Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Now that was two years ago, although to me it seemed all of twenty-two. I’d stayed a year with Harry Marriott, whose ranch was twenty-five miles from Clinton, a very small settlement of farms and log buildings, with one hotel and livery barn, tucked away between two mountain ranges and lying some thirty miles north of Ashcroft on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. I stayed long enough first to blister and then to harden the palms of my hands on the handle of a double-bitted axe, long enough to become fairly proficient in the tricky art of loading a pack horse and then firmly securing the pack with a diamond hitch. Long enough to recognize a buck track when I saw it on the muddy shoreline of Big Bar Creek. And long enough to realize that there was no proper anchorage for me at Big Bar Lake, or, for that matter, in the ranching business anywhere. It wasn’t so much that I minded the work. But raising cattle, like studying law, just plain didn’t interest me. So in the late spring of 1921 I threw my riding saddle on the pinto, loaded almost all my belongings on a pack horse, said “so long” to Harry Marriott and neck reined the gelding northward, feeling that surely somewhere in this wild, sprawling province there must be a spot in which I could settle down and take root, some endeavour that would hold me. A hundred miles north of Big Bar Lake, west of the Fraser River in the Chilcotin district of interior British Columbia, I eventually found both.

  The girl wore a blue print skirt, which, I thought, had not been bought at any trading post or, for that matter, selected from the pages of a mail-order catalogue. It was homemade, I judged, yet it seemed very neat, was spotlessly clean and fitted her like a glove. Her blouse, however, might have come from the mail-order book. It was an affair of georgette crepe, and its sheer whiteness accentuated her dark shingled hair. I noticed that she walked with a slight limp and thought at the time that maybe one of her black leather shoes had given her a sore heel. It was no sore heel that caused the limp. Her face was slightly oval, shaped like the egg of a plover, and freckled like one too. It had such an attractive quality to it that it acted like a magnet on my eyes.

  Then I looked at the old Indian woman by her side, and with little shyness either. Surely there stood the oldest human being I’d ever set eyes upon. Her face was wrinkled like a prune, and almost as dark too. She wore a black silk handkerchief in lieu of a hat, and two long braids of gray hair escaped the confinement of the handkerchief to hang almost at her waist. She wore a black calico dress with a blouse of similar material, and despite the warmth of the day—June had been torn from the store calendar just that very morning—a heavy woollen shawl was thrown across her shoulders. In place of leather shoes, her small, almost childish feet were laced in coarse Indian moccasins.

  Once more I looked at the girl. “Who,” I asked with rude curiosity, “is she?”

  She studied my face a moment before replying, “My grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother!” I blurted out. Then, unable to halter break still less bridle the words that leaped to my tongue, I exclaimed, “But she’s a full-blooded Indian!”

  Those probing hazel eyes never left my face. “Yes,” came the measured retort. “I am part Indian myself.” And with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth: “I am a quarter-breed.”

  I was busy studying the old one’s shrivelled face. “She must be very, very old,” I remarked.

  With a slight nod of the head: “Lala is ninety-seven.”

  “Lala?” There was a musical if unfamiliar ring to the name.

  “Lala is an Indian name,” she quickly informed me.

  Taking a pencil from the counter, I did a simple sum in arithmetic upon a piece of blotting paper. The answer told me that Lala must have been born around the year 1830. There could not have been many whites in the country then, for there weren’t very many now.

  Youth has its own bold way of getting at the root of matters. There was something about the girl that not only aroused my curiosity, but also invited further acquaintance with her. So: “Where do you and Lala live?” I asked.

  “A couple of miles up on the hill,” she told me, gesturing northward toward the slope of the hill leading away from the store.

  My gaze returned to Lala. It was all very perplexing, for the Indian reservation was three miles south of the trading post.

  Evidently the old one’s grandchild easily read my thoughts, for she quietly went on to explain, “A white man took Lala away from her family when she was fifteen years old. She hasn’t lived with the other Indians since.”

  I had a saddle horse of my own in the pasture that wasn’t getting the exercise he should. The old one presented an opportunity, so I grabbed it. “Could I ride up and visit Lala some evening when the chores are finished here?” I asked.

  “I don’t think Lala would mind,” came the smiling response. “Lala is too old to mind anything now. She might even like you if you bring her a sack of tobacco once in a while.”

  That is how I first met Lillian, who for so much of a normal life span has been there at my side, taking the good with the bad, and with never a grumble either. The more I saw of her, the oftener did my thoughts return to the headwaters of the creek I had visited in the spring of 1922. I wanted to go back to that creek, not merely for a fleeting visit, but to stay. Furthermore, I wanted Lillian to be there with me, and had more than a sneaking suspicion that she would be willing. It was Lala who brought matters to a head.

  Tucked away within the recesses of Lala’s wise old mind was a veritable storehouse of knowledge concerning the land as it was when the white men first came to it. Though she knew nothing of biology as printed in any book, the everyday chores of an era when she and the others of her tribe were entirely reliant upon the wildlife resources of the land had brought her into almost daily contact with the complex laws of Nature. Lala knew well of the seven kind years and the seven lean years, and her knowledge was not gleaned from a Bible. The interplay of the cycles that have such paramount bearing upon the fortunes of all wildlife communities was as familiar to Lala as the letters of the alphabet to a child of civilization. If Lala’s biological knowledge came to her from the campus of the wilderness itself, she could not perhaps have attended a better school of learning.

  It was difficult for me to converse freely with Lala, to pump her of all she knew, for only by use of a crude form of pidgin English was she able to answer the thousand and one questions my inquisitive mind demanded of her. Her jumble of words flowed most prolifically, and her memory was most active when, together with Lillian, I talked to her over the smoke of a campfire. While she had a small log cabin of her own, Lala often asked Lillian to kindle a fire outside. Over the coals of the fire she would pass many a long hour, puffing slowly away at her pipe and gazing pensively if unseeingly into the flames. Lala had been totally blind for the last twelve years.

  Across these frequent campfires, Lala told me much of the creek as it was when she was a little girl, before ever an Englishman named Meldrum moved in on the scene to give it the name it bears today.

  “Some elk stop then,” she recollected. “Lots tam’ I watch him stand in beaver water and drink.”

  Yes, there had been elk in the country once upon a time, large herds of them. I’d seen their shed horns with my own eyes, bleached and crumbling in the forests where they were shed. No one seemed to know what had happened to the elk herds of the Chilcotin, or why they had disappeared. But Lala had a possible clue.

  “Me remember one winter—me just little girl—when snow never stop fall all of two moons. Bimeby just tops of little trees stick above snow.” And she measured the depth of that snow by holding her bony hand high above her head. “Lots Indian starve and die that winter,” she clucked on, “ ’cause pretty soon dry fish and berry all eaten and deer nobody can find. For five moon that snow no melt at all, and when warm weather come back, pretty near half Indian people be dead.”

  I judged that this exceptionally long and ferocious winter sank its vicious claw into the land somewhere around 1835 or 1836. True or not, whe
n the whites began dribbling into the Chilcotin a year or two later they encountered no living sign of elk.

  Lala’s words flowed freely when she talked of the creek. In the days of her childhood, it was tribal custom for each Indian family to have their own privileged hunting preserve where they trapped the fur-bearers and hunted the great herds of mule deer migrating from the higher altitudes to their wintering grounds along the Fraser River. The headwaters of Meldrum Creek were the hereditary hunting preserve of Lala’s family, and the long and changing years between that day and another when I first laid eyes upon her had been unable even partially to cloud Lala’s recollection of all that had been there then.

  She delved back into the pages of her fertile mind to tell of the honking of thousands of migrant Canada geese resting their mighty wings on the lakes, and of mallards and other ducks lifting from the marshes at sundown in flights that hid the skyline. The creek below the beaver dams teemed with monstrous trout, resting there a moment in order to gain strength for the effort that would carry them over the dam itself and into less turbulent waters beyond. She’d suck in her breath and clack her tongue when telling of the noisy splash of a beaver’s tail at the cool hush of eventide, point and gesture with her hands in an effort to convey the proper mental picture of the muskrat dens in the banks, or of dark furred mink and otters sunning themselves on the beaver lodges.

  One evening while I squatted by her campfire, studying her wrinkled face, I said, “No trout stop now, Lala. Just suckers and squawfish. And now the Indians never bring beaver pelts to the store to make trade.”

  She shook her head. Her scraggy hand sought and found my arm. Her fingers gouged into its flesh. Lifting her blank eyes to my face she said swiftly, “No, not’ing stop now.” Her fingers relaxed their grip. Suddenly she demanded, “You know why?”

  I pondered this a moment, then hazarded, “Is it because of the beavers?”

  “Aiya, the beavers!” I filled her pipe from the sack of tobacco I had fetched her from the store, passed it over to her and held a faggot to its bowl. She sucked deeply at the stem, imprisoned the smoke in her mouth and then slowly expelled it. “Until white man come,” she then went on to explain, “Indian just kill beaver now an’ then s’pose he want meat, or skin for blanket. And then, always the creek is full of beaver. But when white man come and give him tobacco, sugar, bad drink every tam’ he fetch beaver skin from creek Indian go crazy and kill beaver all tam’.” Again her fingers clawed my arm. Harshly she asked, “What’s matter white man no tell Indian—some beaver you must leave so little one stop next year? What’s matter white man no tell Indian—s’pose you take all beaver, bimeby all water go too. And if water go, no trout, no fur, no grass, not’ing stop?”

  After a few contemplative moments she suggested, “Why you no go that creek and give it back the beavers? You young man, you like hunt and trap. S’pose once again the creek full of beavers, maybe trout come back. And ducks and geese come back too, and big marshes be full of muskrats again all same when me little girl. And where muskrats stop, mink and otter stop too. Aiya! Why you no go that creek with Lily, and live there all tam’, and give it back the beavers?”

  Thus the logic and advice of this ancient unlettered Indian woman, who was there to watch the first of the white men come to her land, and who shared the blankets with one when she was but fifteen years of age, who died a twelvemonth past the hundred mark without having lost a single tooth from her head, or endured a single ache in them. When Death finally crooked a finger, Lala knew naught of the gesture. No spasm of pain pricked her tired wrinkled flesh. She died as some ancient oak might die that has stood too long in the forest. A moment or so ago she was resting comfortably upon her straw-filled tick, puffing serenely away at her pipe. When the tobacco ceased to smoulder, and the bowl of the pipe grew cool, she placed it carefully on the stool by her bed and sighed, “Me tired now, bimeby me sleep.” And that’s how Lala died.

  She was buried on the spine of a bunchgrass-covered ridge above the little log cabin in which she had lived out so many of the declining years of her life. A little girl broke from the ranks of the impassive-faced Indians about the grave as the rough board coffin was lowered on its ropes. The Indian child ran to the grave, looked down into it and said simply, “Lala all gone now.” I was at the grave, reading a bit of the burial service from the Book of Prayer that had come with me from England. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—” A princess of the royal blood could not have wished for more.

  At the time of Lala’s passing, there were few registered traplines in the Chilcotin, as indeed there were not many in the whole province. Hitherto the trapping of fur-bearing animals had been carried on upon a catch-as-catch-can basis, with every man for himself and the devil take care of the hindmost. The word “conservation” was not to be found in the lexicon of the fur trade. That the water tables of the land were slowly but inexorably shrinking was plain for all to perceive, yet no one had vision enough to couple this calamity with a complete decimation of the beavers that had taken place upon so many of the watersheds, except perhaps Lala, and a few other oldsters of her race. But no one sought the advice of any Indian upon such matters, least of all the government agency responsible for the administration of the water resources of the province. And of course no one would have heeded their advice had it been offered—except Lillian and I.

  Together we pondered the pros and cons of such a questionable venture. To me it presented a challenge, and offer of a life I loved to live. I had already trapped a little, although the trapping was confined to the coyotes that came down from the timber at nights to prowl the creek bottoms by the trading post. To Lillian it meant a home of her own, and all that this means to a woman. While I was earning only forty dollars a month and board at the trading post, I might in two or three years’ time save enough to purchase the bare rudiments of the outfit we must have before starting out. There was no lack of obstacles, but what are obstacles to the young? So our minds became set on the purpose; together we’d go to the head of the creek and let God take over from there.

  I applied for, and was given by the British Columbia Game Department, sole trapping rights over some one hundred fifty thousand acres of wilderness that embraced all of the Meldrum Creek watershed from its headwaters to within a mile or so of its mouth. It wasn’t a bad bargain as bargains go. In return for such trapping privileges I must pay the Game Department the huge sum of ten dollars per annum plus certain royalty money upon each pelt trapped. In return I must undertake to “conserve and perpetuate all fur-bearing animals thereon.” But alas, Lillian and I were very soon to discover that there was little fur left there to conserve.

  For one quick moment I did allow my thoughts to dwell upon England and possible financial help from that quarter. My father had certainly hinted that he might supply the money necessary for the purchase of a small cattle ranch in British Columbia. Cattle ranch! There was something substantial, which if managed properly could be expected to yield certain annual dividends. Whereas the project filling my thoughts was as bizarre and uncertain as the tracks of a mousing weasel. My father had ever been a cautious man with his pounds, shillings and pence. If he invested a farthing in a seemingly hairbrained enterprise that offered no prospect of financial return, it would be unwillingly. I dismissed the idea of seeking financial help from England almost as quickly as it occurred to me.

  In September 1928, Lillian and I were married by an itinerant Church of England clergyman. A roly-poly sort of a fellow was the parson, short in stature, broad in girth and as good-humoured and contented as a porcupine sunning itself on a treetop. There was a warm smile on his smooth round face as he began the ceremony and it was still there when he finished. The wedding took place in the spacious sitting room of the trading post, and went off without a hitch save perhaps for the moment when the trader’s red cocker spaniel scratched and whined at the door, seeking his master. Both Becher and his wife were present, dressed in their Sunday
best.

  Lillian had given meticulous attention to her toiletry. Her wedding dress was of some flimsy white lace material, tied at the waist with a pale blue sash. She wore a veil of white netting, and I heard Mrs. Becher whisper to her husband, “My, how charming and sweet she looks!” Joe, the Chinese cook, had gone to supreme culinary effort to provide a feast worthy of such a momentous occasion. “Elic,” meaning Eric, “him catch woman now,” said Joe to Wong, the Chinese irrigator. “Boss woman (Mrs. Becher) tell me, ‘Joe, you fix hi-u muck-imuck so ev’lybody have gleat big feast.’”

  There was cold roast chicken and salad and potatoes and sweet corn fresh from the garden. And there was a large pink sockeye salmon, which, if illegally “dipped” from the Chilcotin River while innocently journeying to its spawning grounds upstream, certainly tasted none the worse for the fact. There was blueberry pie, and pumpkin too, and homemade ice cream and a large wedding cake, which, after the chicken, the salmon and desserts, hardly got sliced at all. Becher had unearthed two bottles of sherry from somewhere, and by the time all the customary toasts had been quaffed, the parson was as jolly as two porcupines sunning themselves on a treetop.

  In 1906—Lillian was two years old then—an elder sister tied a cushion on the back of a gentle saddle pony, hoisted Lillian on its back, placed the halter shank in her pudgy hands and briskly shouted, “Giddup!” The pony—it had packed many a deer into camp in its day—moved off at a lazy, affable walk, and then, when the sister fetched it a good one across the rumps with a willow stick, broke into an unwilling jogtrot. All might have been well if right that very moment a couple of Indian riders had not seen fit to pop over a nearby hill, their horses at a gallop. At sight of the two riders, Lillian’s pony pricked up its ears and stopped dead in its tracks, throwing its tiny jockey clean over its withers to land kerplunk on her back in the dirt. If impact of soft baby flesh and bone against stubborn ground resulted in Lillian’s moving with a pronounced limp when she toddled from here to yon, no one paid any attention at the time. Anyway, the nearest doctor had his shingle up at Ashcroft, over a hundred and fifty miles from the scene, a round trip of at least twelve days with team and buckboard.