The New North. Agnes Deans Cameron

proves the Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.

CHAPTER III

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ATHABASCA LANDING

       Table of Contents

       "I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;

       Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;

       I wait for the men who will win me—and I will not be won in a day;

       And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,

       But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child."

      —Robert Service

      

Athabasca Landing

      Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North. Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading itself with prodigality over the swift river.

      The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.

      We are in latitude 55° North, and between us and the Arctic lies an unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions. Chimerical? Why so?

      Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of 55° westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year 1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain, grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are about to enter does not enjoy.

      Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of Cree-Scots half-breeds.

      Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the place—tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has come to signify the revivifying juice itself.

      

Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca

      One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in the home is, "When will the rabbits run this year?" The rabbits in the North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him. Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of the North.

      It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or "sturgeon-heads," which are to form our convoy have been built, the freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the word which is the keynote of the Cree character—"Kee-am," freely translated, "Never mind," "Don't get excited," "There's plenty of time," "It's all right," "It will all come out in the wash."

      When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing, old Duncan Tremblé, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked admiringly at the printed slip and said, "Aye, aye; the Commissioner he makes laws, but the river he boss." It is only when ice is out and current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven languages—English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook, Montagnais—he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and prevaricates in them all.

      

The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians

      At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their exact banking knowledge.

      Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood meadows—the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated