Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  A couple of roving fur buyers and a Chinese man were seated at the table, playing poker for sizable stakes. Three Indian trappers shuffled in from the store, watched the poker game for a few minutes, then produced a soiled deck of cards of their own and went to playing blackjack. I watched the gambling at the table for a while, long enough to arrive at the conclusion that the luck lay with the Chinese man. “Hope he cleans them right out,” I muttered to myself, and then went to the store. I’ve never had much sympathy for fur buyers.

  The trader was in his office juggling with Accounts Rendered. He glanced up at me, rubbing his hands, maybe in expectation of some profitable trade to come. “Thought maybe you’d all died,” he greeted me cheerfully.

  “There were moments back on Island Lake Flats when we pretty near did,” I responded a bit sourly.

  The trader thought a long moment, then said, “Heller of a winter, all right. Recalls to mind that winter that poor old Joe Isnardy froze to death. Guess that was a year or two before you left the old country. Before prohibition, and I ran a bar here then.” He knit his brows as if trying real hard to recall events from the past. “It was forty-five below when Joe lit out of here with his team and sleigh, heading east. A couple of miles out the cold caught up to him. Joe had a case of Scotch in the sleigh, and to sort of counteract the cold he tapped a bottle. Seems like a couple of drinks wasn’t enough to even warm his hands, let alone his innards, so he goes back at the bottle again. After a while he tied the team up, squatted down on a log and just sat there, pouring the whisky down his gullet. That’s how they found him, a week later, sitting there on the log, frozen stiff as a board, two empty bottles in the snow, a half-emptied one in his hands.”

  “What happened to the horses?” I asked with curiosity.

  “What do you think?” he snorted. “They died and went to heaven and lived happy ever after.”

  After a half-hour of obstinate haggling I peddled our scant catch of furs off for one hundred and seventy dollars’ worth of supplies. There was no cash in the transaction this time; it took our every pelt to pay for all we needed.

  We stayed at Riske Creek for three days, resting our horses, talking about the weather to whoever wanted to listen, poring over the mail and hoping real hard for a warm-up in the weather that would let us get back home without freezing to death on the way. And on the fourth day, with the temperature at a mild zero, we said “so long” to all at the trading post, and thirty hours and one overnight camp later, arrived back at the cabin. There to sit the winter out until the cry of a wild goose said sure enough it’s spring.

  We have spent more than two dozen Christmases now at Meldrum Creek. But when I look back over all of them, I think that that Christmas season spent on Island Lake Flats in a sleigh at forty degrees below zero, partaking of the open hospitality of Redstone Johnny and his plump woman Lizzie—roast moose and a roaring fire—stands out as one of the best of all.

  Chapter 14

  Moleese was a hunchback. He wasn’t born a hunchback, but according to Indian history, his back was broken at four years of age, when a horse fell and rolled on him. Nature, not surgical skill, eventually, after a fashion, reknit the broken back bone, and Moleese was able to ride again. But Nature could not possibly hide the evidence of her handiwork: the hunch would still be there when Moleese set out for his last happy hunting ground. Besides being a hunchback, there was this about Moleese: he was the first man I’d hired. For despite his deformed back, it was Moleese who helped me tame and harness the floods that spewed down Meldrum Creek in that spring of 1935.

  In early spring of 1935 a major flood threat lay over the Fraser River drainage system. Five feet of packed snow covered the three- and four-thousand-foot levels, nine to ten feet at six thousand feet, and still more above that. Whether there was to be cataclysmic disaster or not all depended upon when and how the snow melted. In normal springs, all snow at the lower levels had run off to the river at least three weeks before the snow at higher levels started to move. But if, because of an unseasonably late spring, the runoff at lower and higher levels coincided, then the Fraser River, where it spreads out and moves slowly through the reclaimed lands about its mouth, could not possibly digest the flow within its banks, and unless the man-made dikes about it were stout enough to contain the surplus, thousands of acres of farmland must again, momentarily anyway, go back to that river from which they had been filched in the first place.

  Depth of snow was not the only factor contributing to the threat. The prolonged cold of last December and January presented still another, in the form of ice. Unless there is sufficient volume and depth of water moving along any watercourse, at a temperature of fifty below zero the flow becomes momentarily dammed by the action of the frost, and then the water backs up and forms a miniature ice field. Eventually the law of gravity exerts itself, and the water cuts another channel through the ice and starts moving downgrade again, but only to find itself once more shut off by frost a little farther downstream. By spring, such miniature ice fields are present at frequent intervals along the whole watershed, each awaiting a moment when the sun and the wind will melt them. Then, every such ice field melting and feeding the watershed when its banks are already filled to their carrying capacity contributes just that much more water to a drainage system that neither needs nor can properly digest it.

  But in the spring of 1935 the province was spared major flooding. By early May the snow at the lower levels had melted and run off to the Pacific Ocean. The freshets from the mountains did not get underway until early June, and by that time the Fraser River could contain them. The dikes barricading the farmlands were never in serious threat of being breached, and contented farm folk tilled their reclaimed acres behind them, watching the broad sweep of the river pass innocently by. Not for half a century or more had those reclaimed lands been inundated, and in the meantime the dikes had been raised and strengthened, and thousands of acres of hay, grain, vegetables and other crops were being cultivated behind them. Never again would the Fraser breach those dikes—at least, so everyone thought.

  To us, this sudden extravagance of water was as a gift from heaven. The snows that had so seriously upset our hopes where the winter trapping was concerned now gave us fleeting opportunity to proceed with the building of many more dams. Several winters might come and go before such opportunity came our way again.

  In early May every gulley and fold ribbing the watershed was bursting its britches, spewing the melting snows into Meldrum Creek. There was no need now for us to worry about the ranchers and their irrigation ditches. The creek channel held more water than all the agriculture at its mouth could use. It rushed down the land in a muddy, turgid tide, through many a broken beaver dam, out of the ditched mouth of many a shrunken lake, tarrying nowhere, fired by a frantic urge to keep its tryst with the river in the briefest possible time.

  Apart from the few dams we had built, there was nothing to check the flow and hold and conserve all this excess water. But if agriculture, river and ocean had no use for it, there were others on the creek who did: ourselves. For five years now we had been almost praying for a chance of this sort to come our way, and now it had come, bringing with it opportunity to close the gates upon the larger marshes, soak their blotting paper and fill their saucers until they overflowed.

  In the five years that had gone by since we had come to the creek to live, we hadn’t fared too badly. The cabin now had a board floor in it. The secondhand mowing machine and rake were there in the makeshift shed. We had been able to replace the blocks of wood that were our original chairs for more elegant furniture. And besides these indexes of accumulating wealth, we had managed to amass a bank roll totalling almost three hundred dollars. So, comforted by thoughts such as these and convinced that if we now smote while the iron was hot and allowed none of the water to go to waste, we would soon be able to start trapping large numbers of muskrats. I took a deep breath and arrived at a momentous decision: I would become an employer of lab
our.

  In the opening up of a frontier or the taming of a wilderness, woman has often played equal part with man. Without Lillian at my side sharing the common life through good fortune or bad, giving to that life the many things that only a woman can give, I know that my hopes and aspirations to do with the waters of Meldrum Creek would never have been fulfilled.

  But enough is enough. Though Lillian had helped me with every dam hitherto built, I could now hire an Indian for two dollars a day and board, and we had money enough to pay such a wage for maybe six weeks. Working from seven in the morning until six at night, I reckoned two men could move a pile of dirt in six weeks and rebuild several dams.

  When I broached the matter with Lillian, she stamped a heel angrily down on the floor and scolded, “Six weeks wages and board to an Indian means parting with around eighty dollars in cash. With that much money,” and her eyes darted around the cabin, “we could buy a little more furniture, or that set of matched dinner dishes I’ve been wanting so long.”

  “Why the dinnerware?” I asked mildly, grinning. “We’ve been eating off enamel plates and drinking out of enamel cups for a good many years now and don’t seem to be any the worse off for it.”

  “You just don’t understand,” said Lillian flatly.

  “Sure I understand.” Then, in more serious tone, I said, “It’s not right that you should be shovelling dirt now that we’ve money enough to pay someone else to do it. And then again there’s another problem we’ll soon have to tackle.”

  “Problem?” Lillian frowned. “What sort of a problem?”

  “Veasy’s education,” I replied quietly, then waited for that to sink in.

  Veasy would be six years old on the 28th of next July. The very thought of sending him away to school and boarding him with others was more than either Lillian or I cared to contemplate. We were miles from any school. The environment of the wilderness had made the three of us as a single unity, the one dependant upon the other. From one month’s end to another we seldom saw anyone else. At five years of age Veasy could set a snare and catch a rabbit as professionally as I, for the woods themselves had been a school of sorts to him. And the process of setting the snare demanded a certain amount of patience, a concentration of thought and effort, which is why I taught him how to set them in the first place. The job sharpened his mind, gave him something constructive to think about, and so taught him how to make use of his brain.

  He was already trailing along at my heels now and then when I went out in the woods to hunt, and often his keen eyes spotted a deer before I saw it myself. “Look, Daddy, deer!” And then I’d see the deer myself, lying very still, head and neck flush with the ground as deer often will lie and watch the hunter pass by.

  Already the simple everyday chores of the woods were leaving their mark on his character. He never asked Lillian or me to do anything for him that he could possibly do himself. Lillian no longer had to fill the woodbox at night if I wasn’t home in time to do it for her. Though he could only pack a few sticks of wood at a time, Veasy took care of the woodbox. If, when playing by the lake, he came running to the cabin with the news that he’d just seen a timber wolf or moose travelling the shoreline, then we knew that it was a moose or timber wolf he’d seen. He never lied, perhaps because he’d never known occasion when a lie was needed to cover up the truth.

  Mostly at his own initiative, he was already spelling out simple words in a book, and making sense of them too. If so far he couldn’t write or print the words, I judged that he was only a short step from being able to do so. I’d given considerable thought to the matter of somehow giving him a fair education and arrived at the conclusion that between Lillian and me we’d try to do the job at home and see what came of our efforts.

  In England, I had gone from governess to kindergarten, kindergarten to grammar school. Along with other subjects, I’d delved into Latin and chemistry, algebra and trigonometry, and like matters usually taught in correct establishments of learning. But since my thoughts were so often leagues away from the book on my desk, no sooner had my mind mastered a verb or equation than the process of its mastering was promptly forgotten.

  But Lillian never had been blessed with such opportunity for education. At eleven years of age she’d been shipped away to Soda Creek, forty miles from Riske Creek, to board with relatives, and walked three miles each morning to a one room log schoolhouse attended by nine other pupils. At fourteen she quit school, but in the three years at Soda Creek she had learned to read very well, write fairly well, to add and subtract, multiply and divide. And every lesson she learned was one she never forgot. So what with all that I’d forgotten, and all that she remembered, I saw no good reason why we should send Veasy away to school and so break up the unit.

  “We’ll sit down right now,” I said to Lillian, “and send away for pencils, scribblers and textbooks. And from now on you can do far more good keeping him anchored to his lessons than helping me build dams.” Then, remembering the set of matched dinnerware, I promised, “Come next March I aim to trap around four hundred muskrats, and I know that I can do it. Out of the proceeds of the fur, I’m going to buy you the fanciest set of dinner dishes there is in the catalogue.”

  Moleese was no darker than any other Chilcotin Indian, no fairer either. As was the case with so many of the Indians, a white man had to guess at his age and claim top marks if he came within ten years of guessing right.

  Moleese and his woman Cecelia occasionally came to the headwaters of Meldrum Creek in early spring to catch the squawfish moving upstream to spawn. Though the white man might turn up his nose at such bony fare, the true Chilcotin Indian, in the spring of the year when moose and deer were thin and tough, considered them a delicacy, bones and all.

  In that early spring of 1935 Moleese and Cecelia again had an appetite for squawfish and came to the creek to net them. They pitched their tent a mile upstream from the cabin, and the ring of their horse bells told me of their presence. That evening I paid them a visit.

  The layout of the camp was as familiar to me as the smell that pervaded the atmosphere around it. The tent, pitched under a pine tree, was small, maybe eight feet by ten. The canvas, once white, was now a dirty gray. It bore evidence of continual patching, but no doubt it shed rain after a fashion. The customary campfire smouldered in front of the flaps, and behind it was another fire, mostly smoke, burning beneath a rack of peeled pine poles. On the rack rested scores of squawfish, split and opened down the belly, flesh to the smoke. It was the smell of the curing fish that permeated the atmosphere. Cecelia was behind the tent too, methodically and stoically scraping hair from the hide of a recently killed deer. Deer hides were everywhere, though all but the one Cecelia laboured at had obviously been skinned from kills of long ago.

  Moleese grinned at me as I approached and, twisting his distorted back, heeled down by the fire on a deerskin. The two saddles chucked carelessly under a tree had deerskin blankets beneath them too, as was the case with the two pack saddles a few feet away. I was quite certain that if I peeked into the tent there would be a deerskin flattened out— serving as a sheet to the mattress of boughs it covered. Just as there’d be a deerskin spread on the dusty floor of the tent on which food was served when it was too cold or wet to eat outside. I thought, “Take away their deer and what have they left?”

  Bidding Moleese a gruff “Hello,” I too heeled back by the campfire, as if absorbed in its flames. It was fatal to appear in a hurry when doing business with an Indian.

  Then, after at least two minutes of silence: “You catch lots fish?” I inquired to open up proceedings.

  “You betcha.” Moleese patted his belly. “He damn good too.”

  “How long before your belly get all the fish he want?” I asked.

  Moleese picked his teeth. “Two—three days and then me and my woman don’t want to eat fish for a long time.”

  It was time to come to the point. “You want catch job for maybe five or six weeks?” I said it cas
ually, as if I didn’t care whether he replied yes or no.

  The grin dropped from Moleese’s face. His eyes took on a hard, crafty look. “What kind of job?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Shovel job. You damn good man with a shovel. All you have to do is fill barrow with dirt.”

  “Goddamn hard work,” complained Moleese. “That kind of work make my back sick.”

  That I didn’t believe. In 1927 Moleese had dug a ditch for the trader at Riske Creek two hundred yards long and six feet deep, and in quick time too. My back wasn’t broken when I was four years old, but I doubt that I could have dug it in less time.

  After fifteen minutes of barren silence Moleese said cautiously, “How much you pay me?”

  Knowing there would have to be a great deal of skirmishing before a wage was settled upon, I offered: “Dollar and a half a day and grub.”

  Moleese scowled. “Too cheap. Two dollars and fifty cents more better.”

  Not if I had my way. “One dollar and seventy-five cents.”

  Moleese waggled his head. “Two dollars and twenty-five cents more better.”

  I said, “Just fill shovel with dirt and then fill barrow. Easy job, that.” And: “One dollar and ninety cents,” I came up to.

  But it wasn’t quite enough. “Two dollars more better.”

  “Okay, you win. Two dollars a day it is.” Though I intended to pay that much anyway, I scowled as we clinched the deal, letting on that an Indian’s shrewd bargaining had bested that of a white man. And Moleese registered his satisfaction at the way things turned out with a gaping grin. “When we start work?” he asked.