Pilgrims of the Wild. Grey Evil Owl

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СКАЧАТЬ — to get the feel of it again: people thought him queer —

      What did it all mean; was the whole wilderness falling about our ears?

      I kept going. Further on the tale improved but little. Shining tree and Gowganda, rich camps of earlier days, far from the railroad and undisturbed by the hodge-podge and the hurly-burly of the march of progress, were still kept alive by many of the old originals, waiting for a break, hoping with the perennial optimism of the dyed-in-the-wool prospector, for a new strike to keep the old camp going. The whole Gowganda lake area had been burnt to the bare rock. White Duck, who had carried the mail in the early days, had passed into a legend.

      One reunion was notable and all too short, with Billy Guppy, that king of all woodsmen, respected by all men, Red and White, and whom the Indians called Pijeense — The Little Lynx. Time had changed him in no discernible way; he alluded to the subject of our last conversation, held fifteen years before. He still clung to his traditions and always would.

      I encountered Indians, White woodsmen, real prospectors, each meeting an experience. But when their conversation turned to future plans there were evidences of a vague foreboding in their speech. No man felt secure. Fire, railroads, power projects, the aeroplane, they were tearing the old life apart. The frontier was rolling back like a receding tide. I must hurry.

      Four hundred miles travel brought me to a town on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway which, when I first saw it, had been a frontier post. Before the coming of the steel, rare sportsmen and adventurers, seeking the freedom and spiritual satisfaction to be found in an untouched virgin territory, had come here at intervals. We guided them, a strange, new, interesting job; these men had been our comrades on the trail. We talked about such a trip all winter, and showed each other the letters we got from our patrons. The place was now a populous tourist resort. An automobile highway was in the making. I took a job here; the party was a good one, people from New York, with all the genial good fellowship of the American on a vacation. But there was a false note. Guides were no longer companions, they were lackeys, footmen, toadies; a kind of below-stairs snobbery had sprung up among them, — kid-glove guiding; some of them actually wore white cotton gloves at their work. Old-timers talked about it, shook their heads — but they had to follow suit; fur was gone and this now-emasculated occupation was their only means of subsistence.

      My main outfit had been sent around to this place by freight; I shipped it ahead three hundred miles, replenished my supplies and left, in my heart rebellion and disillusionment. This place held memories I had hoped to renew. I pitied the pine trees standing there. They had to stay.

      The Frontier was on its way. So was I.

      I had billed my freight to a point on the Transcontinental where I arrived a month later, renewed my food supply and sent the outfit another stage ahead. In this manner, touching the railroad at strategic points, a journey was made that covered approximately two thousand miles. This occupied two years, during which time I wandered on in the summertime, and trapped with more or less success wherever fall caught me.

      The waters began to go crossways of my projected line of travel rather than with it, necessitating an inordinate amount of portaging; so that the last leg of the journey was made ignominiously on a train, with the outfit in the baggage car, out of which the canoe regarded me reproachfully at every stop. There was, however, another very compelling reason for this dereliction; my correspondence, usually nonexistent, now demanded constant attention. At a summer resort where I had guided for a short time the year before, there had been a girl, a cultured, talented, and personable young woman of the Iroquois, a cut or two above me perhaps, but not, I hoped, on that account unattainable. The affair was quite wanting in the vicissitudes and the harrowing, but stirring episodes that are said to usually beset the path of high romance. The course of true love ran exasperatingly smooth; I sent the lady a railroad ticket, she came up on a Pullman and we were married, precisely according to plan. The complications started afterwards.

      In order that the blame will not attach in the wrong places, I must here give a brief outline of two very conflicting personalities. We were, in many ways, exact opposites. In my young days I had received some pretty intensive home tuition from an ever-blessed aunt, but had shown little aptitude save in geography, history, and English. In the latter subject the ground work had been solid, and as I now see, very skillfully laid. But I had so far taken no trouble to build on it. Most of my time from middle youth on, had been spent in solitude or largely amongst a people whose language was not English, and confused by regional dialects. Only a retentive memory and a passion for reading had kept alive this early training, and my precise and somewhat stilted English was, like a stiff and ceremonious suit of Sunday best, something to be taken out of the closet and worn on occasion, and its use ended, returned to the limbo of unneeded things. I was careless in my speech and quickly resented any infringement on what I considered to be my personal freedom. This last trait had been intensified by the discipline endured in the army. I had been one of those unusual people, so seldom met with in stories, who was not an officer, did not attract the attention of the higher command, entered the army as a private, and left it as one. I had come back to the woods with my efficiency much impaired, and my outlook on things generally had been in no way improved by the job of sniper that I had held, and the sole educational effect of the war had been to convince me of the utter futility of civilization. Most of my views, whilst free and unconventional were correspondingly narrow.

      My wife Gertrude, who will be referred to from now on by her tribal name of Anahareo, was not highly educated, save in that broader sense which is much to be desired, and is not always the result of schooling. She had a passion for advancement, uplift, and a proper use of words and took a lively interest in world events. She was a direct descendant of hereditary Iroquois chiefs, and her father was one of the original Mohawk river men who had helped to make history along the Ottawa in the days of the great squaretimber rafts; she came of a proud race. She was strictly modern, as modern went at that time, a good dancer and conversationalist, and, a particular dresser herself, she naturally wanted me to always look my best. My idea of looking my best was to wear my hair long, have plenty of fringes on my buckskins, to allow one tassel of my Hudson Bay sash to hang behind like a tail, and to have the front of my shirt decorated with an oblique row of safety pins on each side, as a Cossack wears his ammunition, to be intriguingly glimpsed at times beneath a leather vest. These things were very dear to me, and as to the safety pins, why, they were real handy and served a useful as well as an ornamental purpose, being used to hang up my clothes to dry at night. Other peculiarities born of long habit, and hitherto unnoticed, now became very obvious. I could not, or would not, carry on any conversation at all whilst in a canoe, and preferred to walk in single file, trail fashion as, like most bush people, I continually bumped into anyone who walked beside me; as a concession the lady was, in this case, always allowed to walk in front. These features were brought to my attention one by one, and it is easily seen that our honeymoon, spent with a load of supplies on the way into a hunting ground, must have been unusual and interesting.

Out at the front* it had been found that I could never learn to dance ballroom style, but could in an emergency, with proper assistance, get through the figures of a quadrille without any serious results. I could also dance the Grass Dance** to a drum, and sing the Wabeno*** very creditably. In the other matters I submitted, rather tamely as I now remember it, and as a reward was allowed to retain the fringes and the braided hair. I was being made over for my own good, and it was a bitter pill. But far, far more was yet to come; though even today I sometimes furtively wear the safety pins and the tail, and get great comfort from it. I speedily discovered that I was married to no butterfly, in spite of her modernistic ideas, and found that my companion could swing an axe as well as she could a lipstick, and was able to put up a tent in good shape, make quick fire, and could rig a tumpline and get a load across in good time, even if she did have to sit down and powder her nose at the other СКАЧАТЬ