ROOM 12 i^ c*. fV. / ^ / 3' ^ FAR OUT: ROVINGS RETOLD, FAR OUT: ROVINGS RETOLD. BY LIEUT.-COL. W. F. BUTLER, C.B. AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT LONE LAND," "THE WILD NORTH LAND," ETC., ETC. — for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon, Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous f Ir-cn: Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight on the verge Of the remote horizon. Shblley LONDON : Wm. ISBISTER, limited, 56, LUDGATE HILL, 1880. V- V V BoAW., CONTENTS. — .{. — PAUB Introductorv Chapter vii A Dog and His Doings : I I " 20 A Journey of a Doq and a Man from Cariboj to California : 1 68 " 84 ni loi IV X2I The Yosemite Valley 137 Afghanistan and the Afghans 158 The Zulus i-- South Africa: I 193 II 220 III 239 IV ,55 A Plea for the Peasant 283 A Trip to Cyprus: ■'•• • • • • • ■ • . • 3^^ II 329 III- • 347 IV 368 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. T HAVE been told that an introductory chapter is necessary ere the scattered papers of travel which are here, brought together can bo taken from the lower region of magazine literature, in which they have hitherto had existence, and, with a title bestowed upon them, be elevated or " shelved" into the upper world of books. I feel convinced, however, that no amount of pre- face, introductory chapter, or other preparatory pre- amble could succeed in imparting topographical sequence or literary unity to rambles, the theatres of which have lain so far removed from each other. To group together such separated scenes as the pine-woods and snow-sheeted lakes of the regions of the Hudson's Bay fur-trade with the treeless plains of Natal and the Dutch Eepublics, would be a task beyond even the focussing faculty of my old fishing friend, John Burns, of Derry-cluny. Bums was frequently in the habit of expatiating upon the Vlll FAll OUT. advantages of climate enjoyed by those who breathed the air of his native river bank, whose sahnon pools and streams he knew so well. On one occa- sion when I had succeeded in dragging my bones out of the Gold Coast, less many stone weight of their normal covering, the old fisherman came to see me. There was, ho said, only one thing necessary to in- sure perfect restoration to health and strength, it was to sit every day upon the battlement of a bridge over his river, and to breathe the air that blew down from the Glen of Aherlow. " Had not Father Maher, the Coadjutor, been to Eomo, Asia Minor, and them northern parts, and didn't he give it up, for goodness, to the air on Ballycarron Bridge ?" This "isothermal lino" of my poor old friend comes back now to me when I try to bind together Shasta and Athabasca, and them ,'* southern parts" of Africa; but unless my readers can be induced to adopt some such method of geogra- phical grouping, and to make a "bee lino" across the globe, these divergent paths of "Far Out" travel must still remain sundered by space of seas. Taking the papers in the order in which they were written, that of South Africa comes first. Of the paper itself I will only remark that, although a wild storm of conflict has swept over South Africa since that date, I find no cause to alter a single opinion or reverse a judgment then expressed. A recent well-known INTRODUCTORY. IX traveller visiting the Diamond Fields thought ho had discovered in the fact of black labour there given to white employers the key to the pacific solution of the great difficulties between race. To my mind the great pit at Kimberley had an exactly opposite tendency. It brought to South Africa the white race of gold- seekers ; it brought to Kimberley the black race of gun-seekers. Greed and passion on the one hand; arms and ammunition on the other ; the spark could not be distant. Who rightly gauged the situation can best be an- swered by the host of little wars, which in four years have cost the empire about nine millions sterling. As it has fallen to my lot in life to have seen a good deal of native races in different parts of our vast empire, I may here devote a few words to this ques- tion of native war — a question which, if the moral matter contained in it should in these days be looked upon as old-fashioned and out of date, may at least claim notice from the fact of the " big bill " which usually follows a " little war." One of the effects of living in what is called a rapid age is, that although we have multiplied our sources of information on all subjects almost beyond computation, our time and opportunities of studying those sources of information have not increased. People have no leisure now to inquire into an in- justice. Men grow quickly tired of the whole subject. X . FAR OUT. They do not want the trouble of sifting or weighing a question ; the novelty, even of an unjust war, soon wears off, and the readers of daily papers become more intent upon getting rid of a worry, that has bored themselves, than of redressing some wrong that has been inflicted upon others. "There is nothing more easy," said a veteran Cape statesman to the writer, " than to get up a war in South Africa. If I had only known that the Govern- ment wanted such things, I could have given them a score of Kaffir wars in my time." He spoke the soberest truth. A wild or semi-wild man is always ready to fight if wrong be put upon him. It is the only method of obtaining redress or vengeance that he knows of. He has no means of separating the acts of irresponsible white men from the government under which they live. The only government he can understand is that personal rule which makes the chief and the subject alike answer- able ; and hence every trader carries with him, in his dealings with natives, the character of the nation to which he belongs. Yet wherever I have gone, amo 'g wild or semi- wild men, I have found one idea prevalent in the minds of white men trading with natives. That idea was that it was perfectly fair and legitimate to cheat the wild man in every possible way. One hundred years ago it was considered right to cheat the black man out of his liberty and to sell INTRODUCTORY. XI him as a slave. To-day it is the natural habit of thought to cheat the black man out of his land or out of his cattle. In the coast region of Natal the coin known as a florin is called among the natives "a Scotch half-crown." The reason of the title is simple. A few years ago an enterprising North- Briton went to trade with the natives in that part of the country. He did not barter — he paid cash for what he bought. Curiously enough he always tendered half-crowns in payment. Months later the natives found that their half-crowns were worth only two shillings each ; and since that time the florin, ale " g the coast, bears the name of "Scotchman." Instances of a similar kind could be multiplied, until the reader would be tired of their iteration. As the widest rivers have their sources in rills, so have our wars frequently their beginnings in the state of petty theft and retaliation thus produced. A native is cheated in trade ; he discovers the fraud, and later on commits a theft in retaliation. In- stantly the Colony rings with the outrage. The news is quickly taken up by that large class of idler, loafer, transport-rider, trader — persons to whom war brings a harvest of gold, and with whom, in all parts of the world, war will ever be popular. The position becomes what is called "strained," and then there is only needed a Governor, hungry for the addition of letters to his name, to let loose the tide and begin a little Xll FAR OUT. ■war, which costs Great Britain four hundred or five hundred pounds for every negro shot. .. ,. . , ( . ■ Here is the history of a little war, the bill for which still remains to be paid. A " commando " was sent out against a chief, who had given trouble on the frontier. It is easy to mistake the cattle and women belonging to one black man, for the cattle and women belonging to another. The wives and pro- perty of the recalcitrant negro could not be foimd, but a " commando " is not the kind of expedition to re- turn empty-handed from a campaign, so the women and cattle of another black man or tribe were trium-* phantly seized. As those people had lived on terms of perfect amity with the white man, it may be sup- posed the seizure caused astonishment. The men of the tribe fell, without hesitation, upon the nearest white man they could find — an old trader — and killed him and his sons. War was of course declared, to punish this unprovoked murder, and the little co?iflict thus inaugm'ated cost Great Britain a quarter of a million sterling. I have no hesitation in saying that five-sixths of our African wars, and a still larger proportion of the Indian wars in America, have their beginnings in wrongs done in the first instance by white men upon natives. To the incoming settler the land of his adoption is essentially a neiv land. There may have been people in it for twenty centuries before he came to INTRODUCTORY. Xlll it ; but their lights to possession are not perceptible to him. His title to land in the country often con- sists in the fact of his voyage out, and in the other fact that he never had any land in his own country. It is curious how easy it is to transfer to a fresh soil the seed of an injustice. Denied the possession of the soil in his old home, the first thought of the immigrant in the land of his adoption is to deny to others the right to exist. Too often, having had only the right to labour for others allowed him in England, he eagerly adopts the idea that labour is the natural inheritance of the black man. So it is ever in the world. The man beaten and bullied in his youth will beat and bully when his opportunity arrives — the servant is over the hardest taskmaster. "There is," says Balzac, "nothing more terrible than the vengeance of the shopkeeper." Thus the frontier between civilisation and the wilds finds ever arrayed along it, whether the scene be the backwoods of Canada, the Dakotan boundary, or the outlying "veldt" in the Transvaal, representatives of the two races least likely to agree together — the white man who has never had a servant, and the black man who has never known a master. I recollect once spending a couple of days in the pm'suit of a bear in a western Canadian forest. I had as guide a white trader, a man from a neigh- bouring forest settlement. We chanced to meet one XIV . FAR OUT. • day a solitary Indian hunter. My companion shook his fist and cursed aloud at him. " What harm has he done you?" I asked. "Harm?" answered the man; "he'll never stop until he has killed that bear. I wouldn't leave a red-skin in the land if I had my way." "But the bear is as much his property as it is ours," I said. "Probably for twenty generations back the red ancestors of that poor devil have hunted bears in this forest." What cared my guide ? He was quite as ready to put down the "red-skin" as though the scene had been an English Petty Sessions Court, the Indian had been a rabbit poacher, and he himself the presiding magistrate. In the Sierra Nevadas, in California, I had once the good fortune of meeting the late Mr. Boss Browne, for years an Indian Government Commissioner. From him I heard the history of the origin of the Apachee War, which has so long been waged in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. "When the first coach line was put through Arizona," said my informant, "the Indians were at complete peace with us; they watched the horses at the ranches, they were employed in the stables, and did the work of the road cheerfully and well. All went smoothly for some time until there came upon the line a certain Mr. King. This gentleman was not at all pleased with the peaceable manner in which the busi- INTRODUCTORY. XV ness was proceeding. The Indians were doing the work cheaply ; the stations were supplied at small cost; no money could be made out of such a set of inoffensive people. King determined to change all this, and to make the country fit for an American speculator to live in. His mode of procedure was very simple. Hard by the ranche at which he dwelt there was an old fort of the Mexican times, whose adhoby battlements were weed-grown and ruined. Within some crumbling bastion there lay an old iron carronade, rusting amid the nettles. This forgotten relic of Spanish dominion was the instru- ment by which Mr. King was to effect the change he wished for. He brought the gun out of the ruins, he scraped the mud from the muzzle, cleared the vent-hole, and squibbed off some loose powder to see that all was right within the bore. Then he placed the gun in a neighbouring thicket, mounted upon two trunks of timber, and with its muzzle just hidden within the edge of brushwood. Down that muzzle he put a bag of gunpowder, and on top of the powder be placed several handfuls of leaden bullets — twelve to the pound. When he had completed the priming of his piece he laid the sight of the gun upon ^ne centre of a little depression in the ground that lay about one hundred and fifty yards distant ; then, to keep the gun in its place, he put another log of timber across it. All this done, he quietly covered up his ord- XVI FAR OUT. nance with a sheet, and went his way. An hour later he issued invitations among the Indians for a feast on the morrow. He would kill three oxen ; there would be three fires, at which the oxen would he roasted, and then there would be a great feed and much jollity. The oxen were killed, the fires made, the guests were not wanting. About mid-day the following day there were over two hundred Apachees busily engaged in roasting meat a*; three large fires. The fires stood in a single line in a slight hollow, the floor of which was level, and which level was continued to a small thicket distant from it about one hundred and fifty yards. ■.::'■■'...,' a<- ■.:;■ ..uyA .■?!: *;■;.;■.; '.'R;:...,, " When the feast was at its height, and the Indians •were thickly grouped around the fires, roasting, eating, running back to roast, and then to eat again, Mr. King quietly left the crowd and sauntered up into the thicket. No one minded him ; every one was too eager at the feast. All at once the roar of an explosion burst out from the thicket, and then — there is no need to tell the rest ; dead and mangled Indians lay thick in the hollow. No one knew what had happened ; but when, later on, other Indians flocked wildly to the scene, they found two-thirds of their comrades dead or dying, a score or more wounded with different degrees of severity, and some twelve or more un- touched, but utterly dazed and stupified at the catas- trophe. They could only point to the thicket ; the iron INTRODUCTORY. XVll carronade told the rest. It was found lying somo distance back in the wo: d, flung there by the force of its own recoil. A black mark along the ground showed where a train of gunpowder had been laid to the vent. Of Mr. King there was no trace ; he was already far away towards the nearest fort. But from that day to the present the Indians have been cease- lessly on the war trail, and over the sandy wastes of Arizona and New Mexico many a site is marked to-day with the stone, or cross, which tells the traveller that a white man there met his end at the hands of an Apachee." It may be easily supposed that, when the stage of actual conflict has been reached, the mode of warfare springing from such a condition of society is utterly destitute of any of those rules which civilisation endeavours to impose upon strife. There is literally no line drawn in the savagery of war with the native. There is no " belt," in reality or in metaphor, beneath which it is unfair to hit a black man. Between the Irish wars of Elizabeth's captains and the wars waged against the natives in South Africa there is only the difference of breechloaders, and rifled ordnance; civili- sation is alone traceable in the greater range of the projectile or the increased power of the explosive. The old methods of destruction are as much in favour as ever, but they are left to the nimbler feet or more active hands of our Fingo or Basuto allies. X\'lll FAll OUT. It would be unfair to our colonial brethren to sup- pose that they arc responsible for the savagery of acts done by what are termed " irregular corps " in native wars. In the ranks of many of those regiments the concentrated rascality from half the states of Europe will be found. Here is a little picture from a corps raised for semce in one of the recent South African wars. When visiting his sentries at night, the Command- ing Officer was in the habit of taking round with him an orderly, who carried a lantern. There was, of course, nothing unusual in this fact; but tho method of the inspection had best be told in the officer's own words. "I knew my blackguards wanted to shoot me," he said, " so, as I walked along the lino of sentries, I took care to kee]) the fellow with the lantern on my right or left-hand side. When chal- lenged, I would call out, and then jump quickly to one side, so that if the rascal on sentry fired, he would have aimed at the light and missed me." And yet it is to men such as this corps was composed of that the nation freely pays six times a higher rate of daily wage than it gives to the trained troops of its regular army. Often, when I have seen the wild extravagance that characterises our ** little •wars," and looked at the rabble brought together, to harry some miserable negro and his tribe — ^to chase Through rocks, where monkeys seemed a nobler race, INTRODUCTORY. XIX I have not known whom to pity most, the black man, hunted out of his land and life, or the white rate- payer at home, whose pocket was being so freely bled. Let no man imagine either that for our own troops these wars have in them even the common attribute of " schooling." Sorry schools these to learn the steadiness, the discipline, or the morale, which would meet in a fair field of Em'opean fight the Pome- ranian battalions, or the men who crossed the Balkans in mid- winter. " May it never be my fate," said, to the writer of these pages, one whose experience of troops in war ranged over every campaign of the last thu'ty years in all parts of the globe, " to find myself on a European battle-field with an army trained in a South African campaign." He was right. The cave- smokers of Algeria made but a sorry show when pitted against sterner stuff than Kabyle fugitives : yet Algeria was not the only part of Afi-ica where cave-smoking warfare was widely practised, and where science coolly blew helpless women and children into atoms in the burrows to which they had fled in terror. • -. Let us quit this subject. If this were soldiering, it would indeed be only a sorry trade. When the present Afghan war was in its initiative stages, we ventm-edto express a doubt upon the favourite theory of the " forward school," that the Afghans had only to be freely shot, plundered, and otherwise A '2 mi FAR OUT. knocked about, to become our fast and firm allies, and to hate the Bussians with something of the discrimi- nating fervour of a London music-hall audience. As the best method of stating these views wo had re- course to the past history of the Afghan people, and of our own relations towards them, concluding the attempt to prove the moral of the moment, by the lesson of the past, with these words : " Twenty millions of money ! twenty thousand human lives ! three times that number of camels and horses lost ! a name hated throughout the length and breadth of this mountain land — such were the results accruing to us from three years' wandering in search of a scientific frontier." Whether history has since repeated itself to almost every syllable of the above sentence we must let our readers determine. Meantime I will leave these sub- jects and turn to other lands which are filled with brighter sights and softer sounds— with the echo of the wilderness, the ring of dog-bells over snowy ■solitudes, the plash of canoe-paddle in quiet waters ; with sights of suns setting over measureless meadows, of moons glistering upon snow-sheeted lakes, of the weird lights of the north flashing above motionless pine-tr-ees — sights and sounds of all that varied north land which through time and distance wears ever un- changed its memories of lonely beauty. Of the dog, whose fortunes had so close a connection INTRODUCTORY, XXI ■with mine own through many scenes of winter travel, there remain a few words to he ^vritten. It may he rememherecT that in the spring of 1873 his career as a hauling dog ceased, and that in the autumn of the same year he became a dog of civilisa- tion, if not of progress. Henceforth life wa» to be to him a time of rest and food. The collar and the moose- skin trace could only visit him in troubled dreams. No more the early call to harness in the savage cold of the dark morning would break upon his sleeping ear as he lay deep beneath the falling snow. No more the long day tugging at the collar, the mid-day halt, the frozen white fish for supper, the shivering bivouac under the pine-trees — all was changed, his work "was over; and, like some old veteran of a hundred lights in the seclusion of his club, thenceforth he could lay down his body for himself and the law for •his friends, and beguile the tedium of time in the pursuit of small game, or devote himself to pastimes "which would recall earlier scenes of life in the great northern wilderness. As time went on that aversion which he had demonstrated towards cats on his first introduction to civilisation deepened into a more last- ing animosity. Perhaps they seemed to him a link that bound him to older enmities — enmities to the lynx and the marten, the beaver and the otter, the pur- suit of which had in bygone times so often caused him. moments of excitement ; for how often had I seen him • • XXll FAR OUT. baffled by n mnrtcn up a pino-troo, or intensely puzzled by tlio sudden disappearance of a fisher into a burrow, down which ho would intrude his head as far as it was possible for it to go, while his great body drew in deep respirations of sand and air, as though he would draw the animal from his earth by mere strength of inhalation. Frequently too was he noticed to indulge in hole-digging of a desultory description, the object whereof was not apparent. It may have been that the old doj was affected at the memory of the many caches he had made during his life of travel — those neve revisited hiding-places of superfluous food scattered along his ten thousand miles of winter work ; and perhaps a vague idea possessed him that, burrowing at random, he might find some long-hidden treasure of moose-leg, white fish, or buifalo-bone. It is impossible to say whether he was happy or not, for happiness in dogs, as well as in their masters, is a quantity that cannot always be measured by the weight or value of their creature comforts. Dog comfort he undoubtedly possessed — dog comfort of the bed and the bone ; but who shall say that there came not now and again to his brain old memories of cozy camps on pine islets in great frozen lakes, of mid-day halts by snow-drifts where the red and golden willows glistened in the winter's sun, of old antagonists and fellow- haulers, of the hosts of Muskeymotes, Cariboos, Tete- Noirs, Kuskytayatimoos, that had been boon com- INTRODUCTOKY. XXlll panioiis, or fierce rivals, to him in the fur forts of the north ? Glimpses, too, of idle moments in those far- away forts of the great wilderness when he hayed the Northern Lights that flashed and flickered over the pine-tops on the opposite shore, or answered hack at intervals the lonely howl of some wandering wolf against the clear cut sky-lino of a moonlit prairie hill. Once again dog and master were destined to meet. Three years had passed since they parted on the Atlantic shore of North America. Since that time the world had changed much with hoth of them. Ease and ago had bowed the sharp head, bent the broad back, uncurled the bushy tail, and slouched the springy gait of the once unequalled Esquimaux. Toil and the fever of the African forest had left their trace upon the man. It had been night when they had parted ; it was also night when they met again. For a moment the old dog seemed to be puzzled ; he had been roused from sleep to meet the new comer, but when his ear caught voice and words that had been so familiar to him, memories of the old time seemed to come back, for the bent tail wagged, the lip curled into the laugh, and the well-remembered whimper of satisfaction sounded again — echoes of old companion- ship of camp and trail in a far-oflf world. Two years more and echoes, if such they were, ceased. In the summer of 1878, Cerf Vola the Untiring made his last camp on the shore of life. His grave is XXIV FAR OUT. r under a pine-tree, although far away from the land of pines ; and, if it be given to the dog spirit to roam again the scenes of life, he has for his " happy haul- ing grounds" a wondrous heaven — a mm-mur of many waters, an echo of ever-sounding pine-trees, and many glimpses of that vast]world of wilderness — ^lake, forest, prairie, and mountain, "far out" beyond the white man's farthest farm. . v FAR OUT: ROVINGS RETOLD. A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. % Tj^AE out, in that portion of the grim Laurentiau wilderness of North America which stretches its iron belt between the more recent formation of the Bay of Hudson and the valley of the Mackenzie Eiver, there lies a sheet of water named Deer's Lake by the old English fur-traders, who first reached its shores from the estuary of the Churchill Eiver. It is essentially a lonely place; the rocky shores, broken into deep and quiet bays, hold a vegetation of fir and spruce trees, dwarf, rigid, and of dark sombre hue. The waves beat in monotonous cadence against the bare rocks which mark the "points" or capes between the deep indentations of the shores ; and the bays are often filled with long growing reeds and I FAR OUT. waving grasses, through which the wind makes cease- less moan, as early autumn follows with rapid foot- steps the Septemher sun. In summer, short though it he, there are sights to he seen on this lake, filled with that rare beauty only to be found where the rain and the sun have together and alone woven the covering of the earth ; for in summer there falls upon these hills the strange, un- wonted beauty of saffron sunsets, lengthening out the shadows of dark pine-trees on water so still that the ripple from a wild duck's breast steals far over the sm'face, and gently rocks the shadowed image of the shore, and waves the motionless pine-branch on the cliff, and dies in the water-worn hollows of the old grey rocks with an echo just audible in the great stillness of the scene ; then, too, as the light of evening deepens, and the western end of some long arm of the lake yet lives in the strange contrast of dark rigid tree-tops, outlined against a lustrous after- glow, there sounds over lake and shore a cry, the vivid distinctness of which startles the echoes deep into the bosom of the woods. It is the wail of the loon — a wild and lonely call that tells the shy moose in his willow lair he may rise and seek his mate ; that calls the dark-fm-red otter from his haunt beneath the rock to his nightly toil of fishing in the quiet pools where the fish glance like silver arrors in the moonlight ; that signals to the grey owl thpl Lis time has come, too, to flit amid the dusky shadov>s ; that tells wild beast and wild bird they A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. 3 may set forth for feast, or love, or war, safe under the cover of the night, in their great home of the wilderness. On the south shore of this lake there stands a small trading-house or "fort" of the Hudson Bay Company. It is the usual type of structure common throughout the fur country of the great north. Log- house and picket-fence, trading-store, and hut for half-breed servants, all alike built from the wood of the straight fir-tree, roofed with logs, covered with the bark of junipers, and made secure from the searching winds of winter by inud and moss stuffed tightly between the interstices of the logs. In winter, house, fence, and hut lie deep drifted, amid snow piled high by storm ; in summer, dogs stretch in lazy delight ur:cn the sloping pathway between the picket-fence and the lake shore. A boat lies updrawn upon the beach ; an Indian birch-bark canoe, turned downwards upon its face, lies near it. Far out upon the lake another canoe, a speck on the water, is seen coming from the further shore with some Indian family intent on trade ; and around, over the palisades and roof-tops, in endless lines, the motionless and rigid pine-trees stand dark and changeless. In fact, this fort at Deer's Lake differs not from a hundred other forts scattered over this great northern wilderness. Its aspect, life, people, boats, canoes, surroundings, are all the same; everything is alike here as elsewhere: everything, save one item, and B 2 '4 FAR OUT. that one item is an important one — it is the dog. The dogs of Deer's Lake differ from other dogs in most of the forts of the great northern land. Dogs, it is true, are fond of differing all the world over ; but on this point of difference between dogs at Deer's Lake and dogs elsewhere in the north there is a notable distinction, and it is this — that while the dogs at the many fur forts further inland, the trading forts scattered over the vast basins of the Saskatchewan, Peace, and Athabasca Rivers, are a poor and wolf-like breed, those at Deer's Lake are remarkable for possessing a strength, size, and sym- metry, a uniformity of colour and characteristic, stamping them at once as a distinct species which has developed into that perfection always attained by Nature when in the wild state she moulds her creatures to their own wants and purposes. The dogs are, in fact, of Esquimaux breed, a species of which it will be necessary to say a few words. • Around the wide circle of the Arctic Sea, on all northern shores of Europe, Asia, and America, that extraordinary race of human beings known as Esqui- maux possess a breed of dogs unequalled for the value of the assistance they afford to their human masters. The Arab has his horse, the Lidian his canoe, the Libyan his camel; but in the dog the dwarfed and hardy races of the frozen north possess an auxiliary more constant, more untiring, more useful, than any other thing of animate or inanimate nature the wide world over. A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. 5 From northern Norway, along the cold slopes of Lapland and the White Sea, far into that unknown region where Russia's north-east cape stands the nearest continental outpost to the pole upon the earth ; down along the wintry shores of the Lena and the wild Yakoutsk waste, to the Straits of Behring ; and, again, into the regions of North America by the mouths of the three great rivers which seek the Arctic Ocean, until, sweeping around the wide Bay of Hudson, the line crosses to Greenland and ends on the east coast of that desolate island — all around the immense circle of this northern shore-line there is found a breed of dogs, differing in size, it is true, but closely identical in shape, habit, and characteristic. When the scattered tribes of Esquimaux move east or west along the shores of their lonely realms, when the spring-time tells them to quit their snow-houses, and to set out upon their dreary quests of fishing, while yet the ice gives safe and ready means of travel ; when early winter, closing in the dusky darkness upon the short summer, sends them again to their huts, the dog is ever there to haul his load of dried fish or musk-ox meat, of oily blubber or skin, of drift-wood or dried moss ; of walrus-bone for spear-heads ; of all the curious craft of kettle, axe, knife, arrow-head, and tent, which the Esquimaux fashions from the few rude materials flung to him by the sea, or grudgingly yielded by the inho; itable shore. - Deep-chested, broad-backed, long-voolled, clean- legged, sharp-nosed, pointed-eared, bright-eyed, with () . FAR OUT. tail close curled over back, in token of an everlasting good humour towards man and of fierce resentment to all outside dogs, the Esquimaux dog stands of his species the only animal which gives to his master the twofold service of horse and dog. The lake called Deer's Lake, of which we have already spoken, is not many marches distant from the west shore of Hudson's Bay. Indians descending the Beaver or Churchill River can easily reach the fort which stands at its mouth, in the summer ; and in winter, when the cariboo are plentiful along the belt of woods lying between Lake Athabasca and Hudson's Bay, stray pai-ties of Indians move at times back and forward from Deer's Lake to Fort Chm'chill. Thus there has arisen an intercourse between the two stations, and as Fort Churchill is the most southerly point to which the Esquimaux come on the shores of the bay, it has fallen out that the dogs bartered by the Esquimaux have been carried inland to the post of Deer's Lake, and that around the palisades and huts of that remote establishment the burly forms and upraised tails of these best and truest Arctic travellers are to be seen. Nearly a dozen years ago from this present time an event occurred at this post of Deer's Lake which, although it received neither comment nor chronicle at the moment, is still worthy of a passing notice in this record. It was only the birth of a dog. Beyond the fact that the event took place at the time I have indicated, little more is known; indeed, it may be A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. 7 admitted that even that fact would for ever have remained in the limbo of unrecorded history, if cir- cumstancea had not occurred in the after-life of this dog which gave prominence to his earlier existence. It may, however, be safely presumed that the earlier st; '^es of puppyhood were passed by this dog in conditions of unusual felicity. Doubtless the year was one of plenty, so far as white fish in the lake was concerned, or the herds of reindeer were unusually numerous in the neighbouring woods ; and doubtless, too, the mother of this dog was of a free and generous nature, who grudged not to her progeny a share in spoil of bone, or in the feast that followed the return of the lake-boat from the nets — an event usually watched with anxious eyes by the whole pack of dogs at a northern fur fort, who welcome with hilarious howl the grating of the keel upon the beach, sure prelude to a rich feast, if the night's yield has been propitious. Thrown a chance wanderer in some of these remote and lonely posts in this wilderness of the north, it has often been my occupation to watch the habits of these dogs in the idle hours of their lives. Their fights and mutual jealousies, their impertinent intru- sion into the provision sheds, their wolf-like howls when the earliest streak of dawn glimmered over the eastern hills, their joy when released from harness, their sorrow when about to be placed in it, have often filled up the moments of a day spent in one of those remote spots. 8- FAR OUT. I remember once, at the fort called St. John's, on the Upper Peace River, being witness to a strange conflict between the instincts of a dam to her whelps and the cravings of her own hungry nature. She had become, by some fortunate chance, the possessor of a large bone ; this she had carried to a place of safety under my window, followed by her family of four puppies, just verging from the age of toddling to that of toothsome tendencies. The mother's gaunt sides and staring bones showed that the progeny were no easy burden to her, and their rounded and chubby figures contrasted strongly with her angular outline. Nevertheless, the four youthful haulers seemed to be of opinion that it was wiser for them to claim a share in the bone now under discussion than to await a future moment when its sustenance might be derived second-hand from their maternal relative. They growled and tugged at the bone almost in the mouth of their hungry nurse, and rolled over each other and over the bone in a mixture of infantile ferocity and feebleness most laughable to look at. The expression of their mother's face was one of hungry perplexity. Here was a clear case of injustice on the part of the offspring : they still looked to her for support, and yet they also sought to share her support — this precious bone ; nay, they even presumed upon her feelings to rush in and take it by force, knowing that from her alone could they secure it without being severely bitten. Her only resource was in flight : raising the bone in her mouth, she tried to get away from her A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. 9 family to eat it alone ; but they invariably toddled after her to renew again their importunities. A bright idea seemed suddenly to strike the brain of one of the puppies : he relinquished his attempts at the bone and devoted himself to his more legitimate province of deriving nourishment from his mother; but I could not determine whether this manceuvre was only a ruse to detain her for the benefit of his three brethren yet struggling for the bone, or simply an effort to improve the occasion with reference to a " square meal " on his own account. Arguing from these and similar scenes witnessed among dogs generally in the north, and having regard to the excellent proportion attained by the dog whose history began at Deer's Lake, I can safely aver that his mother must have been of a free and generous nature to him in his early youth. But whatever may have been the conditions of that earlier life, it must suffice for us to know that four winters of haul- ing and four summers of repose had passed over him ere fate determined that the name of the dog and his doings should fall upon the ear of the big outside world. It was the winter of 1871. ' • For three months the great northern forest had lain prone beneath snow, ice, and bitter cold. Many a storm had swept over the immense waste, piling the dry snow into huge drifts by the banks of frozen rivers ; silting up willow islands, covering the wreck of fallen vegetation in the dark pine woods, and 10 FAR OUT. moaning away into endless space over lake, and plain, and forest. The scene is in the neighhourhood of the fur fort called Cumberland, on the shove of Pino Island Lake, near the lower Saskatchewan River. It is the hour of sunrise. Along the white bed of a tortuous river, fast frozen beneath five feet of ice, and deep drifted in snow, came three dog-trains ; twelve dogs in all. Four men accompany or follow these trains in the rapid stride and long swing of snow-shoe walking. The bells upon the dog-harness ring and jangle clearly in the keen frosty air, for the thermometer is standing at some twenty-tive degrees below zero. A white steam rises from the breaths of dogs and men, and great icicles hang on the beards of the travellers, whose fur caps are frosted over with ice dust fine as flour. The pace is about four and a half miles an hour, and its rapid movement has done more to make the blood course freely through their bodies than capote or mittaine or fur-cap could ever achieve on such a morning. Suddenly, from a bend in the river chan- nel, there became visible on the left shore a solitary Indian wigwam ; a thin column of smoke issues from the opening in the pointed roof, a dog barks vigor- ously toward the new comers from the bank in front ; all at once the train dogs quicken their pace to a sharp trot, the men break into a run, and in a few minutes the sledges are abreast of the wigwam; then the leading dogs make a wild lurch to leave the river and ascend the bank, with a view to a rest, and perhaps A DOO AND ms DOINGS. 11 to a Bpell out of harness; but that is not to bo, and a loud and stern word of command from the leading driver makes them crouch to}:5ether in the dry yielding snow in the centre of tlie river. The three men ascend the river bank and enter, ono by one, on their luinds and knees, the low opening of the Indian wigwam. Tlie scene inside is a curious one. Through the opening in the roof the hght comes fully in ; a fire is burning on the ground in the centre ; its smoke, only half escaping through the aperture above, hangs in the upper port of the tent, and it is only by sitting on the ground that one can escape its influence and see with ease and comfort. At the further side of the fire from the doorway sits an old withered, wrinkled Indian, who scarcely regards the new-comers, but continues to sing a low, monotonous song ; a young woman and two children are squatted near. The new-comers sit on some dried rushes around the fire ; the old man, having shaken hands with them one by one, continues his dirge. The leader of the paiiiy asks his followers what the old man is singing about. " About the death of his son," they reply. " His son, this woman's husband, and the father of these two children died here two days since ; and last night a dog-train came from the fort (Cumberland), and took the body away for bm-ial in the graveyard there." "And the man, who was he ? What did he die of?" asked the leader of the pai-ty. 13 FAK OUT. " lie was a Fronch half-brrcd wlio had adopted tlio Indian lifo, and he lived \utn\ in thiw wigwam, huntin}» for the family. He died of cold eau^ht in chasinf^ a black fox, which had carried away one of hia traps. He was a {jjood hunter." The story of this man's life and death was soon told ; meantime the Indian continued his sor'g. , " What is he singing ? " . '* He says that he is old and cannot hunt ; that his support has gone from him ; that it would bo better if he went too." . A few minutes later the party left the wigwam and continued their journey along the frozen river. There was now a trail on the ice, and the dogs followed it with rapid steps. Soon the river opened upon a large lake ; the sleds bounded briskly over the hard drifted surface of the snow, which bore the trace of a recent dog-train upon it ; then there appeared, far oflf in front, the misty outline of buildings grouped together on the dim opposite shore of the lake. Quicker went the dogs, faster beat and clanged the bells, until, leaving the ice, the dogs dragged their loads into an irregular open space surrounded by wooden houses, in the centre of which other dogs and men stood watching the new-comers. Prominent amongst the dogs a large burly-figured, bushy-tailed animal at once caught the eye ; he ap- peared to be intent upon combining two almost impossible lines of conduct in one and the same moment ; namely, to ingratiate himself into the good A !)()(; AND .IIS DOINGS. 13 RVacoB of the mon of the party junt eomo, and to intimidate by a hvv'wh of quick hut ferociouH " awich'S " thf new (h)t^s. ThuH ho proHcnted a sinf^iilar contniHt of HoHfitudc and Hvvai^'j^er ; tho upturned tail \vaHK''ast stretches of frozen lake, promised to be traversible without greater difficulty than that of cold and hardship ; for over these large lakes the very force and violence of the winds have made the mere labour of travel comparatively easy. The snow closely packed upon the ice forms a hardened surface, upon which the snow-shoe leaves but scant impression, and the dogs and sleds run lightly over the smooth and dazzling highway which cold and storm have laid across the vast spaces of these inland seas. It was the 31st of January when I set out with my new train for this last stage of five hundred miles. The cold was very great ; the country as desolate as frozen swamp, spreading in endless succession for eighty miles' distance, could make it ; but the story of that journey has been already told in another place, and its introduction here is only necessary in order to carry on the history of the "foregoing" dog into times and through events which have found no record. 16 FAR OUT. Twenty days passed away ; the marsh and the lakes had been crossed. There had been days of bitter blast, and nights of still, cold rigour, and cosy camps on islands drifted deep in snow, where the tall pine-tree stood to shadow back the glow of tKe fire lit beneath it, and to shelter the wayfarers whose passing footsteps had broken, for one short night, the quiet of these lonely isles. And now it was all over ! I had got back again to house and fireside, bed and board. True, it was only four months since I had left these adjuncts of civili- sation, but time in those matters has only a relative significance, and distance had so lengthened out the vista of these hundred and twenty days that it seemed half a lifetime had been spent in the wilderness, I took up my quarters in an unoccupied house lying about six miles from Fort Garry, in order to quickly complete some official reports relative to my journey. I had as attendant an old pensioner; as companions my four dogs. The pensioner dwelt in the kitchen, the dogs occu- pied a large stable. I had the rest of the house to myself. When not suffering from a too liberal allow- ance of Hutlson's Bay rum, the pensioner was wont to devote his leisure moments in the evening to en- deavouring to elucidate, with my assistance, some problems that perplexed him. He had quitted the army and left England before the era of the introduction of electricity, and " them A DOG AND IIIS DOINGS. 17 themagruffs," as he used to term the telegraph, was ever a fruitful source of conversation with him. For the rest, he cooked for me and for the dogs, kept my fire alight, and fulfilled that truest of all services by leaving me to myself as often as I pleased. At times I gave the dogs a run over the snow, or put them in harness and ran them to the Fort for exercise or business. But even the border civilisation of the Eed Eiver Settlement had many temptations for Cerf Volant and his comrades. There wore some farmsteads in the neighbourhood of my i:ouse, and ducks and turkeys and a cock were things .is completely beyond the comprehensions of my team as the telegraph had been puzzling to my attendant ; with this difference, however — that while the old soldier lost his head over the mystery of the electric wire, the cock and his companions invariably lost their heads to my team's inability to comprehend their true functions in civilisation. More than once was the mid-day scamper up the roadway in front of my house attended with wild scenes of flutter and confusion in straw-yard and byre into which my dogs had penetrated, and more than once were my repeated calls by name of each dog answered by the reappearance of these " missing links" between civilisation and savagery in a state of hilarious joy over the capture and decapitation of these puzzling poultry. At last the time came to quit the settlement for c l8 FAR OUT. other and largor scenes of civilisation, into which the dogs could not go. A Hudson's Bay officer about to start for Norway House, on the north shore of Lake Winnepeg, became the purchaser of the team and cariole, and Cerf Volant passed from ray possession to resume his old place in a Hudson's Bay fort. I parted from the dog with keen regret : he stood alone among his comrades not only as a hauler but as a friend. The work of our lives is the real test of our natures. Any man can be jolly Cx good-tempered at his dinner, or during his leisure moments ; but if the uaily routine of his work leaves no fro^vn upon his nature, if his heart does not close or harden beneath the hourly hammering of his toil, then you may swear there lurks no cranny of discontent in his being — there is no nook of selfish- ness in his heart. So was it with this dog. He alone was ever jolly at his post ; he hauled through all the hours of a long day without slack of collar trace or stint of effort ; but the ear was ever ready to turn responsive to a kindly call, the tail to wag a wel- come within the tight-drawn traces of his toil ; and when the evening came, and the collar was laid aside, and the last strap unbuckled, not lighter did he shake from him the dry powdery snow than the vestiges of his long day's work. Companion in the camp, faithful seiTant during the day — what more could man desire ? The day of departure came. I drove through the single street of Winnepeg village on my way south. A DOG AND IIIS DOINGS. 19 At the entrance to the town, at the spot where, on the night of my first arrival eight months earlier, I had parted from my guide, to pursue alone the way to the friendly Indian settlement, I saw my dog-train coming at a brisk pace along the frozen road. Cerf Volant was leading, a half-breed driver ran behind the sled. " Cerf Volant, old dog ! " I called out. He turned in his harness at the well-known voice, there was a crack of the half-breed's whip like a pistol shot, and the dog, realising that a mighty change had passed over his life and fortunes, bent his head to the collar and trotted on bravely towards the north. The last link of the lone spaces was gone ! q2 II. A YEAE and a half had passed away. The reality of the wilderness had become a dream. Idealised by distance and separation — the camp, the lonely meadow, the dim pine woods, the snow-capped mountains, the mighty hush of nature as the great solitude sank at sunset into the sleep of night — all had come back to me in a thousand scenes of memory ; and in the midst of the rush and roar of a great city, I had seen, as though in another world, the long vista of unnumbered meadows lying at the gateway of the sunset. I had heard the voice of lonely lakes and pines that whispered into the ear of night the melody of unmade music. I would go back to it again. Why not ? Is there anything on earth better than this wilderness? Is there aught in this short life of om's with less of that pleasure which is sure to turn to pain ? with less of those things which are sweet while we toil towards them, and bitter when they lie behind us on the road of life ? The gold of this wilderness is nature's own ; ring it, change it, spend it, hoard it, there lies not in its millions or in its fractions ore atom of alloy. A DOG AND IIIS DOINGS. 21 There is no mountain too lofty to find a frame in the mind's eye of the wanderer; there is no flower too lowly to till with its fragrance the winter garden of his memory. I got back to the old scenes again. It was the early autumn ; the oak woods along the Eed River shores were beginning to yellow under the breath of the north wind ; the mosquitoes were all gone ; the wild ducks were settling on the prairie pools and the reedy " sloughs " of half-dried water-courses ; the grouse were beginning to " pack " ; the warm balmy days were followed by fresh cold nights ; and the prairies, basking in the mellow sunshine of September, stretched in unbroken line from the oak woods of the river to the distant verge of the western horizon. About a hundred and fifty miles south of Fort Garry there stood, on the Eed River bank, a small Hudson Bay post in the territory of Dakota. The wave of immigration had in my absence flowed fast over this fertile valley of the Red River, and the huts and shanties of settlers were now dotted along the trail that led north towards British territory ; the great hungry tide from overcharged Europe was, in fact, eating deeper into the lone land, and month by month the wilderness was losing ground before its sharp and restless surge. But the wilderness had sent its best and truest representative to meet and greet me on the very shore of its lost dominion. As I drove to the door of the Hudson Bay post, accompanied by a friend who had brought two large 22 FAR OUT. Bcotch deer-hounds from England, a huge hushy-tailed dog came charging full tilt upon the new comers. He was followed hy three other animals with tails upraised in various forms of fight ; the charge was sharp and decisive. The dog of Scotland was ignominiously overthrown, and as he lay extended upon his back I beheld, standing over him with legs firmly planted on all sides of the prostrate foe, and tail shaking unutterable defiance, almost at the back of his own head, the burly form of the unconquered Cerf Volant. It was a strange coincidence. On the day of my departure I had left him travelUng north into distant regions ; on the day of my return I found him at the extreme southern limit of Hudson's Bay possession. But changes had come upon the rest of the train. Tigre and Muskeymote had gone to the land where all dogs go. Cariboo yet remained, and two other dogs, ' Spanker and Pony, had taken their places in the vacant traces of my old train. Nor was Cariboo long to remain ; when the time arrived for my departure towards northern regions he too had hauled himself out of life, and Cerf Volant alone remained to link the journey which I was now beginning with the past scenes of former travel. As I have said, the story of this second jomrney has, like that of its predecessors, been already told. It will suffice now to broadly enumerate the distances traversed and the work done by this dog ere, passing once again from the wilderness, I introduce my old A DOG AND HIS DOINGS. 2.'» friend tr .e waters of the Pacific, and to the scenes and custo of a now civiliKation. I was 1- entering the wilderness with no very fixed purpose. Beyond tlie north and west of my previous wandering thisre hiy a vast region ; it was my intention to hold steadily to the north-west, and come out — chance would only determine where. The autumn was yet long enough to carry me across the region of jjrairie to the southern limit of the sul)- arctic forest : within that forest the horse could not penetrate; it is the land of the snow-shoe and dog-slod in winter, of the canoe in summer. I reckoned upon the winter snow to carry me nearly to the Pacific ; if not, the canoe against the current must do the rest. Perhaps as to this i)lan the reader may ask two questions — Why, in going towards the Pacific Ocean, should the current be against you ? And why did you select the rigorous winter season for crossing these northern latitudes ? To answer one question is partly to answer both. The great river systems of the north have their sources at the Pacific side of the Rocky Mountains, not in that range, but in the Coast or Cascade range, which follows the general line of the Pacific shore. Their various tributary streams unite their waters into two main channels, which pierce the Eocky Mountains in two great passes, and flow out into the Sihu-ian plain lying east of the range, to finally join the Mackenzie Eiver, flowing into the Ai'ctic Ocean. In winter these rivers form vast frozen highways, 2i FAR Ol'T. alonp; which