmon

  The Rainbow Chasers by Ervin Austin MacDonald

  Klondike Cattle Drive by Norman Lee

  The Ranch on the Cariboo by Alan Fry

  Packhorses to the Pacific: A Wilderness Honeymoon by Cliff Kopas

  Pioneers of the Pacific: A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters by Agnes C. Laut

  Copyright © Veasy Collier/the estate of Eric Collier 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

  Originally published in 1959 (E.P. Dutton & Co., New York)

  First TouchWood edition published in 2007 with ISBN 978-1-894898-54-6.

  This electronic edition was released in 2011.

  e-pub ISBN: 978-1-926741-99-4

  e-pdf ISBN: 978-1-926741-81-9

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  Cover design by Jacqui Tomas

  Cover and all interior photos from the collection of Eric Collier

  TouchWood Editions acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  www.touchwoodeditions.com