CHAPTER V.

BEAR RAVINE.

Late into the night we sat beside our fire discussing the articles which we would attempt to carry up on the heights, and it was then that Porter astonished us by saying that he intended, if I agreed, to make an attempt to carry up the canoe.

This really extraordinary feat he set to work to accomplish on the morning of August 5th, and it brought about the incident which follows.

Rising very early, he cleared a road with his axe through the undergrowth near the camp, and carried the canoe across the torrent, finally laying it down, and turning it over on a steep hummock, quite 100 feet high, which was situated on the east side of Bear Ravine Torrent. There he left it, and returned to camp to a very fine breakfast, in the preparation of which Hardy and I had collaborated. Having eaten our meal we started again, Hardy and I carrying each 40 lbs. of flour, my rifle, and some other kit. We passed along the little path Porter had cut, and were crossing the torrent at a ford, when I, who happened to be walking last, looked up suddenly and saw, on the high ground above me, not only the canoe, but a black bear, which stood beside it staring at it intently, and evidently deeply interested in its appearance. I warned the other two, and we all sank to the ground where we were—I on a boulder in the middle of the stream.

The bear was right above, and about 120 yards from me. My rifle was in its case, but in a minute I had slipped it out, and believing the bear must see us in another second, I took a hasty aim and fired. The bullet hit the bear, passing in at the foreleg and coming out behind the ribs. The animal lost its balance, and came crashing down the cliff, then regained its feet, and vanished into a patch of alders. At the shot Porter sprang up, hurled down his pack, and, axe in hand, ran like a berserk into the underbrush after the bear. Meantime I climbed up the slope on which it had been standing, and from the top of which I thought I might command the exit from the patch of alders. For a few minutes I saw no sign of either Porter or the bear, and then suddenly Porter, still carrying the axe, and evidently still under the influence of his berserk fit, emerged from a patch of woods far up the valley. He was obviously on the trail of the bear, and indeed, a little later I saw the bear break cover in front of him.

Upon this I began to run up the valley over the screes, and about three-quarters of a mile away found Porter seated lugubriously upon a rock. I was inclined to be annoyed with him for following the bear so quickly, as, left to itself, it must have lain down and been easily approachable. Porter in defence of his action explained that, though the bear had lain down two or three times, it soon got up again, and as the ground tracking was difficult, he had thought it better to keep the brute in sight. It had eventually entered the cave, which Porter now pointed out to me. He added that at one time among the alders he was “so handy” to the bear, that he might have struck it with the axe but did not do so—wisely, I think.

[Illustration: Black Bear, shot August 5.]

[Illustration: The Bear’s Cave.]

I thereupon went on to the cave, which had a very narrow opening, and, peering in, saw the bear standing up and growling furiously. It was about 8 feet from me, but the cave being very dark and my own body excluding all the light from the entrance, I could not see the barrel of my rifle. I was also much more afraid of the bullet ricochetting from the rock wall than I was of the bear. As I fired the bear stumbled off a flat rock on which he had been standing, and moved back deeper into the cave. To the best of my belief that bullet missed altogether. There was a large rock at the end of the cave, and the bear retreated to the shelter of this, and there, as well as I could gather from the sounds, it lay down.

As the brute remained very much alive and vocally resented our intrusion, Hardy and I decided that he and Porter should go back for their packs while I stayed to make sure that the bear did not come out and make off. About half an hour after they had left me, as I no longer heard the bear move, I crawled into the cave; but not knowing how far the recess extended, or whether there was a second exit, I began to fear I might lose the bear after all, and so crawled out again to cut a pole of alder, to which I lashed my knife. Again entering the cave I began with my improvised spear to feel about for the bear behind the big rock. To do this I had to advance several feet inside the cave, and at the first poke I got a surprise, for the bear—which was by no means dead—crawled out round the rock, and for the moment actually got between me and the entrance.

It seemed, however, more frightened of me than I of it—or perhaps it was too hard hit to show fight—at any rate it backed in again under the rock, and lay there, growling and snarling. Finding I could not make out in the darkness how it was lying, and so could not use my knife, I crept from the cave as hastily as might be, after which, seated on the rocks among the mosquitoes, I waited for the bear’s wounds to grow stiff. Had I been able to use my knife I should certainly have tried to put the animal out of its pain, for it was a disgusting sensation to sit there waiting for it to die. As fate would have it there was nothing else to do in this case; thus, after about two hours the groaning and growling grew faint, and presently the bear was dead.

The only instance within my knowledge of a black bear doing severe injury to a man occurred in Newfoundland, where Reuben Lewis, the present chief of the Mic-mac Indians, was badly mauled in an encounter with one.

When my companions returned we dragged the carcase into the daylight. It proved to be a she-bear, a very old animal, and weighed well over 200 lbs. We set to work at once to gralloch and cut it up; in spite of its age it was in good condition—and, like the fat boy in “Pickwick” with the rook—we gloated over its plumpness.

[Illustration: The Canoe 1,000 feet up.]

[Illustration: Hardy and Porter nearing Mosquito Glen.]

We soon finished gralloching the bear and then pushed on up the ravine. Hardy, on the second relay with Porter, had returned with a load of 80 lbs. of flour. Finding that he could manage to carry it so far he now insisted on keeping it, feeling, as he afterwards explained, that if he could get an 80 lb. pack up Bear Ravine he would have proved to his own satisfaction that he would be equal to whatever packing circumstances might subsequently necessitate his undertaking during the rest of our journey. As a second man to steady the canoe and to help Porter in his self-imposed task was eminently desirable, I raised no objection, and so we started. Difficult as portaging the canoe would have been in any circumstances, it was rendered doubly so by the fact that a wind sprang up, which continually caught and overbalanced it. It is no easy matter for one man to portage a canoe over really bad ground, but for two men, especially if there be a marked difference in their heights, it becomes almost an impossibility. And, in fact, there was little that I could do, beyond shout to Porter to stand firm and to seize the end of the canoe in my hand, in order to prevent it swinging round whenever a gust struck it.

In this way we climbed the defile, cutting a path with the axe through the alders, until, as we rose, the vegetation became more and more scanty and the incline steeper and steeper. The whole distance was between 3½ to 4 miles, the gradient becoming gradually sharper as we mounted; but much the worst spot was beside the second waterfall of the torrent, for here the chaos of rock had only recently fallen from the cliff above, and had not yet settled. More than once these great fragments slipped and overbalanced as Porter only just stepped clear with the canoe. First and last it was the nastiest bit of walking any of us had ever done, and we were glad enough when late in the afternoon we left the defile behind us, and laid down the canoe in a little mosquito-haunted glen, from which the gradient to the level of the plateau was easy. Interested as we were to see the tableland we did not make any attempt to do so that evening. Truth to tell, the climb up Bear Ravine with packs and the continual vigilance necessary when walking over the rock had strained us to the limit of endurance. Our faces, too, were streaming with blood from the bites of mosquitoes and black-flies which had preyed upon us to their hearts’ content as we balanced ourselves upon the boulders. Indeed, we were most thoroughly tired, when by evening, carrying the bear meat, we once more threw ourselves down in our camp on the banks of the Fraser.

Hardy’s feat of carrying 80 lbs. of flour up the ravine was hardly second to that of Porter with the canoe, and for a man unused to packing was unquestionably a magnificent test of his endurance and pluck. Measured by aneroid, we rose a little over 1,500 feet in the course of our climb.

The following day being Sunday, we rested, and Hardy made a duff in the evening with the fat of the bear. He had great culinary pretensions, not altogether unjustified.

Having been successful in carrying provisions up Bear Ravine, we felt that we had broken the back of our task, and that we had now finished with the Fraser Valley. It had helped us straight towards our goal to an extent we never could have hoped. With nothing worthy to be called a bend in the valley throughout its entire length, it had carried us in a direction remarkably little out of a due westerly course, the latitude, according to our observations, varying only from 56°33.46 at our first camp near Nunaingoak, to 56°44.23 at the point where we ultimately left the river. If the country on the plateau proved practicable for packing, we felt we ought, with over seventy miles to our credit, to be independent of our canoe as soon as practicable leads of water ceased.

[Illustration: Caribou crossing-place.]

[Illustration: Taking a “spell.”]

On Monday, the 7th, we again packed each his parcel of necessaries up the ravine. On this day we were portaging provisions, and I tried the experiment of putting my load in my rucksack instead of carrying it with a headstrap, as is the custom of the country. I found I could keep my balance on the precarious footing much better when carrying on the shoulders, though the strain on the heart was very great. For the rest of the trip, with the exception of the following day, I always used a rucksack, a fact that later on had a great effect on our fortunes, as it allowed of my keeping my eyes open for game, which is quite impossible for a man encumbered with a headstrap.

On that Monday, as I was climbing up, I came suddenly upon a large she-bear and her cub. They were within 200 yards of me, but my rifle was on the top of the cliffs, as I would not risk our only weapon twice over that appalling medley of treacherous rocks.

Hardy, whose turn it was to shoot (we had made an arrangement to take alternate shots with the one big rifle left to us) had also seen the bears on his way up, and it was not a little tantalizing for him to watch them feed quietly away over the mountain side. This made a total of six bears—of which four, if not five, were most certainly different animals—seen by us in ten days in Bear Ravine.

That evening we returned to camp on the Fraser, and, having _cached_ all that we were leaving behind in a large fir tree, we started on our last pack up Bear Ravine on August 8th. That day, while packing with the head strap, I was near to making the last journey of my life, for in jumping from rock to rock among the loose screes near the head of the valley I overbalanced a huge fragment, which, although it shifted a bare yard, only missed crushing my thigh by the fraction of a second.

The nine loads we had carried up comprised 110 lbs. flour, 25 lbs. bacon, 8 lbs. raisins, 3 lbs. tea, thirty packets of McDoddie and Lazenby, and 2 lbs. chocolate food. One ·350 rifle with 65 cartridges, and a ·22 with two hundred, a fishing rod, two tents, a canoe, a Jaeger bed, and four blankets, as well as our changes of clothes, instruments, pitch, rope, canoe poles, paddles, cooking-pots, candles, etc., not forgetting the Stockholm tar and oil. These all made a very tidy heap in Mosquito Glen at the head of the ravine.

After a short rest we began our climb to the plateau above, and, at first, were in difficulties over a large patch of snow which had not yet been melted by the sun of Labrador’s short summer. Surmounting this after a time we saw before us a low rocky knoll, on the further side of which lay our course. Presently we reached it, and were at last free to lay down our packs and take in the surrounding scene thoroughly.

[Illustration: “Hard lies the path.”]

[Illustration: Bear Ravine.]

[Illustration: Robert Porter.]

[Illustration: Bear Ravine Brook.]

On all sides of us stretched low rolling hills, covered with stones and moss, lakes rimmed round with sparse grasses lay in the hollows. And over them all within the circle of sight—save for the mosquitoes, which hung in clouds over us—was not a sign or sound of life past, present or to come. So I thought for a moment—but stay, what is that? Leading away into the south-west were small piles of stones placed at even distances the one from the other. They dwindled away as far as the eye could see, finally to lose themselves in the glow of the evening sky. Human hands had raised them, they were the cairns heaped up by the Eskimo of a far bygone day, and used for guidance on their spring sledge journeys, after the deer of the barren ground. At first it seemed that they must be too low to serve as guiding marks, for in winter the snow would surely cover these little heaps of stones from sight. But such is not the case, for they are raised on exposed spots; and up there on the roof of Labrador, 1,700 feet above sea level, the snow does not lie long or deep, for the wind rules all things and reduces all things—even the snow—to its will.