Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  No, there was little of good cheer in the papers. Several thousand unemployed rioting in the streets of Vancouver, several millions without work in those United States of America. If that was the world of civilized man, the sooner we got back to our trapline the better.

  The matter of when to start back was usually left to Lillian. It would be at least three or four weeks before we came out to Riske Creek again, and now that we were here I didn’t want to hurry her about getting back. But after a couple of days of drinking tea and eating fruitcake with Mrs. Becher, and talking about all the mysterious things that women generally talk about when two of them are together, Lillian stated bluntly, “I’d like to go home.” And as if that wasn’t maybe quite enough, she added, “There’s hay to think about.” I swear that no sooner had Lillian gotten one job off her mind than she began thinking about another. And perhaps it is just as well that this was so. I was sometimes slightly inclined to put things off, for a day or two anyway.

  But she was right. Before September’s shortening days brought the first really heavy frosts of fall we had to have winter feed for our horses. The horses were our only means of contact with the Outside unless we cared to make the fifty-odd-mile return trip on snowshoes or afoot.

  Hay of a kind, like so much else, was there for the taking. On a small beaver meadow a step or so upstream from the cabin, we could cut a half-dozen tons of slough grass hay, which, if lacking the quality of timothy or clover, would keep flesh upon an animal’s ribs until the backbone of a winter was broken and new grass in sight.

  We had no horse mower and rake and didn’t know where we could borrow them, for now every mower and rake in the land was busy piling up hay against the hungry months ahead. But we had outfitted ourselves with a scythe, a large and clumsy hand rake, and pitchfork. And of course we had fourteen hours of light each day in which to use them. I wielded the scythe, and if this was one mowing machine with which I’d had no previous experience, the compelling needs of the moment soon taught me how. After a couple of days of wracking backache I began to attain a sort of proficiency with the scythe, and each time the blade whished through the air, a swath of bright green hay lay wilting in its backtrail. As the hay cured, Lillian came behind with the rake and a pitchfork, piling it up in cocks. And as often as not, as soon as a cock was built, Veasy turned somersaults on it, knocking it to pieces.

  Between the two of us we made a rack out of dried poles and pegged it to wooden runners, then hitched the team to the primitive, though very efficient, vehicle and hauled the hay and stacked it by the house.

  The summer waned; fall stalked down upon us. The aspen and willow leaves traded their green for rusty gold.

  September gave us a few days of light rain and once more a trickle of water slithered down the creek.

  October’s raw winds brought flocks of sandhill cranes and Canada geese to the scene, noisy as noisy can be as they circled the lake by the house. Southward bound were the cranes and the geese, and if the former seldom stopped to visit a while, the geese were more neighbourly. They squatted down on the lakes in large, gossiping flocks and stayed a week or two, resting their wings and gorging on the short alkali grass at water’s edge.

  On our trapline, any meat killed after the middle of October will soon freeze solid and stay frozen until late in the following March. If the wilderness was unable to supply us a turkey for the nearing Christmas, it could give us a goose. Taking the ten-gauge shotgun down from its pegs on the cabin wall, I saddled up a couple of horses, and with Veasy on the rump of Lillian’s mare, we went about the job of hanging us up some geese.

  This demanded teamwork between Lillian and me, as well as the need to curb Veasy’s exuberant spirits for a few minutes so that he wouldn’t flush the geese before everything was ready. First we must check on the wind, for when leaving the water Canada geese always take off against the wind, never with it. Satisfied on that score, I spent several minutes sizing the situation up, deciding what course the geese would take when they became airborne. Then I whispered to Lillian, “I’ll snake around and hide myself in that patch of timber at the south end of the lake. Allow me ten minutes to get into position and then you bust out of the woods at a gallop. That should put them off the water right.”

  “How am I going to tell when the ten minutes are up when neither of us has a watch?” she objected.

  But now a few of the geese were impatiently chattering to one another as resting geese often will when they are thinking about flying off. I had to get off and into my hiding place. “You’ll just have to guess,” was the only advice I could give her as I sneaked away through the trees.

  But Lillian always played it safe. It was more like half an hour than any ten minutes before she moved out of the timber to flush the geese, although how she managed to keep Veasy quiet that long is something I’ll never know. But anyway she came, sometimes at a trot, often at a gallop, confusing the geese and pushing them out low over my head, a perfect shot for any gunner.

  “Bang-bang and goosey falls down!” chirruped the palefaced Hiawatha behind her as the ten-gauge dropped two of the geese. After a few hunts like this, and when a dozen geese were hanging under the spruce behind the cabin, where they froze solid overnight, we bothered the geese no more that fall. I had long ago divorced my mind from the principle of killing just for the sport of killing. The hunting and killing of any species of game, feathered or otherwise, was no longer the sport I had known it to be in England’s far-off days. Hunting was now a part of our effort for survival, and when the need no longer existed, my guns went back to their peg on the cabin wall.

  October’s last day went like the final flicker of a candle. Lakes were belching and grumbling as thickening ice froze them tight. With the freezing of the lakes went the last straggling flocks of geese. A loneliness of sorts bore down on us with the passing of the geese, for there was ever something cheering about their chatter. With their departure we could now expect but a moment or two of respite before winter sank its claws upon the wilderness with grim reality.

  But there were far more important things to do than contemplate the drab months ahead. There were traps to be steamed in a brew of fir needles, to rid them of all suspicious scent clinging to their steel. There was snowshoe harness and webbing to check and oil, stovepipes to clean so as to lessen the danger of their catching fire when the stoves were banked with wood against the bite of the cold outside. Seldom a winter went by in the Chilcotin but that some two or three homes did not go up in smoke, taking with them almost all they possessed. Few of their owners could afford insurance, if indeed they had been able to get any on a building of sun-bleached logs, sod roof and with rusty stovepipes for chimneys. The only fire protection we had was keeping the stovepipes clean.

  It required all of a week to set out and bait the traps, and by the time the last set was made, six inches of powdery snow had fallen. The coming of the snow reminded me of another job that must be done before we could give all our attention to the traps. It was a job as hazardous as it was urgent, and one that neither of us looked forward to. But due to the now almost-empty pocketbook, it was one we could not forego.

  Chapter 8

  Tossing a lighted torch into a bear den may seem a rather risky way to get a winter’s grease supply, but we had no other choice. We lacked a year’s supply of grease and we lacked even a small supply of money and had no intention of purchasing grease from any trading post if we could obtain it free elsewhere.

  Late in September I had busied myself for all of three days prowling the woods in search of an “active” bear den. An active den in this case was one that had been cleaned out by a bear in late summer and made ready for winter hibernation. Finally I located one and blazed a trail from it back to the cabin, so that there would be no question of our being able to return to the spot when the den had a tenant.

  Now that winter had come to stay, that tenant should be in residence. Hoping that this was so, we followed the blazes back to the den a
nd cautiously approached its mouth. One quick glance told me yes, the den is occupied. The bear had crawled down its funnel and covered the mouth of the hole behind it with sticks and moss.

  Gingerly I removed the plug from the mouth. Veasy sat on the rump of the horse, eyes popping with excitement. “Bang-bang and the bear falls down.” Now I could wind the fetid stink of the bear, hear its slow breathing.

  I straightened up and tossed Lillian an assuring grin. “Think you can go ahead with your share of the business?” I asked, as if she really had nothing to do at all.

  I guessed that her heart was pounding furiously and that there was probably a knot at the pit of her stomach. For Lillian’s share of the business was expecting a lot of any woman. But she stepped toward me, biting her lip. “I can try.”

  There was just a hint of doubt in her voice, which compelled me to stand very still, watching the mouth of the den. Was it really worth it? Weren’t we taking desperate chances? What if I missed? What if the bear took a notion right now to come out of the den, with Lillian and I afoot, a couple of feet from the den? But the .303 rifle seemed to say it was all right. But what if the rifle missed? Shucks, I thought, it can’t. It seldom did at a deer, so why at a bear, a few feet from its muzzle? And anyway, we needed the grease.

  I said, “Let’s fix the horses.” And we led them off a ways and tied them to trees. Lillian lifted Veasy from the rump of her horse into the saddle proper. “Sit still,” she warned him, “and don’t you dare wiggle an eyebrow.”

  Returning to the den, I bolted a shell into the barrel of the .303. Then I touched a match to a long sliver of pitchwood. The torch spluttered and flared. I handed it to Lillian, at the same time giving her instructions that were terse but to the point. “When I shout ‘let ’er go,’ shove it down the den and scram for the horses.” And in afterthought: “And don’t miss the saddle.”

  I stepped behind a tree a half-dozen yards from the mouth of the den. I wiped a speck of snow from my right eyelash. My heart raced a little. But the rifle said, “Nothing to get skittish about.” I made a final inspection of the gun, especially its sights. The front one was iced up a little, but I soon fixed that. I gulped air into my lungs, hanging onto it for a second or two. Then it whooshed out of me in one strident roar: “Let ’er go!”

  Without a falter Lillian stepped almost into the jaws of the den.

  I couldn’t see her head and shoulders; they were in its mouth as she thrust the torch home. Then she raced for the horses and flung herself into the saddle.

  For a moment that seemed like ten years I stood very still at the tree, resting the gun barrel against its trunk and lining the sights on the mouth of the den. And in a flash it happened. A huge bear scrambled out of the den, just as I figured it would, muttering angrily to itself, dense fur rippling along its spine. It was black as polished coal, fat as a grain-fed porker, and about as big as black bears come.

  Crack! The bear somersaulted as the bullet whacked home. “Shoot again!” cried Veasy, who was enjoying it all immensely. The bear was down in the snow, flailing at imaginary enemies with a right front paw. Now it was upright, head rocking from side to side. There was neither nervousness nor excitement in me now. As of course rightly there shouldn’t be with a gun like that in my hand. I sighted in again. Crack! And that one was through the forehead, and the bear reared backward and was dead when it hit the ground.

  Together Lillian and I skinned the animal out, while Veasy went into the den to see what things looked like there. We stripped the flesh and innards of their thick layers of fat and loaded it into gunny sacks. By the time the job was finished, the sacks contained enough bear fat to keep us in lard for a year when rendered out and mixed with moose tallow. Veasy crawled back out of the den. “Warm in there,” he said.

  I lashed the sacks on the pack horse and was about to hoist into my own saddle when a sudden thought occurred to me. I said, “Coyotes like bear meat too.” A couple of heavy spruce trees stood a hundred yards off. Placing a hitch around the bear’s head and taking a turn with the rope on my saddle horn, I snaked the carcass to within a few feet of the spruces. Lillian watched with puzzled eyes, so I told her, “Coyotes will clean the carcass up after a while. I’ll come back tomorrow and set some traps under the trees.” Nothing went to waste that could be put to any use.

  A needling north wind flicked at our faces as we returned home with the spoils. While I unloaded the pack horse, and watered the horses and forked them some hay, Lillian banked the heater stove with wood until its sides were cherry red. Let it blow, let it snow! Now that we had our grease we could devote most all of our time to the traps.

  By the end of the third week in December, twenty-five coyote pelts hung at the outer walls of the cabin. A line of small traps that Lillian herself had set out in the spruces paralleling the creek a few steps from the cabin door caught her fifteen weasels and a mink. The mink was treasure trove, for it was an extra-large male mink with silky charcoal fur, maybe worth all of fifteen dollars.

  “Capitalist,” I mocked, watching her skin out the mink. “What are you going to do with all that money?”

  “There’s a set of matched dinnerware in the catalogue,” she began. Then with a shake of the head: “No, not that yet. We’ll spend it on lumber so’s I can have a floor.” During the first winter of trapping, that was the only mink that left its track in the snow.

  “It’s time,” I was thinking, “that we thought about trading off the catch.”

  With Christmas only four more shopping days away and our stock of groceries lacking much in the way of Yuletide treats, Lillian quickly agreed yes, we’d better sell the furs. So we hitched the team to the sleigh and headed south for the trading post.

  The matter of trading the pelts off at the store was one that demanded infinite time and patience. “What are you paying for good coyote pelts?” I asked Becher by way of a feeler, dumping the skins on the counter.

  He sniffed, then sighed, then sniffed once more. With almost tired indifference, he shook and examined the skins. He bit off the end of a cigar and lighted it. He squinted at me from beneath his heavy gray eyebrows and began palming his chin. He puffed steadily away at the cigar, looking out of the heavy plate-glass windows, as if maybe his thoughts were on England, or India, any place but Chilcotin, B.C. But finally his eyes came back to the fur. “Cash or trade?” he asked.

  “Both.”

  A shot in early winter of Lillian, Veasy and Eric, ready to head out to Riske Creek to get the mail.

  Swinging up on the counter, heels gently drumming its side, the trader fingered a cigar a long moment, then tossed it to me. I too swung up on the counter, heels drumming its side. I bit the end off the cigar, took a firm grip on it with my teeth and asked, “Match?”

  He sighed. “You just got the habit, eh?” But handed me his matchbox.

  An Indian woman entered the store, maybe twenty, maybe fifty, for who was I to judge her age rightly? The trader nicked a disapproving eye at her. “She hasn’t a red cent piece,” he complained. “Not a damned cent.” But I’d worked for the trader long enough myself to know that whenever the Indians were flat broke, Becher would always give them a certain amount of credit and take a chance on their paying him later with either labour or furs.

  “You want something, Sally?” Becher shot a quick glance at the woman and then his eyes returned to the window.

  A blood-red silk handkerchief covered her head, an old woollen sweater her teats. She was almost as broad as she was long, and the cheap calico skirt from the hips on down barely covered her knees. Her teeth were yellow with tobacco juice, her nose was flat, her mouth was big, and she had eyes like a squawfish just hauled from the water. But I had to admit that apart from these minor deficiencies in facial character, she wasn’t bad looking at all.

  Now she giggled and said, “Tobacco.”

  The trader seemed suddenly to tire. “Not a damned cent.” It was addressed to the window, not me or the woman. But after a
while he looked at me and said, “They’ve got five papooses and they’re broke flatter than a pancake. The buck has been sick, and can’t hunt. They’re living off dried salmon.” And with that he flipped open the ledger and took a sack of tobacco from a shelf. “How you pay s’pose I let you have tobacco?” he wanted to know of the woman.

  She had a quick answer to that one. “Yesterday I trap two muskrats. Bimeby when skin dry I bring you.”

  So the trader gave her tobacco, a two-pound tin of syrup, two books of cigarette papers, a box of soda biscuits and a small bag of candy. “When he ready you bring me your muskrat and pay your jawbone (credit),” he warned, and then gave his attention to my furs.

  He complained, “Depression sure has thrown the monkey wrench into the fur business. Take coyotes, for instance.” And he began fingering mine. “Can’t hardly give a good coyote pelt away.”

  I remained mute, studying the end of the cigar. Becher shook and examined the skins, slowly this time. He picked up a pencil and began figuring on a scrap of paper. Then he braced himself and said, “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll allow you two hundred dollars for the lot, half cash, half trade.”

  I began gathering up the skins. “Too cheap. Those furs are worth every penny of two hundred forty dollars if I ship them away to the auction sales.”

  “Auction sales!” The trader snorted. “They’ll rob you blind, those auctions will. Commission, royalty, shipping charges—” And after allowing time for that to sink in, he went on, “They’ll just steal that mink from you, will the auctions. Not a bad one, either.” And he picked up the mink and blew into its fur. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make it two hundred twenty dollars, all in trade.”