The two boys ran rapidly to meet Moise, and overwhelmed him with questions asked all at once.
"How"s everything?" demanded Rob, "and where"s Jesse?"
"Oh, those boy, she"ll been all right," said Moise. "She"ll be on camp seex, h"eight mile below here, up above, maybe so. My cousins Billy and At-tick, come through with us--they"ll portage half-way to-day.
"But, _mes amis_," broke out Moise; "there"s your boat! How you"ll got her through? S"pose you take wings an" fly over those rock, _hein_?
_Mon Dieu!_"
"We couldn"t wait any longer, Moise," said Rob, "and we thought we had better be busy than idle. It was hard work, but Alex carried her over, and we didn"t have much left to pack except our rifles and ourselves."
"Then you"ll not need any mans for help on the portage? All right.
We"ll get some boat below."
"How far is it back to your camp, Moise?" demanded John.
"Maybe five, seex mile, maybe more--I"ll not keep track of heem."
"Can we go back there to-night with you? I"d like to see Jess. May we go, Alex?"
"If you like," answered the old hunter, quietly. "I"ll stay here and sleep, and if you care to, you can sleep there. I don"t doubt you will be glad to see your friend again, and he"ll be glad to see you."
Tired as the boys had been, they were now so excited that they forgot their fatigue, and trotted along close to Moise as he now turned and struck a steady pace back on the portage trail. It was quite dark when at last they came out on a high bank above a level, at which a camp-fire was glowing. John and Rob put their hands to their mouths and gave a loud "Halloo!" They saw the smaller of the three figures at the fire jump to his feet. Then came the answering "Halloo!" of Jesse, who came scrambling up to meet them as they hurried down.
"You"re safe, then," said Jesse. "Oh, but I"m glad you got here all right."
"We"re glad to meet you safe and sound, too," said Rob. "Yes, we finished the trip--we even carried our boat through by ourselves, and she"s there now on the bank of the stream, ready to go on down."
"That"s fine," said Jess. "These two men, the cousins of Moise, have been as nice as you please. They said they could fix up the _Mary Ann_, and they were very glad to have her--there she is, all in a bundle. They are taking her across in sections. It was hard work getting up the river, for it was all dirty and high. But we made it--I think we worked eighteen hours a day all the way round. Moise is a hustler, all right, besides being a cook."
"So is Alex a hustler, you may depend," rejoined Rob. "We couldn"t have two better men. Well, here we are, together once more, safe and sound."
"What"s the programme now, Rob?" asked John.
"We"re to sleep here to-night--although it doesn"t seem as though we"d have very many blankets," answered Rob. "And then in the morning I suppose Moise would better go and help Alex get the boat down to the river. But where"s the other dugout we were to have, Moise?"
Moise talked awhile further with the two reticent breeds.
"My cousin Billy, he"ll say there"s old man about five, seex mile below there, an" he"ll got dugout," he said at last. "He"ll say twenty dollar for dugout."
"That"s cheaper than Peterboroughs," said Rob, smiling. "Anyhow, we"ve got to have it, because you can"t buy canoes in shops here on the Peace River. You tell these two men, Moise, to go down there in the morning and have the old man, whoever he is, bring his canoe up as soon as he can to the port. We"ll meet, I should say, about noon to-morrow, if all goes well. And as we"re now through the worst of it and seem to have pretty fair weather yet, I shall be surprised if we don"t get quite a bit farther east inside of the next twenty-four hours."
"Then hurrah for Uncle d.i.c.k!" said John. "He"s somewhere down this river, and maybe it won"t be so very long before we run across him."
"Hurrah! for all those boy also!" smiled Moise. "Pretty lucky, _hein_?"
XXIII
THE LAND OF PLENTY
Rob"s plans were approved by Alex and Moise, and worked out so well that by noon of the next day the entire party had rea.s.sembled at the rendezvous. The _Jaybird_ was the first boat to be loaded, the men getting her down the steep bank with small delay and taking a rapid run of a couple of miles or so down the river soon thereafter. After a little time they concluded to wait for the other men who had gone down the river-bank to secure the dugout of an old Indian, who, it seems, was known as Picheu, or the Lynx.
"I don"t know about a dugout, Moise," said Rob. "There may be bad water below here."
"No, not very bad water," said Moise. "I"ll ron heem on steamboat many tam! But those dugout she"ll been good boat, too. I s"pose she"ll been twenty foot long an" carry thousand pound all right."
"Well," Rob answered, "that will do us as well as a steamboat. I wonder why the old _voyageurs_ never used the dugout instead of the birch-bark--they wouldn"t have had to mend it so often, even if they couldn"t carry it so easily."
"I"ll tell you, fellows," said Jesse, who was rather proud of his overland trip by himself, "the fur trade isn"t what it used to be.
At those posts you don"t see just furs and traps, and men in blanket-coats, and dog-trains. In the post here they had groceries, and axes, and calico dresses, and hats, just like they have in a country store. I peeked in through the windows."
Alex smiled at them. "You see," said he, "you"ve been looking at pictures which were made some time ago perhaps. Or perhaps they were made in the winter-time, and not in the summer. At this season all the fur packets have gone down the trail, and they don"t need dog-trains and blanket-coats. You ought to come up here in the winter-time to get a glimpse of the old scenes. I"ll admit, though, that the fur-posts aren"t what they were when I was a boy. You can get anything you like now, from an umbrella to a stick of toffy."
"Where?" asked John, suddenly, amid general laughter.
"The toffy? I"m sure we"ll find some at Peace River Landing, along with plows and axes and sewing-machines, and all that sort of thing!"
"But the people pay for them all with their furs?" inquired Rob.
"For the most part, yes. Always in this part of the country the people have lived well. Farther north the marten have longer fur, but not finer than you will find here, so that they bring just as good prices.
This has always been a meat country--you"ll remember how many buffalo and elk Mackenzie saw. Now, if the lynx and the marten should disappear, and if we had to go to farming, it still would be the "Land of Plenty," I"m thinking--that"s what we used to call it. If we should go up to the top of these high banks and explore back south a little bit, on this side of the Smoky, you"d see some of the prettiest prairies that ever lay out of doors, all ready for the plow. I suppose my people some time will have to use the plow too."
"Yes," a.s.sented Rob, "I remember Mackenzie"s story, how very beautiful he found this country soon after he started west on his trip."
"My people, the Crees, took this country from others long ago," said Alex, rather proudly. "They came up the old war-trail from Little Slave Lake to the mouth of the Smoky, where the Peace River Landing is now. They fought the Beavers and the Stoneys clear to the edges of the Rockies, where we are now. They"ve held the land ever since, and managed to make a living on it, with or without the white man"s help.
Some of us will change, but men like At-tick, the old Indian who brought Jess across the trail, and like old Picheu, below here, aren"t apt to change very much."
John was once more puzzling at the map which the boys had made for themselves, following the old Mackenzie records. "I can"t figure out just where Mackenzie started from on his trip, but he says it was longitude 117 35" 15", lat.i.tude 56 09". Now, that doesn"t check up with our map at all. That would make his start not very far from the fort, or what they call the Peace River Landing to-day, I should think. But he only mentions a "small stream coming from the east,"
although Moise says the Smoky is quite a river."
"Most people think Mackenzie started from Fort Chippewayan," said Alex, "but as a matter of fact, he wintered far southwest of there, on the Peace River, somewhere between three hundred and four hundred miles south and west of Fort Vermilion, as I gather from the length of time it took him to get to the edge of the Rockies, where we are now.
He mentions the banks getting higher as he went south and west. When you get a couple of hundred miles north of the Landing the banks begin to get low, although at the Landing they"re still almost a thousand feet high above the water-level, at least eight hundred feet, I should say."
"Well," said Rob, "we know something about this country ourselves now, and we"ll make a map of it some time, perhaps--a better one than we have now."
"Yes," said Jesse, "but who can draw in that horse-trail from Hudson"s Hope to the head of the steamboat transport? I"d like to see that trail!"
"I suppose we could get on the steamboat some time before long if we wanted to," said John.
"No," said Alex, "hardly again this summer, for she"s made her last trip with supplies up to Fort St. John by now."
"We don"t want any steamboat, nor anything else," said Rob, "except to go on down on our own hook, the way we started. Let"s be as wild as we can!"
"We"re apt to see more game from here down than we have any place on the trip," said Alex. "You know, I told you this was the Land of Plenty."
"Bimeby plenty bear," said Moise. "This boy Billy, he"ll tol" me ol"