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We can't carry food for caches, or make the big portages. So we hunt the river, and a day's trail on either bank. There's beaver and fox to be had that way, and it's most all I can hope for. I don't worry if we get it plenty. You see, I need it big this trip." Something of the strangeness of the encounter was passing from Marcel's mind.
The snow had vanished almost completely from the portages, and water covered the ice on many of the lakes. When, at Christmas, the staff accepted Mrs. C 's invitation to spend the day at Inver, the question was whether they would come with dogs or canoes? Neither, however, were practicable, and they had to walk some of them eighteen miles.
A man may journey very far through the lone spaces of the earth without meeting with another Winnipeg River. In it nature has contrived to place her two great units of earth and water in strange and wild combinations. To say that the Winnipeg River has an immense volume of water, that it descends 360 feet in a distance of 160 miles, that it is full of eddies and whirlpools, of every variation of waterfall from chutes to cataracts, that it expands into lonely pine edged lakes and far-reaching island-studded bays, that its bed is cumbered with immense wave-polished rocks, that its vast solitudes are silent and its cascades ceaselessly active to say all this is but to tell in bare items of fact the narrative of its beauty. For the Winnipeg by the multiplicity of its perils and the ever-changing beauty of its character, defies the description of civilized men as it defies the puny efforts of civilized travel. It seems part of the savage-fitted alone for him and for his ways, useless to carry the burden of man's labour, but useful to shelter the wild things of wood and water which dwell in its waves and along its shores. And the red man who steers his little birch-bark canoe through the foaming rapids of the Winnipeg, how well he knows its various ways! To him it seems to possess life and instinct, he speaks of it as one would of a high-mettled charger which will do any thing if he be rightly handled. It gives him his test of superiority, his proof of courage. To shoot the Otter Falls or the Rapids of the Barriere, to carry his canoe down the whirling eddies of Portage-de-l'Isle, to lift her from the rush of water at the Seven Portages, or launch her by the edge of the whirlpool below the Chute-
The Afognak coast is heavily wooded with spruce, while a large plateau in the interior is almost barren, and gave good opportunity for using the glasses. During several days at the head of Kofikoski Bay nothing was seen, so we packed up and crossed a large piece of the island by portages and a chain of lakes, where our Osgood boat was indispensable.
These were carefully selected for their reputed courage and powers of endurance. The boats in which they travelled were four in number, and were built upon a model which, as far as possible, combined strength to resist the rocks with lightness for portages and protection against the over-wash of the waves.
It is not an easy matter to propel a loaded canoe against a strong stream with a single paddle, and it is almost as difficult to pole her alone; while there were two long portages to make, when the craft and everything in them had to be hauled painfully over a stretch of very rough boulders.
The operation was not new to her; a dozen times within the month since the outfit had swung out from Athabasca Landing she had watched from the muddy bank while the half-breeds and Indians unloaded the big scows, ran them light through whirling rock-ribbed rapids, carried the innumerable pieces of freight upon their shoulders across portages made all but impassable by scrub timber, oozy muskeg, and low sand-mountains, loaded the scows again at the foot of the rapid and steered them through devious and dangerous miles of swift-moving white-water, to the head of the next rapid.
To Fort Churchill they had travelled almost due north first up the Mississippi, then across land to Lake Superior, and direct over the lake to one of the Company's posts on its northern shore. Thence by a chain of lakes, rivers, and "portages" to York factory, and on northward to Fort Churchill.
Hubbard went ahead to fish below the rapids in the creek while George and I brought down the canoe and outfit, making several short portages. That night we camped two miles down the stream. Hubbard had caught, by hard work, thirty small trout, half of which we ate for supper.
Three days later they left Hudson's Hope, with Baree riding amidships. The mountains loomed up swiftly after this, and the second day they were among them. After that it was slow work fighting their way up against the current of the Finly. It was tremendous work. It seemed to David that half their time was spent amid the roar of rapids. Twenty-seven times within five days they made portages.
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