However, under pressure of
the priest, he at length remembered a black transgression.
The fall
before, while hunting, he went to the windward of a thicket that seemed
likely to hold his Moose, because on the lee, the proper side, the
footing happened to be very bad, and so he lost his Moose. Yes!
there was indeed a dark shadow on his recent past.
A man may be a good hunter, i.e., an all-round trapper and woodman,
but not a moose-hunter. At Fort Smith are two or three scores of
hunters, and yet I am told there are only three moose-hunters. The
phrase is not usually qualified; he is, or is not, a moose-hunter.
Just as a man is, or is not, an Oxford M.A. The force, then, of
the phrase appears, and we were content to learn that young Bezkya,
besides knowing the Buffalo country, was also a good man and a
moose-hunter.
We set out in two canoes, Bezkya and Jarvis in the small one, Billy,
Selig, Preble, and I in the large one, leaving the other police
boys to make Fort Resolution in the H. B. steamer.
Being the 4th of July, the usual torrential rains set in. During
the worst of it we put in at Salt River village. It was amusing
to see the rubbish about the doors of these temporarily deserted
cabins. The midden-heaps of the Cave-men are our principal sources
of information about those by-gone races; the future ethnologist who
discovers Salt River midden-heaps will find all the usual skulls,
bones, jaws, teeth, flints, etc., mixed with moccasin beads from
Venice, brass cartridges from New England, broken mirrors from
France, Eley cap-boxes from London, copper rings, silver pins,
lead bullets, and pewter spoons, and interpersed with them bits of
telephone wires and the fragments of gramophone discs. I wonder
what they will make of the last!
Eight miles farther we camped in the rain, reaching the Buffalo
Portage next morning at 10, and had everything over its 5 miles by
7 o'clock at night.
It is easily set down on paper, but the uninitiated can scarcely
realise the fearful toil of portaging. If you are an office man,
suppose you take an angular box weighing 20 or 30 pounds; if a
farmer, double the weight, poise it on your shoulders or otherwise,
as you please, and carry it half a mile on a level pavement in
cool, bright weather, and I am mistaken if you do not find yourself
suffering horribly before the end of a quarter-mile; the last part
of the trip will have been made in something like mortal agony.
Remember, then, that each of these portagers was carrying 150 to
250 pounds of broken stuff, not half a mile, but several miles,
not on level pavement, but over broken rocks, up banks, through
quagmires and brush - in short, across ground that would be difficult
walking without any burden, and not in cool, clear weather, but through
stifling swamps with no free hand to ease the myriad punctures of
his body, face, and limbs whenever unsufficiently protected from
the stingers that roam in clouds.
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