Canadian Wilds Part 4

Take again the Canadian lynx. Were this name always adhered to, there would be less room for prejudice, but unfortunately it is more frequently called cat. I admit it has all the appearances and manners of the cat, but let someone, unknown to you, fry some fat cutlets from the ham of a lynx, and fifty to one you will relish it as very fine veal and you cannot be convinced to the contrary. There again is the porcupine, I think sometimes known as the hedgehog. When they are in good condition, nicer or more juicy meat a hunter cannot put his teeth into. When properly prepared and properly cooked, the white mans "rarebit", the suckling pig, cannot prove its points.

The arctic or snow owl is a bird that gives as fine a flavored flesh, and the same in color and appearance as a fat capon. But where one is set against it, is when served up in Indian fas.h.i.+on, boiled whole, it has then the appearance of a young baby, and one would almost have to be a professional cannibal to tackle the object. The thick, plump thighs, the round bald head, makes the appearance to a young infant almost startling. However, if one closes his mental eyes to this similitude, the flesh is most toothsome.

I come now to another that occurs to me as being much despised, that is the festive and highly perfumed skunk. We look on a skunk, be it man or beast, as the meanest kind of thing, but I a.s.sure you the skunk (the four footed one) is not to be despised or cast aside when one is hungry or desires a change from the everlasting bacon and biscuit. A skunk, shot and prepared with care, makes very good eating.

Two of the animals of our forest I never could stomach and very few Indians eat them, be they ever so much pushed for food, and these are: the otter and mink. Their flesh is oily, black and highly flavored, resembling the meat of seal, only more so! The Indians as a rule look down with contempt on a fellow Indian who eats otter or mink, whether from necessity or from an acquired and perverse taste.

I venture to opine my little sketch will set many of my hunter friends thinking and perhaps make a few converts. You won't repent it.

Forty years ago, before the country was opened up to civilization and the usual provisions of the white man were imported into the wilds, the great staple foods of the territories, from the Labrador Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, consisted of buffalo, caribou, white fish and rabbits. According to the parts of the country where these animals resorted, the Indians, traders and trappers, lived almost exclusively on their flesh, either in the fresh, dried or pemican state.

All foods, not imported, went under the name of country produce, and as flour is the staff of life to the white man, so was buffalo, caribou, rabbit or white fish to the dwellers of the north country.

Beaver, partridge, porcupine and other small prey, a kind of entree, or side dish, got only at odd times, and not to be depended on for regular three times a day diet.

The quant.i.ty of any one of these four foods required to sustain, even a family of six, during a long northern winter, was something to make a layman incredulous.

The Indians living about the plains of the lower Saskatchewan and foothills of the Rockies not only lived on the buffalo, but made up immense quant.i.ties of pemican, which was parched in summer skin bags, weighing about sixty pounds each, and traded for ammunition, cloth, beads, hatchets, etc., at the forts.

From these bases of supply the bags of meat were sent to posts farther north, and used for tripping and feeding the men about the post. Large quant.i.ties were floated down each spring from Fort Ellis, Qu Appelli and other plain forts, by the a.s.siniboine to Fort Garry and from there in larger boats to Norway House, on Lake Winnipeg, which in those days was the receiving and distributing factory for all the country north and east, and had the distinction of being the place of council each year.

The people inhabiting the country embraced by the Mackenzie River, Great Bear Lake, and the coast of Lake Winnipeg, subsisted almost entirely on white fish. These were killed in great numbers each sp.a.w.ning season, not only for their own food, but for their team dogs as well, the posts putting past from ten to one hundred thousand, according to the importance of the place and the mouths to feed.

The fish were hung in number on skewers as taken from the water, the sharpened stake being run through the fish near the tail.

The string of ten fish on a skewer was called a "percer," and was hung head down from long horizontal poles, as high as a man could reach, and the length of these traverses would accommodate one hundred "percers." The great stock of fish was surrounded by a high picket stockade open to the weather, with one entrance, which was kept strictly under lock and key, and opened each evening by the post-master, i. e., steward, who gave out the requirements for the next twenty-four hours' consumption.

The expenditure was kept posted up each night, showing for what use the fish had been given out, under the following headings:

Mess Account.

Men's Rations.

Indians visiting the post.

Dog Rations.

Thus, at any time, the factor could tell the exact number of fish consumed and number yet on hand.

Many of the posts would have an expenditure of a thousand fish a week for all purposes, which would be about thirty thousand for the winter.

In the country lying south of Lake Winnipeg to Lake of the Woods and east as far as the Ottawa River, the staple food was the harmless little rabbit. It is a dispensation of Providence that the rabbit is a prolific animal, for they are the life not only of the people, but of martens, lynx, foxes, ermine, owls, hawks and ravens.

An ordinary family of Indians, living on plain boiled or roasted rabbits, require about twenty a day, and even that keeps their vitality a very little above zero. There is no doubt but what the food a man eats makes or lowers his valor and endurance.

No one ever heard of the fish or rabbit-eating Indians going on the war-path, while, on the other hand, the buffalo eaters were fearless men both as hors.e.m.e.n and fighters.

The Labrador Peninsula, bounded by the Saguenay river on the west, Hudson's Bay and Straits on the north, the Atlantic seaboard on the east, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the south, a country as large as England, France and Austria combined, is the home of the Caribou or wood deer, who migrate north and south in countless herds spring and autumn, and are followed by bands of roaming Indians continually preying on them.

As in the case of the pemican, these Nascapies, Montagnais, and Cree Indians bring into the posts dried meats, marrow fat and tongues to barter, and on this the post dwellers live.

With the Indians of the present day armed with modern rifles, and the great depletion in the calf-crop made by the marauding of wolves, the day cannot be far off that the caribou will be of the past as the buffalo is.

In their migrations north and south, at certain places well known to the natives, the deer have to cross rivers. Taking the crossings the mob of deer would compact itself so much that the traverse would be black with their bodies.

The Indians who had been waiting for some days the pa.s.sing of the herd, would attack them from up and down the river in their canoes, shooting them with arrows, spearing and axing the poor frightened brutes in the water till the lower waters were covered with floating carca.s.ses.

Much meat and many skins were spoiled for the want of quick attention. After the battle the Indians gorged themselves to such a state of repletion, that it rendered them unfit for exertion, but a just G.o.d frequently punished them during the bitter weather of the following winter by starvation, and whole families succ.u.mbed for want of the very food they so wantonly wasted in the autumn.

The Hudson's Bay Company had a post years ago on Lake Mis-a-ka-ma right on the tableland between Ungava bay and the Canadian Labrador coast, for the trading of deer skins, both dressed and in the parchment state. One year the skins were in such numbers that the boats of the brigade could not carry the whole to the coast, and bales of them had to be wintered over to the next year.

The Labrador has been for many years the base of supplies for fish and rabbit districts, where the natives have no deer to make moccasins, mitts and s.h.i.+rts, and the parchment for their snowshoe knitting.

These deer skins take a round about route to reach their destination, being in the first place s.h.i.+pped from Ungava, or Nigolette, to London, and after pa.s.sing the winter in London, are res.h.i.+pped to Montreal, via the St. Lawrence, and from that depot sent with the new outfit to posts that have requisitioned them the previous year.

One would think with the introduction of flour, pork and other imported provisions that the slaughter would be a thing of the past, but the killing goes on as before, and now only the skin is taken, the meat remaining to rot.

CHAPTER IX.

OFFICERS' ALLOWANCES.

To readers of H-T-T descriptions of modes of living in by-gone days will, no doubt, be as interesting as actual hunting or trapping. I therefore submit a reminiscence of days in the early sixties, gone never to return.

Transport then to the far inland posts was so tedious and costly that it was impossible to freight heavy stuff so far away, and the employees of the company had to live on what the company in which they were stationed produced. However, a scale of allowances of a few delicacies were allowed, and these were made up every year at the depot of each district, and were for one year. The laborers or common people about the post got nothing in the way of imported provisions, except when at the hard work of tripping. The officers' scale was as follows, be he a married man or a single man, it made no difference.

Their several grades were as follows:

Chief Factor, Chief Trader, Chief Clerk, Apprentice Clerk, Post Master.

A Post Master did not mean a master of a post, but was generally a long service laborer, who could supervise the general work about the post and act as interpreter if required. He also received a minimum allowance from headquarters, but of fewer articles than that of clerks and officers. A Chief Factor, being of the highest grade in the service, received the largest allowance, which was as follows:

Three hundred pounds flour, 336 lbs. sugar, 18 lbs. black tea, 9 lbs.

green tea, 42 lbs. raisins, 60 lbs. b.u.t.ter, 30 lbs. tallow candles, 3 lbs. mustard, 6 3/4 gal. port wine, 6 3/4 sherry wine, 3 gal. brandy.

Exactly one-half of the Factor's allowance was the share of the Chief Trader, and a half of the latter's portion was the scale for a Chief Clerk or Apprentice Clerk. A Post Master however, not receiving the full list, I will give in detail.

Fifty-six pounds sugar, 3 lbs. black tea, 1 1/2 lbs. green tea, 7 lbs. rice, 1/2 lb. pepper, 1/4 lb. pimento.

At every post where it was possible to grow potatoes they were given the greatest attention, as they const.i.tuted a very material place in the feeding of the post people. They were, however, kept under lock and key, and a weekly allowance given out by the Post Master. At posts where cattle were kept the allowance of b.u.t.ter was not supplied by headquarters, as we were supposed to make our own.

The allowances never came up with the general outfit, but were sent up in bulk to the headquarters of the district, and there parceled out for each post in that Factor's territory. The clerks or officers in charge of these out-posts went to headquarters about the 15th of August with a half-sized canoe. This being a special trip, made especially for the allowance of any small thing that might have been overlooked in the indent, was called "The Allowance Canoe."

A week was generally spent at headquarters in friendly intercourse with the staff there. The prospects for the ensuing year were talked over, and the requisition for the next year's outfit read carefully over, and any article requiring explanation or comment was then gone into by the Factor while he had the framer of the indent at hand.

This was the only time of the year that all the officers of that district met together, their respective posts being east, north and west, and hundreds of miles of forest and stream separating them.

This reunion was a red letter week, and no sooner were we back to our posts but we looked forward to the next meeting. I doubt very much if today such a self-reliant, hardy and easily satisfied body of men could be found to fill similar circ.u.mstances.

It was etiquette not to arrive at headquarters before the date appointed. Occasionally a canoe from some post would have made extra good time coming out, probably gaining a day or part of a day, and would camp back of some point almost in sight of "The Fort." A noted last place of call before reaching the fort was called "Point a la Barbe."