Part 29

What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could see.

[Illustration: After the car had passed: a stretch of road south of the Nechako.

Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.

Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.

WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.]

“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t get traction.”

As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded “mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.

“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.

“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House. Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”

“How far is it from here?” I asked.

“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three mile.”

“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”

Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.

“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,” he said.

“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.

“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to stand in the road bargainin’.”

I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.

That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three _perfectly awful_ miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. _It had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles._

Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable litter of small children.

“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads, unless ’twould be in the loft.”

“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”

Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”

But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and left in darkness everything.

We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however, the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon, ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.

I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation, as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast, quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which, if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were therefore fair game, we were given the _suite de luxe_. This consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked, tired humanity. It was a _nuit du diable_, as our Paris friends would say.

It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton, the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the throttle.

“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”

Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination. There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton, rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn, my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline. Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey’s end!

Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board. After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating, too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:

“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”

“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting through to Hazelton.

“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named “Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”

So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself.

New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.

A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit, seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.

The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships, uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the tenderness of a woman.