Canadian Wilds Part 17

SUMMARY OF TRAPPING.

By total hunt, $547.00; to provisions, $49.50; sundries, 70 cts; 2 men's net earnings for 135 days at $1.84 equals $496.80.

The amount per diem clear to each of the brothers may not appear to the reader as very remunerative, yet compared to working in the shanties they did much better. The wages for good axe men last winter were from eighteen to twenty dollars per month.

Compared with the same length of time working in the lumber camps the figures would stand thus: 4 1/2 months lumbering at average wages of $22 equals $99; 4 1/2 months trapping, $248.40. In favor of trapping, say in round figures $150.00.

I submit the foregoing to the readers of H-T-T, hoping it may prove interesting.

It is no doubt ancient history, still it may be interesting to the readers to know the large hunts made by some of our Indians in the latter '60's. Referring to a note book kept in those days I find the hunt of one particular Indian recorded. His name was A-ta-so-kan--the only help he had, a boy of twelve.

This family left the Post in August and only returned the following June. His hunting grounds were just across the heights of lands going towards Hudson's Bay, from the headwaters of the Ottawa River. Game of all description was very plentiful then; so much so that, providing an Indian had a few pounds of flour and lard to get away from the vicinity of the station, his guns nets and snares kept him in abundance. A-ta-so-kan, altho having several children besides the boy took only fifty pounds of flour, ten pounds of lard, one pound of tea, and ten pounds of tobacco. Goods, however, he supplied himself well with--such as many of various bright-colored flannels, yards of duffle, yards of H. B. strouds, both blue and white, and several pairs of H. B. wool blankets. These people were brought up on country produce: i. e., fish and flesh, therefore found it no hards.h.i.+p to be without flour, etc.,--the white man's food. From that one man and his young boy I got at the end of the hunting season (first of June) the following furs:

96 Large Beaver Skins.

226 Small Beaver Skins.

32 Otters.

120 Martens.

35 Minks.

40 Lynxes.

1236 Musquash.

Making altogether four of our eighty pound packs of furs. This, of course, was an exceptional hunt--still we had several other Indians who ran A-ta-so-kan a close second.

What a difference in the stretching and drying of that man's skins, compared with those we get on the frontier. Each skin, apart from the musquash, was as clean as note paper, all killed in season and all dried in the frost or shade. On the line of civilization there is such keen compet.i.tion among the traders to get furs, that the hunters stretch and dry the skins in any way. Beaver, for instance, which is bought by the pound, is frequently weighted with syrup, and sand rubbed into the hair and paws, and considerable flesh left on, all tells when three or four dollars a pound is paid.

The Abanakis Indians about St. Francis Lake, St. Peter, are noted for their tricks of the trade, and when you get a blue-eyed Abanakis, look out to be cheated. I call to mind on the St. Maurice River, when stationed there, one of these gents brought furs to sell at our Post.

Among the lot was a beaver skin. According to its size, if well dressed, it ought to have weighed a pound and a half, or three quarters at most. Judge of my surprise when I found it tipped the scales at two and half pounds. This was phenomenal and uncanny, and I remarked to the hunter, that we would leave the skins in the store until after dinner before closing the trade.

During the mid-day hour I slipped out and examined the skin critically, and found the rascal had flinched up layers of the inner skin or "cutem," and had inserted small sheets of tea-chest lead, after which he had pressed the skin down flat and dried it in this state. This was insult added to injury, because about a month previous he had begged the lead from me to make bullets with. Verily there are more tricks with horses and furs than meets the eye.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

A PARD NECESSARY.

I say for safety, successful hunting, and division of the many necessary labors, when the hunting or trapping day is over, a proper partner is necessary. I am aware many old hunters have pa.s.sed years quite alone in the solitude of the trackless forests and the valleys of the mountain ranges, but what a life! What risks they have run!

Some may have led this life from choice or from greed to possess the whole proceeds of the trapping season; still it is a life no man should lead.

Sickness rarely overtakes a trapper; the outdoor life they practice is conducing to good health; continual exercise and fresh air engender a good appet.i.te, but there is always the risk of accident, accident in many ways. The guns, the axe, the canoe, breaking through the ice, or even getting caught in one of his own traps; in fact by the last mentioned source of danger I have known two men to lose their lives in a most horrible way of torture and agony, and these men were not novices at the business; one was a middle-aged half-breed, born and brought up to trapping, and the other was an old Nova Scotian who had trapped and hunted for forty years and yet he died in a bear trap.

Man was not intended to live alone, and a trapper who pa.s.ses the best part of his life far away from his fellow man becomes selfish, crabbed and morose. No matter how successful he may have been in his hunting years, when old age comes on, his last moments are generally pa.s.sed alone in some miserable shanty, covered with dirty and musty old clothes and blankets, no one to pa.s.s him a drink of water or wipe the death sweat from his brow, or else some good person on the fringe of civilization, partly from charity or necessity, takes in the broken old hulk and keeps him until the end. A grave somewhere outside the fence is pointed out as where "Old Pierre," the trapper, is buried. I have several such resting places in my mind as I pen these lines.

No, I maintain a companion in hunting and trapping is a necessity in many ways. In selecting one they should be alike in only two points--age and honesty. If the head of the partners.h.i.+p is short, stout and of a phlegmatic nature, his chum ought to be say five feet ten inches high, weigh one hundred and fifty pounds, of a nervous energetic nature and cheerful. Two such men are most likely to get along well together.

Animals don't come to the camp door and ask to be skinned. On the contrary trapping, to do it right, is hard work and when the real day's work of tramping through swamps and over mountains setting traps is done there is yet much work for the cold, wet and hungry men to do at the camp; cutting and carrying the night's fire wood, cooking their supper, drying their clothes for the morrow, patching broken moccasins and skinning and stretching pelts they may have secured that day. With a good pard these labors are, of course, divided, and each cheerfully and silently takes his share.

There is nothing I have enumerated but what has to be done every night. A trapper returns to his camp, and if he has to make a new camp at the end of his trail so much more and harder is the work, and the poor old trapper without a companion must, of necessity, perform all these duties alone, the completion of which takes him far into the night. Brother trappers, I know whereof I write. I have tried both and I say for division of labor, for good comrades.h.i.+p and for positive safety select and join fortune with "A Good Pard."

To ill.u.s.trate, I give one of my own experiences: I reached my camp once at dark in February, utterly tired out, wet by the melting snow on my clothes, and a fast that had not been broken at noon. There were a few burnt sticks in the fireplace (a lean to camp), these I raked together and started a blaze. With my excessive fatigue and the warmth of the fire, I fell asleep as I leaned for what I thought was a moment, against a stump in the camp. It was a dispensation of Providence that I ever awoke, but I did, far into that February night. On waking I realized in a moment the narrow escape that I had had. The great trees of the forest were cracking all about me with the intensity of the cold. My wet clothes were sticking to me as if of ice, but my brain was clear and I knew no time was to be lost in my self-preservation.

After tramping about and beating my body for some time to create circulation, I was rewarded by feeling my blood flow once more in a natural way. The last quarter of the moon shed what light it could over the tree tops and I strapped on my snowshoes and went to work at chopping wood to last till morning. A good cup of tea, some biscuit and pork and the then bright and cheerful fire made me my old self, but I received a lesson never to be forgotten.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

AN HEROIC ADVENTURE.

When we had come to anchor in Trinity Bay and all the sails were safely stowed, the captain of our yacht proposed we should go ash.o.r.e and see the celebrated Comeau _fils_.

Bob, my companion asked, "Celebrated for what?"

"Oh! for several things," replied the captain. "He is a most extraordinary man in his many acquirements and knowledge. Born and brought up on this coast, he has pa.s.sed all his life here, with the exception of the three years his father was able to send him to school, but those three years he made use of to lay the foundation of a wonderful store of practical knowledge. His schooling, as I have said, was but the foundation; by reading and observation he has added to it in a marvelous way.

"From his early training and the life of every one on the coast, it would go without saying that he knows how to shoot, but he is more than a good shot, he is a 'deadly' shot. Anything he aims his gun at that is within shooting distance is dead. As a salmon fisher, no crack angler who visits these rivers can hope to compete with him.

"As a linguist he can speak, read and write in French, English, Latin and Indian; besides this, he can talk rapidly in the dumb alphabet.

He holds the position of telegraph operator at Trinity, also of postmaster and fishery overseer, and besides, when anything goes wrong with the line for two hundred miles east or west, the department immediately wires him to go and fix them up.

"He has more than a fair knowledge of medicine for one who derived all his insight from reading alone. Last summer there was an epidemic of measles all along the coast, among both whites and Indians. Here, with a population of 150, two-thirds of whom were down Comeau, who attended them, did not lose one patient, while at Bersimis, where the department sent a full-fledged M. D., there were thirty-nine burials out of a population of 450.

"You may be sure the poor people all along the coast love him."

So the boat was lowered away, and the Captain, Bob and I were rowed ash.o.r.e to see this paragon. From the outside look of the place I could see the man was one of good taste and orderly. The knock at the door was answered by Comeau himself. The Captain was personally acquainted with him and introduced us before we entered. I must say I was disappointed. One always is when he has pictured a person in his mind's eye and finds that in reality he is quite a different kind of person.

I had looked for Comeau to be a large man and a boisterous one from his position of superiority over others. On the contrary, I found him below the medium, a quiet, low-voiced man, reserved almost to shyness. I saw at once he was a great observer, one who would make deductions from specks invisible to ordinary people; or, in other words, he could put two and two together and dovetail them better than most men.

We were ushered into a large, clean, airy room, in the middle of which sat a very good looking lady in a roomy rocker, with a child on each knee. If Comeau himself is reserved and not inclined to talk, his wife can do enough for both. She excused herself for not rising when her husband introduced us. Nodding down at her babies, she said, "You see I am fixed." One could see she is a proud mother--they are twins; this she told us before we were well seated, and she further informed us that they were the only twins on the Labrador. So she is celebrated also.

When we got fairly settled in Comeau's den, the conversation naturally drifted into hunting and fis.h.i.+ng. Bob made some inquiries about the pools on the Trinity. To make his explanations clear, Comeau pulled out a drawer of photographic views of the river. In rummaging these over, he cast aside a gold medal. "Excuse me," I said, reaching over and taking up the medal. On it I read engraved:

"PRESENTED TO N. A. COMEAU BY THE R. H. S. FOR BRAVERY IN SAVING LIFE."

Upon my asking him to recount the circ.u.mstances, he blushed and looked quite confused, and said: "Oh! it was nothing worth speaking of, but I suppose people talked so much about it that they gave me that token. It was nothing more than any man would have done," and this was all we could get from him unless we had carried persistency to an ungentlemanly degree.

After having spent a very pleasant hour, we returned on board, and the Captain told us the story that the hero himself would not:

Two years before, one day in January Comeau arrived home from the back country to find that two men had that day while seal hunting off sh.o.r.e been driven off the coast toward the ice pack in the gulf. One of the men was Comeau's own brother-in-law, and the other a half-breed. In spite of the supplications of his wife and the persuasions of the other individuals of the place, Comeau set about preparations to follow them out to sea. He asked no one to accompany him.

The wind all the afternoon had been steadily off sh.o.r.e and was now moderately calm. He took with him some restoratives, provisions, a lantern, a couple of blankets, his rifle and ammunition and what else useful he could think of in his hurry. The ice pack was then about ten miles off the land, and he reasoned the men must be on the ice, if large and strong enough, or in among it if in small cakes, the latter being much more dangerous.

From Trinity to Matane in a direct line the distance is forty-five miles, and to push out in a frail, wooden canoe alone and the darkness coming on in the black gulf in mid-winter required a brave man with extraordinary nerve to dare it, and this Comeau did.

Three minutes after pus.h.i.+ng out from the beach, canoe and man were swallowed up in the darkness. The next the people of Trinity heard of him was a telegraphic message on the second day after. It read: "Matane. All three alive. Joseph, hands frozen; Simon, both feet frozen badly."