Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  In the early fall of 1945, almost any trapper with a nose at all could scent prosperous fur prices on every breath of wind that shivered the tops of the conifers. Our own traps were set out long before the snow came, un-baited and unscented, but there just the same, as we waited for the fur to become fully prime before adding bait and scent.

  Four inches of snow fell in early November, and following the snow the temperature skidded sharply to zero minus five. Now all carnivorous fur-bearers were fully prime, so I scented and baited the traps, leaving Veasy to the job of hauling the logs down off the hill. For somehow the house must be paid for, and I was determined to exact every cent of its cost from the wilderness about us. That wilderness was not to fail me.

  In line with my earlier predictions, fur prices rocketed crazily. Mink hit an all-time high of sixty dollars a pelt for extra-large sizes, and since the muskrat cycle was at a peak there were plenty of mink around to prey upon the muskrats. Each muskrat itself was worth three dollars in cash, or still more in trade. Almost any small, dark and silky fisher cat that got tangled up in the traps was certain of fetching one hundred and fifty dollars, maybe slightly more if one haggled long enough with the trader.

  On the outside, in the land of indoor plumbing and hardtop roads, money started flowing like water down a flume. And deep in the heart of the wilderness the trappers slid their snowshoes over the trapline trails, bowing their heads to the blizzard, silently cursing the frost that pricked their fingers as they adjusted the pan of the trap, but trapping just the same.

  So it’s trap, and trap, and trap, and it’s skin, and skin, and skin! Step into the snowshoe harness when there’s yet no light in the east to see things, bid the moose and the mule deer good morning as they lift from their beds at your coming. And drag back to the cabin by the light of the moon and the stars, cold, weary and all stiffened up from stooping down to the traps and lifting the catches from them.

  Then, after a quick supper, all fur has to be stretched, by the light of the coal-oil lamps, or flickering candle if no other light is at hand. But cleanse and stretch the catch, for God and the wilderness willing, there’ll be more to stretch with the morrow. The fur trade is hungry for pelts and, for this one fleeting moment anyway, cares little about what it pays for them.

  I personally came nigh wearing the webbing of my snowshoes to a frazzle during that winter of high fur prices. It was one winter when the wilderness smiled benevolently. For day after endless day the mercury was at twenty above with the nooning, seldom dropping below zero at night. Not too much snow lay about the game trails, so once a trapline was broken out and packed, one could, if he wished, tote his snowshoes on his back and tend the traps afoot.

  From mid-November until early in February, I had but one day’s respite from the chore of running and tending the traps. It hardly seemed right to be out there in the snows handling traps on the birthday of Our Lord, so on Christmas Day I stayed in the cabin, resting, and doing full and proper justice to the feast that Lillian had been all of a week preparing.

  As soon as the carnivorous fur-bearers showed a hint of’ losing their winter sheen, I pulled the traps set for them. By that time Veasy had all the material for the home that could be obtained from the woods piled up at the site we had selected for its building. Now the two of us were able to give all our attention to the large crop of muskrats that had multiplied upon the marshes.

  It was the hardest trapping of all. One hundred traps set out in the houses today might yield us some seventy or eighty rats on the morrow. All must be toted in off the ice on our backs, loaded on the pack horse, and the skins peeled from them and stretched by lamplight, when the mind and the flesh were begging aloud for rest.

  Lillian’s nimble fingers placed the skins on the stretcher boards and tacked each one in place while Veasy and I did the skinning. Seldom was there a night throughout the muskrat trapping season of 1946 that saw us in bed before midnight, seldom a morning that we weren’t up and moving around by 5 A.M. at the latest.

  By early April, when the ice began turning to slush, and the muskrat houses were collapsing, we three were so tired of it all that we could not have stood the pace of it any longer for all the gold of Ophir. It was with relief that we greeted the disintegration of the ice and muskrat houses. For the moment anyway we’d had our fill of trapping and didn’t care if we ever saw the pelt of a muskrat again, or of any other fur-bearer, for that matter.

  We sprawled on our backs for a few days of lazy relaxation under a swiftly warming sun outside the cabin door, watching squadron upon squadron of wild geese winging by overhead. The irrigation dam was a babble of quacking mallards and other ducks. Bluebirds and robins and multihued woodpeckers were busy with their nesting, and as the shore ice slipped its moorings, and open leads of water thrust dark and slender fingers from land, the beavers of Meldrum Creek came out of lodge and bank run, and threshed the water with their tails as if in salutation to the sheer joy of it all. Spring was back in the wilderness.

  By mid-June Jasper and his work crew tacked down the final layer of roof shakes. The house was finished and ready for us to move into. Hitching the team to the wagon, we piled our mean stock of furniture and other effects in the box and quickly the move was made. And after sixteen years of eating and sleeping in that one-room, sod-roofed cabin, our new home seemed as big and important as Buckingham Palace.

  Eric, Lillian and Veasy in front of their new cabin, designed by Veasy and Lillian.

  The lush returns from the winter’s trapping not only paid cash on the counter for the new building, but were also responsible for bringing another revolutionary event to the changing tempo of our affairs. The high prices received for our furs left us with a healthy bank balance after the house was paid for. The beavers were multiplying fantastically well. Temptation was strong in us to trap a few in the spring of 1946, for then a large beaver pelt was selling for seventy dollars. But somehow we dreaded the thought of trapping any of the beavers until we absolutely had to. A day was fast approaching when we’d have to trap beavers, to keep their numbers in check. But that day was not yet.

  To me, and perhaps Lillian too, the infrequent pilgrimages to Riske Creek in spring, summer and early fall were just another chore, something that must be done every now and then. The return trip took two days no matter how early we got away in the morning. In winter, of course, sleigh runners replaced wagon wheels and then, if the snow lay deep in the track, we were fortunate if we got back in two days; more often it took three or four.

  But still, we’d never known any swifter or easier way of travel, and what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t cry about. What if these times many of the ranchers, and many of their cowboys too, for that matter, had turned their backs on a mode of transportation that had served them so long and so faithfully and were now gripping steering wheel instead of reins, gearshift instead of whip? As far as Lillian and I were concerned, they could have their automobiles. We’d ever trusted in horseflesh, and were still content to do so.

  But Veasy saw things differently. The horses were slow, the wagon rough. And anyway, why spend two days going out to Riske Creek for mail when the round trip could be made in four hours?

  Reading his thoughts and becoming uneasily aware of the outlandish design shaping up in his mind, I decided to bring matters to a head. “What’s ailing you these days?” I cautiously inquired one morning when I noted him standing by the wagon shaking his head.

  He came slowly around in his tracks and said, “We need something out here that will run on gasoline and oil and not grass or hay.”

  I took a measured breath. “You mean an automobile?” Even the very words sounded bitter on my tongue.

  He slowly nodded. “Why not?” Then, without flinching from the probe of my eyes: “There’s a vehicle on the market called a Jeep. Willys Jeep. I saw one at Riske Creek a while back. Fellow who owned it told me all about it. Said you can go anywhere with one that you can with a team and wagon. Just the r
ig for us. It has a four-wheel drive and when you gear it down into bull low you can crawl along at two or three miles an hour. Fellow said it will go through eighteen inches of snow too.”

  Four-wheel drive? Bull low? Just what in hell was the boy talking about?

  “We can pick one up secondhand for a thousand dollars.” The way Veasy said it, a thousand dollars might only have been a five-cent piece.

  “Oh, my God!” I squatted back on my heels, shaking my head at the absurdity of it all. Stink up this wilderness of ours with the exhaust fumes of an automobile? Over my dead body!

  “Lillian,” I suddenly cried. “Hey, Lillian, come here!” And when she came, I said weakly, “It’s Veasy. He thinks we should buy some sort of an automobile. Jeep, he called it. Four-wheel drive—bull low—” And then words failed me.

  “You want Mother to bounce over these rocks in a wagon for the remainder of her days?” Veasy asked jarringly.

  “You want to stink these woods up with gas fumes?” I flared back. Then looking to Lillian for help: “Crazy, isn’t it? Absolutely ridiculous.”

  Lillian neither agreed nor disagreed. She just shook her head and said, “I’m neutral.”

  My eyes drifted almost affectionately to the wagon. Fifteen dollars cash and one coyote pelt, that’s what the wagon had cost me. Not too long ago either. Just how long, though? Only seventeen or eighteen years. It was a good wagon yet, a good stout wagon. In those days they made things to last. That wagon was assembled in times when a vehicle had to be good, true and strong, and last a fellow a lifetime, and maybe that of his grandchildren too. All that the wagon needed was a fresh coat of paint. Give it another coat of paint and it would be as good as new.

  Veasy was reading my thoughts. “Needs new tires too,” he informed me, as if he knew more about old wagons than I did myself. “And the spokes are coming away from the felloes, and the hound gear is falling apart.”

  “Give it a good coat of paint and it’s a fine wagon yet,” I persisted doggedly.

  Veasy wouldn’t give an inch. “A Jeep would soon pay for itself back here. We’ll have to start trapping beavers pretty soon, and as I see things a lot of that could be done with a Jeep. And a whole lot easier and quicker than we could do it with pack horses too.”

  Trap beavers with an automobile? At first it sounded preposterous. But after two weeks of mulling that over in my mind, the suggestion had lost some of its wildness.

  When first we came to the creek, the only trails about it were game trails. In due time some of these trails were cut out a little so we could get over them with our pack horses. Maybe they could be cut still wider. And maybe with the use of a few boxes of stumping powder we could remove some of the rocks from the right-of-way. And by corduroying the track where it crossed the occasional strip of muskeg, and by bridging the creek here and there, maybe we really could get to several of the beaver dams with one of these “Jeeps,” as Veasy called them.

  The issue hung in doubt for almost three months. Veasy clung to his theme that much of the work now done with horses could be done better and quicker with a Jeep. “We could even stack the hay with one when it’s cut.” Or “Haul wood with it too.” Then, sensing that I was wavering, he tossed in some more shots: “Could use it for hunting ducks and geese. Haul moose and deer in out of the woods with it maybe.”

  It still sounded outlandish to me, but now Lillian was neutral no longer. Veasy’s steady, unyielding arguments had convinced her that a thousand dollars spent on a secondhand vehicle wouldn’t be a bad investment at all.

  Versus Veasy alone I might have held out, but with Lillian and Veasy teamed up against me I didn’t stand a chance. We’d buy one of these confounded things with their four-wheel drive and bull low, and bring an end to all this discord that was disturbing the peace of our home. Inwardly I felt sure that such a contraption of gears, spark plugs, carburetor and other whatnots would come to a quick and sorry ending before it travelled many miles over our sort of roads. Or given an ounce of luck we might even manage to get it stuck in a muskeg, where it would soon settle from sight, to be neither seen nor heard of again. This latter prospect cheered me up no end.

  In that fall of 1947—the year of mechanization, I call it—when finally we got the Jeep I was forty-seven years of age. Twenty-seven of those years had been spent in the wilderness or near-wilderness. Yet never once in all those years had I ever once laid a hand on the steering wheel or gearshift of an automobile. I was distrustful of any mode of transportation that did not rely upon something with heart, lungs and good stout legs for its motivating power. Now a team of horses hitched to wagon or sleigh, there was something solid, something a fellow could rely on. Through bogholes or snowdrift, upgrade or down, the horse always got you there eventually. They never left you afoot. And should some mild calamity befall wagon wheel or sleigh runner, it was usually one that could be easily repaired with use of pliers and haywire.

  Now I was suddenly called upon to put my whole faith in a vehicle that had no heart or lungs, lacked anything resembling legs, and with so many innards beneath its bonnet that just staring down at them gave me a headache.

  A friend of ours in Williams Lake drove the newcomer to Riske Creek. The three of us drove out from home with team and wagon to meet it. Veasy was humming a lively tune all the way out, Lillian had an air of expectancy about her, as if we just couldn’t get to Riske Creek quickly enough, that maybe the thing would run away before we got there. I was crestfallen, hanging my head, thinking, “I should have never given in to all this foolishness.”

  And so we came to Riske Creek, and there the vehicle sat, spic and span. There it sat, but—how in heck were we going to get the thing home?

  “Drive it, of course,” said Veasy.

  “Who?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “You, if you like. Or if you don’t want to, I will.”

  “You don’t know the difference between gearshift and toot the horn,” I rudely informed him.

  “But I can learn, can’t I?”

  “Okay,” I said, “go ahead and learn.”

  Our friend gave a half-hour of his time to teaching Veasy how to use gas pedal and clutch, gearshift and instrument panel. Within an hour of first touching the steering wheel, Veasy was driving the vehicle up and down the road. It took me most of a year to learn how to drive a team of horses properly. It took Veasy an hour and a half to learn how to drive that Jeep.

  Despite urgent advice from me that she’d better go back in the wagon, Lillian was perched on the seat beside him when Veasy headed the vehicle north, in the general direction of Meldrum Lake. I stood by the wagon, watching the cloud of dust the Jeep left in its backtracks. When I could no longer hear the purr of the motor, I turned to the friend and said, “Bet two bits he’ll never get it home.”

  “Bet two bits he will.”

  It was a bet I lost. Two and a half hours after leaving Riske Creek, Lillian and Veasy were home. Trailing behind in the wagon I kept gazing ahead, expecting at any moment to see them sitting by the side of the track, the Jeep gone lame or something—and was perhaps a bit disappointed when it wasn’t so.

  The vehicle sat in front of the house for a week before I’d lay a hand on its wheel. Finally Veasy coaxed me into climbing on the seat beside him. “You’ve got to learn to drive it sometime,” he argued, “so why not now?”

  Eventually I tried. I said “giddup” as I moved the gearshift from neutral to first and stepped on the gas pedal, cried “whoa” when I wanted to stop. I ran the contraption headfirst into the irrigation ditch and had to shout for Veasy to come and get it out of there. I skinned the bark off so many jack pines when first I drove it out to Riske Creek that it seemed someone had newly blazed out the track. But finally I learned.

  The wagon never did get its new coat of paint. In fact it has never had a team of horses hitched to it since mechanization came to the trapline. It sits dejectedly under a pine tree, stoically enduring the taunts of the elements, tongue slow
ly rotting, tires loose on the felloes. And sometimes as the sun goes down and the softened murmurings of the wilderness are as an angelus in our ears, Lillian and I walk over to the wagon and squat there on its tongue, chins cupped in the palms of our hands, eyes on the ever present forest. Yet we scarce see the trees. Instead we see the wagon in front of the trading post, within its stout box all we can claim as ours. And when the night breeze touches our skin we barely feel its breath. Instead we feel the sharp jar of the wagon wheels as they roll from rock to rock. “Remember?” I suddenly ask of Lillian, sensing that her thoughts are mine.

  Once Eric purchased a Jeep, the wagon was retired. Here they are off to one of their beaver-trapping cabins; Eric and Veasy built all the roads and bridges on their property.

  She nods. “As if it were yesterday.”

  “Yesterday,” I repeat. “Yes, but what a long way we’ve travelled since yesterday.”

  Chapter 26

  It came on me suddenly, like raindrops from out of an almost cloudless sky, or a buck deer stepping out from behind a curtain of second-growth firs. It was the beginning of an ordeal and trial for Lillian that was to test her strength, her reasoning and, yes, her faith, as that of few other women has been tested either before or since. It was Lillian versus Wilderness, with the odds heavily against her.

  It was Tuesday, in mid-December, and I was thinking about how in a couple of weeks another year would be gone, and we’d be at the jump-off of 1948. I was four miles out from home, snowshoeing over a trap trail that overnight had been covered by nine inches of new snow. It was a wet snow too, one that stuck to the snowshoes and made my every stride an unpleasant effort. Still, I was used to that. Snowshoeing ever has and ever will be a matter of cruel effort when one is plowing out after a recent snowfall which, had the air been but a few degrees warmer as it fell, might have been rain and not snow at all.

  It was around noon when the thing hit me. A half-hour earlier I’d been fine, eager to get over the trail and see what the traps had caught. But suddenly I felt tired, and my legs ached, and I broke out in a cold sweat. I set fire to a pitchy stump, shovelled the snow aside with one of the snowshoes and quickly made myself a bed of boughs. Despite the heat of the fire, I was shivering as I lay on my side on the boughs.