Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  If the marshes and lakes had their water back, there’d soon be an increase in muskrats and other fur-bearers. If we both held to the conviction that some day we were going to bring beavers back to Meldrum Creek, neither of us had the least idea how this was to be done. You don’t go to an auction sale and purchase live beavers as you would a horse or a cow. And as far as we knew there wasn’t a single beaver left anywhere in the Chilcotin, and mighty few in all of British Columbia, for that matter. But for the moment we shoved the matter of beavers aside and gave our immediate thoughts to the problem of how we ourselves might go about the reflooding of at least one or two of the marshes through which the creek pursued its unambitious way.

  For provision and maintenance of habitat is the only real key to the increase and perpetuation of any wildlife resource. If the environment is provided, and if treated to the most rudimentary principles of conservation, nature can be relied upon to take over from there.

  In 1931 the pelt of a muskrat was worth from eighty cents to a dollar. Hundreds of muskrats could be raised on the marshes once they had their water back, but in their present arid state they were of no economic value to us or anyone else.

  One species of wildlife must nourish and perpetuate itself by preying upon another. If the marshes of Meldrum Creek were again inundated, the aquatic seeds and tubers that were still rooted in their soil would provide food for muskrats, waterfowl and fish. To prey upon these would come the mink, the otter and other carnivorous fur-bearers. If the pelt of the lowly muskrat was worth but eighty cents, that of the mink was worth from fifteen to twenty dollars. It was simply a matter of creating a habitat for the one so that there would be food for the other. Putting theory into practice was not quite so simple.

  The solution to it all glared us in the face. With the beaver dams, there lay the answer. At the mouth of every tract of marsh, large or small, was a beaver dam. In many of the landlocked lakes, beaver lodges, long disused, could still be seen in the water. Though no beavers had been in Meldrum Creek for a half-century or more, the remnants of their dams and lodges remained to mark the once-upon-a-time presence of a rodent weighing about sixty pounds at full maturity, whose appetite for work and ingenious feats of engineering had not only bent the flow of the creek to his will but also the freshets that fed it.

  Repair those beaver dams then, and let these wastelands produce! Close the gate in their breach, harness the creek as the beavers had once upon a time harnessed it. Throw the water back upon the marshes, allow none of it to dribble away and be swallowed up by the river. But we weren’t the only ones trying to snatch a living from the creek. Those others in the valley below us were as badly in need of water as we were ourselves. And had far greater claim to what little there was.

  Asians first tapped Meldrum Creek of its water. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, some two score Chinese swung their picks and plied their shovels, and so ditched water from the creek to the gravelly benchlands lying slightly above the Fraser River and six miles south of the mouth of the creek. When sinking their prospect holes in the gravel, they had dug up placer gold, and a plentiful supply of water was needed to sluice the pay dirt and separate dirt from gold. The closest available supply lay with the creek to the north, which yet lacked a name.

  For a half-dozen years the Chinese diverted the whole flow of the creek into their ditch and brought the water to their mining operations down-river. And the water frothed through their sluice boxes, carrying the dirt with it, but leaving the precious yellow metal in the boxes. And the Chinese scooped it up in wooden spoons, ladled it into buckskin pokes and buried the pokes in the ground so that no thieving white man or Indian could steal it from them. And folks there are who say that to this very day some of the pokes are still buried in the ground, because some of the Chinese miners died of the smallpox and the secret of where they had buried their gold died with them.

  Eventually the gravel was mined of its treasure, and the Chinese that the pox didn’t want went digging for gold elsewhere. But now white men had found the creek and cast appraising eyes at the narrow, fertile valley lying about its mouth. The soil washed down from the hills above was rich and would grow vegetables and fruit, as well as hay and grain if you turned the soil with a plow. Upstream a few miles, where the land levelled off to form a large plateau, were thousands of acres of uncropped grass. The land could be had for the taking, and the ample year-round flow of the creek could be relied upon to fill the irrigation ditches that must bring water to the crops. So once again was Meldrum tapped of its flow, and around the year 1860 a livestock industry was born on the creek that still flourishes today.

  In a land that is covered with three or more feet of snow for at least four months out of the twelve, an ample supply of hay in stack or shed is as essential to a healthy cattle industry as spring, summer and fall range. The carrying capacity of the range can be no greater than that of the stackyards that must furnish hay in winter when cattle cannot fend for themselves.

  The soil in the valley was rich, and there was enough of it to provide winter feed for as many horses and cows as the summer ranges could support without their being overgrazed. But Meldrum Creek lies in the “dry” belt of British Columbia, where irrigation is as necessary to the growing of crops as the very soil itself. In 1860, and during the early part of the nineteenth century, that water was there, in the creek. It was there because for ages long gone one generation of beavers following another had been dedicated to the purpose of ensuring that it would be there. Though the whole water table of the creek began to lower when the last of the beavers was taken from it, not for a few years yet was that gradual shrinkage noticeably observed and felt by the ranchers who had come to live in the valley. When the creek did become visibly sick, and there was scarce sufficient water with its summer flow to irrigate one acre of ground where before there was sufficient for a half-dozen, no one seemed to be able to diagnose the true nature of the ailment, still less suggest a remedy.

  The root of the disease lay in the lowering lakes and drying marshlands above. They were the original source and supply of all the water that moved down the creek to make rendezvous with the river. Upon any glacial watershed, it is the eternal ice fields at its source that nourish the stream in summer, but if those ice fields were to be taken away and dumped into an ocean, the stream itself must dry up.

  There are no glaciers at the headwaters of Meldrum Creek, but once upon a time the creek had its beavers, and as long as they were there the creek was always healthy. Not until the very last colony of beavers was taken from it did the creek begin to sicken.

  In competitive haste to get the last few beavers, both white trapper and Indian cut their dams and set their traps in the breach, knowing that the most trap-shy beaver must move in at nightfall to repair the damage and prevent the loss of that precious water impounded by the dam. No other fur-bearer is quite so vulnerable to the steel trap as the beaver. He cannot conceal his presence, for it is instantly revealed by the evidence of his work. The prime function in the life cycle of a beaver is the conservation of water, and he cannot fulfill that function without leaving a sign behind him. The stumps of his cuttings always remain to reveal his presence to all who look for him. In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century there were many abroad upon the watershed with their traps, keenly seeking just such a telltale sign.

  Upon Meldrum Creek the extermination of the beavers was both simple and decisive. Large tribes of Indians lived on their reservations within a day or so’s journey of the watershed. Egged on by the greed of the white fur buyers, these Indians hunted the creek from source to mouth seeking freshly cut trees, which warned of a beaver’s whereabouts. Indians were not the only vultures to squat down at the remnants of the feast. White men, too, passed up the pelt of no fur-bearer that could readily be turned into cash or trade. But soon no Indians and no whites came to the creek looking for fur. The beavers had ceased to exist.

  Besides the many beaver ponds, the h
eadwaters of Meldrum Creek were sprinkled with natural lakes, which when full to their banks contributed greatly to the healthy annual flow of the creek. After the passing of the beavers and loss of water in their dams, the flow of the creek dwindled to such a state that now there was an alarming shortage of water for the irrigation ditches. It was now that the ranchers gazed speculatively at these many lakes straddling the creek above. Speculation bred action, and in short order the lakes were ditched and lowered of their content. Thus was Peter robbed to settle accounts with Paul.

  But now the beaver marshes were dry. There was no slow but assured seepage of water through the dams to maintain an even flow into the lakes at a time of the year when evaporation is at its highest pitch. Yet it was during that time that the irrigation ditches needed water most to bring moisture to the crops. The lakes were ditched to obtain this water, and to such an extent that the annual precipitation could not begin to repay the borrowings of the previous summer. Now real trouble stared the cattlemen bleakly in the eye.

  In the fall of 1926 when I first saw the valley, the flow of the creek was such that of the six or seven cattle ranches there that had to have water in their ditches if they were to have winter feed for their stock, only the owner of the original water right on the creek had any at all. And that ranch had scarcely enough to irrigate a first crop of alfalfa, let alone a second.

  Government, in the form of the Water Rights Branch, Department of Lands and Forests, moved in to appraise the melancholy situation, ran transits over the lakes, jotted down figures in their notebooks, shook their heads and departed—but continued to extract fees from the ranchers entitling them to use water that wasn’t there to use. There was certainly no lack of dam sites behind which water might be stored and conserved. What was lacking was concrete action whereby at least some of the major beaver dams above might be closed and their breastworks raised. But the cattlemen were so busy squabbling with each other over the nonexistent water that they apparently had no time to explore the means of providing it.

  This then was the situation on Meldrum Creek that day in late June when we explored its marshes, seeing what they had to offer us, insidious doubt creeping into our minds that they could ever again support even a small measure of the wildlife that had been there when Lala was a child.

  “We’ll have to repair the dams before anything else can be done,” said Lillian, “and turn the marshes into lakes.”

  “And just how do you figure on going about that unless we have the go-ahead from the Water Rights Branch or the ranchers themselves?” I replied.

  Lillian kept silent. She knew as well as I that we couldn’t tamper with or shut off the flow of the creek when there wasn’t enough water there to meet the needs of the ranchers below. If we did we’d be hitched up to trouble.

  Now, and after having spent five long days in the saddle, skirting the edges of the marshes and following the deer paths through the forest, and in all that time glimpsing no other fur-bearer’s track except those of the coyotes (their tracks were everywhere), I summed it all up by declaring, “It’s hopeless.”

  Lillian was staring into the flames of the campfire. With a sudden impulse, she looked up at my face and said quietly, “Eric, I never want to hear you say that word hopeless again. We may not have much of anything here in this wilderness. But the one thing that we’ll always have plenty of is hope.”

  Chapter 6

  It was so hot that sweat drenched our skin when we were just stretched out in the shade of the cottonwoods, busy with nothing but our thoughts. It wasn’t a sticky heat so often dispelled by a thunderstorm, but an arid, molten heat that withered the pea vines and timber vetch, sucked the sap from the slough grass, turning its green a jaundiced yellow, and shrivelled the blueberries on their bushes as quickly as they formed. To Lillian, the loss of the blueberries was a tragedy indeed. They’d flowered out nicely in June, promising a bumper crop, and given a shower or two of rain in July, their bushes would be loaded with plump purple berries that she looked forward to picking and preserving as fruit and jam for the winter. But there was no rain in July, and not a drop in August. There was day after endless day, and week after endless week, of pitiless, searing sun, which meant we’d have no fruit or jam for the winter unless it came in tins from the trading post.

  But the loss of the blueberries was only one of the calamities to strike Meldrum Creek in that summer of 1931, when prairie became desert, alfalfa fields rusted before they were in bloom, and when even the pines and spruces seemed unable to find enough moisture in the ground to freshen their needles.

  From source to mouth Meldrum Creek’s bed was as parched and dry as the game trails leading to it, as were most of the lesser lakes about it too. And in the oozing black mud that soon crusted hard we saw the webbed track of many a duck or goose too young to fly, too clumsy to run and without wisdom enough to strike out overland and seek water elsewhere. For them there was no hope at all. Taking full advantage of a profitable situation when they saw it, the coyotes moved down on the watershed in packs to hunt where the hunting was easy. Many a scattering of duck and goose feathers littered the creek bed during that summer of frightening drought.

  Waterfowl was not the only form of life to be snuffed out in the mud. With the creek channel and all lesser lakes in the timber dry, cattle wandered along the banks with their tongues hanging from their jaws, all seeking water. In front of the old beaver dams there was an inch or two of foul water that was as much mud as liquid, but between this and dry ground were several yards of deep and sticky bog. Goaded on by their thirst, the cattle wallowed out through the mud, trying to reach the puddles beyond. Many never got there but instead mired to the belly, unable to go back, unable to go on. And there in the mud they died, though the process of dying might take all of four or five days.

  And come roundup time in the fall, many a rancher would be shaking his head at the wasteful loss of it all, and thinking that if things didn’t change, the day wasn’t far off when maybe his cattle would have to go all the way to the river to find themselves a drink.

  But the stinking slime of Meldrum Creek was not the only mire laying claim to a victim. Other creeks were in like condition, and on open rangeland where water supply consisted mostly of shallow depressions in the ground that collected and held the spring runoff of the snows, the situation became so hazardous to livestock that the Grazing Rights Branch, Department of Lands and Forests, built fences around many of the potholes so that cattle could not try to get out to what little water might be left in them and so bog down.

  Meldrum Creek in 1931, before the Colliers had repaired the beaver dams. Thirsty cattle seeking water were drawn to the puddles in front of the old dams, only to be mired in the mud along the banks of the creek, where they died.

  If fencing was a temporary safeguard, it was not a permanent cure. In time, posts supporting wire or rail would rot in the ground and have to be reset. And of what use to stock was the surrounding range if their only available water supply was fenced off and denied them?

  The only permanent solution to the trouble was to conserve enough water in the kind years so that there would be plenty in the lean. That’s what had to be done, and maybe it could be, too. Anyway, an idea began shaping in my mind, vague at first but becoming clearer the longer I thought it over. And when all was crystal clear, I told Lillian about it.

  “The Water Rights Branch,” I suddenly announced. “We’ll write to them about it.”

  “About what, the blueberries?” With a laugh Lillian said, “I’ve got blueberries on the brain.”

  “It’s a good thing you’ve got some somewhere, ’cause there’s not a one in the woods.” And after she’d wrinkled her nose up at me for this, I went on, “About Meldrum Creek and the beaver dams.”

  Lillian’s face showed her skepticism. “What would the Water Rights Branch know about beavers?”

  “Darned little, maybe. But they should know something about dams.”

  “Such as?
”

  “Well,” I replied, “the more dams there are on a creek, the more water there’ll be in it.”

  Lillian sniffed, and the sniff spoke for itself. “Then why don’t they build some dams on our creek?”

  “Haven’t the time or inclination.”

  “Then why bother writing them?” Lillian was in a mood for arguing.

  “Because,” I began to explain slowly, “we’ll do the job ourselves if they’ll give us the go-ahead.”

  “I see.” Lillian sat very quiet and still for a moment, hands folded in her lap. Then: “Sit down and write them about it,” she said. “But I think it will only be a waste of time.”

  And so to the Water Rights Branch, Department of Lands and Forests, I penned a lengthy letter, explaining the situation as I saw it on Meldrum Creek, and emphasizing my belief that the only permanent solution to the water problem lay in repairing the beaver dams scattered over the upper reaches of the watershed, and reflooding the marshes. We were willing to do that work ourselves without asking help or payment from anyone. Would the Water Rights Branch give the project their official blessing and provide us with some protection for the dams after they were repaired? It would be silly of us to begin the job if before it had been given a fair trial the dams were tapped of their water by the ranchers below.

  And the letter went off and in due time was answered. “We are of the opinion that your plan would be of no benefit whatsoever to the annual flow of Meldrum Creek—” There it was, polite, concise, chilly, the drab phraseology of officialdom wherever it might be encountered. There it was, the encouragement given us by the Water Rights Branch; but if it dampened our spirits for the moment, it couldn’t douse them altogether. There was still another source we could turn to for encouragement, and it was Lillian who reminded me of it.