South from Hudson Bay: An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys

Not a wild animal, except a few gophers, had been seen all day; the cart train was too noisy. But now the wind that swept the prairie brought a chorus of voices, the high-pitched barking of the small prairie wolves, and the long-drawn howling of the big, gray timber ones. The dogs answered, until their masters, waking, belabored them into silence. The camps along the rivers and the shores of Lake Winnipeg had seemed remote enough from civilization, but not one had impressed the mountain-bred lad with such an overwhelming sense of loneliness as did this circle of carts on the prairie.

He found Louis already asleep, and crawled in beside him. There he lay, listening to the wolves and, when their howlings ceased for a time, to the faint and far-away cries of a flock of migrating birds passing high overhead. Then he drifted away into sleep.

The approach of dawn was beginning to gray the blackness in the east when every dog in the camp suddenly began to growl. The horses grew restive, neighing and moving about. Startled wide awake, Walter, thrilling at the thought of a Sioux attack, asked his comrade what the matter was. Louis did not know. He had thrown aside his blanket and was crawling out from under the cart. As Walter followed, he heard the guide calling to the watchers beyond the barricade. The guards replied that all was quiet on the prairie. They could see nothing wrong, discern no moving form.

For a few minutes everyone in the camp was awake, anxious, excited, but nothing happened, no war whoop came out of the darkness. The dogs ceased growling, the ponies neighing, and soon all was silence again. What had caused the alarm, whether prowling wild beast or skulking man, or the mere restlessness of some sleepless dog or nervous horse, no one could tell.

The camp was astir before the sun was up, and the first task was to water the horses and cattle. Louis remained behind to get breakfast while Walter rode the pony to the river.

The late start from Fort Douglas made getting to Pembina that day impossible. After plodding along the prairie track and crossing several small streams, the cart train passed a cold and stormy night in the open beyond the wooded bank of a muddy creek that Louis called Rivière aux Marais. Pembina was reached next day in a driving storm of rain, sleet and snow.

The Pembina River took its name from anepeminan, the Ojibwa term for the shrub we call highbush cranberry. The junction of the Pembina with the Red was an old trading place. The Northwest men had established themselves there before the close of the eighteenth century, and in the early years of the nineteenth all three rival companies, the Northwest, the Hudson Bay, and the New Northwest or X. Y. Company, as it was called by the old Northwesters, maintained posts a short distance from one another. Those old posts were gone, – burned or torn down, – long before the time of this story. The two forts then standing had been built at a later date. Fort Daer, the Selkirk Colony post, dated from the autumn of 1812, when the first of the colonists, under the leadership of Miles McDonnell, had come to the Pembina to winter. It stood on the south bank of that river near where it empties into the Red. Just opposite, across the Pembina, was a former Northwest fort, which had become, since the uniting of the companies, a Hudson Bay trading post.

Some of the Scotch settlers and all of the Swiss except Walter were to be lodged at Fort Daer until they could build cabins of their own. Louis had asked Walter to be his guest. The cart he was driving, which was not his own, was loaded with the household goods of some of the settlers, and had to be taken to Fort Daer. After leaving the fort, the two boys, carrying their scanty belongings in packs, made their way to Louis’ home. The little village of log cabins was not actually on the Pembina, but near the bank of the Red a mile or more from the junction point. The arrival at Fort Daer of a cart train from down river was an important event, but the abominable weather curbed curiosity, and the boys saw few people as they made their way against the storm to the Brabant cabin.

Louis’ mother, hoping that he might have come with the party from Fort Douglas, was on the lookout for him. Before he could reach the door, it flew open. Followed by the younger children and three shaggy-haired sled dogs, Mrs. Brabant ran out into the sleet and snow. Very heartily Louis hugged and kissed her. When he presented his companion, she welcomed Walter warmly. The children greeted him shyly. The dogs, inclined at first to resent his presence, concluded, after a curt command and a kick or two from the moccasined toe of Louis’ younger brother, to accept the newcomer as one of the family.

To the Swiss lad, weary, soaked, and chilled through, the rude but snug cabin with a fire blazing in the rough stone fireplace, promised a comfort that seemed almost heavenly. He had not spent a night or even eaten a meal inside a building for many weeks. The warmth was so grateful, the smell from the steaming kettle that hung above the blaze so appetizing, that for a few minutes he could do nothing but stand before the fire, speechless, half dazed by the sudden transition from the wet and the bitter cold.

He was roused by Mrs. Brabant who offered him dry moccasins and one of the shirts she had been making for Louis during his absence. Walter had a dry shirt in his pack, but he accepted the moccasins gratefully. His shoes were not only soaked, but so worn from the long journey that they scarcely held together. The cabin, one of the best in the settlement, boasted two rooms, and Louis’ mother and sisters retired to the other one while the boys changed their clothes. As soon as they were warm and partly dry, supper was served.

The household sat on stools and floor in front of the fire, each with his cup and wooden platter. From the bubbling pot standing on the hearth Madame Brabant ladled out generous portions. The rich and savory stew was made up of buffalo meat, wild goose, potatoes, carrots, onions, and other ingredients that Walter did not recognize but enjoyed nevertheless. It was the best meal he had tasted in months, and he ate until he could hold no more.

The hunters had returned only a few days before from the great fall buffalo chase, and there was abundance of meat in the settlement. It was during the autumn hunt two years before that Louis’ father had been accidentally killed, and the Brabant family had not accompanied the hunters since that time, but Mrs. Brabant’s brother had brought her a supply of fresh and dried meat and pemmican. The goose thirteen-year-old Raoul had shot, and the potatoes and other vegetables were from the Brabant garden. The grasshopper hordes had missed Pembina. Mrs. Brabant expressed sympathy for the poor Selkirk colonists who had lost all their crops. She listened with lively interest to the boys’ account of the trip from Fort York, and asked the Swiss lad many questions about his own people.

Walter was so grateful for shelter, warmth, food, and the kindly welcome he was receiving that he could not have been critical of the Brabant family whatever they had been. As it happened, he liked them all heartily. He was to discover, within the next few days, that this household was considerably superior to most of those in Pembina. The interior of the cabin was neat and clean, differing markedly in this respect from many of the bois brulé dwellings. Her straight black hair, smoothly arranged in braids hanging over her shoulders, her dark skin, and high cheek-bones betrayed the Ojibwa in Louis’ mother, but in every other way, especially in her ready smile, lively speech, and alert movements, she seemed wholly French. She wore deerskin leggings with moccasins, but her dark blue calico dress, belted with a strip of bright beadwork, was fresh and clean. Her little daughters were dressed in the same fashion, except that Marie, the elder, who was about ten years old, wore skirt and tunic of soft, fringed doeskin, instead of calico. The dark eyes of both little girls sparkled when Louis, unknotting a small bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief, handed each one a length of bright-colored ribbon, one red, the other orange, to tie in their long black braids. For his mother he brought a silk handkerchief, a gilt locket, and a packet of good tea, the kind, he had been told, the Chief Factor at Fort York drank. Raoul was made happy with a shiny new knife.

Louis and Walter were tired enough to take to their blankets early. Mrs. Brabant and the girls slept in a great box bed, made of hand-hewn boards painted bright blue, that stood in the corner of the room where the fireplace was. In the smaller room, which was nothing but a lean-to shed with a dirt floor, was a curious couch for the boys. It was made of strips of rawhide stretched tightly on a frame of poles, and was covered with buffalo robe and blankets. This cot Louis shared with Walter, who found the rawhide straps not nearly so hard as bare ground. Raoul rolled himself in a robe and lay down in front of the fire.

XV

THE OJIBWA HUNTER

Walter was anxious to get a place ready for the Periers, but he found that every one of the fifty or sixty log cabins in Pembina was full to overflowing. Indeed he marveled at the number of men, women, and children of all sizes that could be packed into a one-room cabin. The houses were built of logs chinked with clay and moss, and roofed with bark or grass thatch, and few had more than one room.

A straggling, unkempt place was the settlement, the cabins set down hit or miss, with cart tracks wandering around among them. The tracks and dooryards were deep in mud, which was stiff with frost when the boys started out that morning. As the sun softened the ground, Walter found walking in the sticky stuff something like wading through thick glue, it clung to his moccasins so. Gardens were rare. The surroundings of most of the cabins were very untidy, cluttered with broken-down carts, disorderly piles of firewood, odds, ends, and rubbish of all sorts. Shaggy, unkempt ponies, hobbled or staked out, and wolfish looking sled dogs, running loose, were everywhere.

The people were most of them bois brulés whose hair, skin, and features showed all degrees of mixed blood from almost pure white to nearly pure Indian. They seemed good-natured and very hospitable. The merrymaking in celebration of the return of the hunt was not yet at an end. Everywhere Louis and his companion were urged to share in a feast of buffalo meat, to join in a gambling game or in dancing to the scraping of a fiddle. So pressing were the invitations that declining was difficult.

The neatest, best kept buildings in the village were the mission chapel and presbytery. Father Dumoulin was setting a good example to his flock by cleaning up his garden patch. Looking up from his work, he greeted Louis by name. The priest was a striking looking man, tall and strong of frame, his height emphasized by his long, straight, black cassock. His face was strong too. Walter, though not of Father Dumoulin’s church, felt instantly that here was a man to command the respect of white men, half-breeds, and savages. When the priest learned that the boy was one of the newly arrived immigrants, he asked a number of questions.

Near Fort Daer, in the edge of the woods bordering the river, a cluster of better kept cabins housed some of the more thrifty of the Scotch. In one of the largest and best of the houses, the two lads found the MacKay family settled for the winter. Neil was eager to arrange for an immediate buffalo hunt, but Louis replied that he could not go for a while. There were things he must do for his mother, and Walter did not want to be away when his friends arrived.

From the MacKay cabin the boys went on to Fort Daer. Like all the forts in that part of the world, Daer and Pembina House, the old Northwest post, consisted of log stockades enclosing a few buildings. They stood on opposite sides of the Pembina and the land about each had been cleared of most of its trees and bushes. The Pembina was a good-sized stream, deep, sluggish, and like the Red, colored with the mud it carried. At Fort Daer Walter talked with some of his countrymen, who were feeling somewhat encouraged. They had been well fed, and were grateful for warmth and shelter. Real winter, the bitterly cold winter of this northern country, might come at any moment now to stay.

If Walter was to hunt to help supply himself and the Periers with food, he needed a gun. With Louis he went to the Company store at Pembina House to buy one. He could not pay for it in money, but hoped that he might get it on credit, paying later in buffalo skins and other furs. The Hudson Bay Company frowned on fur hunting as well as on Indian trading by the colonists, but the settlers would be obliged to hunt that winter if they wished to eat. Louis thought that if Walter agreed to turn over to the Company the pelts of the food animals he killed, and not to engage in barter with the Indians, he might arrange for a gun and ammunition.

The two were explaining Walter’s needs, when an Indian burst suddenly into the room. His buckskin clothing was covered with mud. Blood matted his black hair and stained one dark cheek which was disfigured by a great scar. His eyes glittered, and his manner was wild and excited. The boys thought for a moment that he was going to attack the trader. The Indian, however, had no weapons, – no gun, hatchet, or knife. He began to talk rapidly, angrily. Walter could not understand a word of Ojibwa, but he could see that the Indian’s speech startled both Louis and the trader. The latter replied briefly in the same tongue, then darted out of the door, the Ojibwa after him. Before Walter could voice a question, Louis was gone too. The Swiss boy turned to follow, hesitated, and decided to stay where he was.

In a few moments Louis was back again. “What is it? Are the Sioux coming?” Walter asked anxiously.

“No, unless this affair is the work of spies.”

“What affair? Could you understand what he said?”

“Most of it. He was so wild it was hard to follow him. He has been attacked. He was down at the river loading his canoe. Two men came along. While one was talking to him, the other stole up behind him, knocked him over the head, and ‘put him to sleep.’ When he came to his senses, the goods he had just bought and his gun and knife were gone. There was a hole cut in his canoe. Of course he may be lying. He may have hidden the things and made up the story.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To get a double supply of goods and ammunition. The trader believes him though. He is sending men in search of those two fellows.”

When the trader returned he added further details to the story. The Ojibwa, he said, was an honest, trustworthy hunter, who had been bringing his furs to the Company for several years. He had come alone from Red Lake to get his winter’s supplies and ammunition. Having finished his bargaining, he was loading his boat at the riverside when another canoe, with two men, appeared, coming up stream. One of the men shouted a greeting in Ojibwa, they turned their boat in to shore, jumped out, and engaged him in talk. Entirely unsuspicious of treachery, Scar Face was answering one man’s questions, when the other struck him from behind and knocked him senseless.

“Does he know the fellows?” questioned Louis.

“He never saw them before.”

“Could they be Sioux passing themselves off as Ojibwa?”

“No, one was a white man, he says, and the other, – the man who attacked him, – was in white man’s clothes, but looked like an Indian. He wore his hair in braids, had no beard, and spoke like a Cree. He was a very tall man, strong and broad shouldered.”

“Do you think he is telling the truth?”

“I’m sure he is. Scar Face is a reliable fellow, always pays his debts, and has never tried to deceive us in any way. You saw the blood on his face. He has a bad cut on the side of his head. One of our men is dressing it for him. No, he isn’t lying. His description of the men is good, and he was not in the fort when they were here.”

“They have been here? You know who they are?”

“I think so; beyond doubt. Two fellows answering to the description were here this morning and bought some tobacco. They said they had just come from St. Boniface with a letter for Father Dumoulin. The white man is a DeMeuron, a red-faced fellow with a sandy beard. I don’t know his name. The other one is a bois brulé voyageur called Murray.”

“Not Black Murray?” cried Walter.

“That’s the name he goes by. You know him?”

“Vraiment, we know him,” put in Louis emphatically. “So he did not go up the Assiniboine with the western brigade, but came this way. He must have started before we did, to get here by water so soon. We found his tracks and those of his companion, where they had landed to boil their kettle. They were ahead of us then. He wasted little time at Fort Douglas, le Murrai Noir.”

“Whatever possessed him to attack that Ojibwa?” queried the puzzled trader.

“I think I can guess,” replied Louis slowly, “though I know not for sure. He wanted the Ojibwa’s supplies. He plans, I think, to become a trader. To trade he must have some goods to commence with. This is not the first time he has obtained them dishonestly.” Louis told the story of the missing sack of pemmican and Murray’s bundle of trade articles.

The Hudson Bay man listened intently and nodded thoughtfully. “That must be what the rascal is up to. Well, I have sent men out on horseback, up and down the Red River. The thieves haven’t come by here on the Pembina. They’re not likely to show themselves in the neighborhood of the forts. Perhaps they will be caught, though I doubt it. They have a good start and there is plenty of cover to hide in until the going is safe. It is useless to try to overtake them by canoe.”

XVI

LETTERS FROM FORT DOUGLAS

The white man and the half-breed were not caught. Had the thieves trusted merely to speed in paddling, the men sent out from the post must have overtaken them. Even down stream, canoemen, obliged to follow every bend and twist of the river, could not make as good time as mounted men riding along the bank. Probably the two had crossed to the other shore and had concealed themselves and their canoe until the search was over. There was little chance that Pembina settlement would see or hear anything more of them for a long time.

The Ojibwa being a skilful hunter whose goodwill was worth retaining, he was supplied with another outfit. He went away contented with his treatment at the post, but seething with desire for vengeance on the men who had robbed him.

When questioned, Father Dumoulin said that the white man, Kolbach, had brought him a letter from his superior, Father Provencher, at St. Boniface. “The Father said in his letter,” Dumoulin explained, “that Kolbach had just come to tell him that he was going to Pembina. He asked if the Father had any message to send me. So Père Provencher wrote hastily, while Kolbach waited. Kolbach is a DeMeuron, a German Swiss. He is a wild, unruly fellow who comes but seldom to confession. I felt surprised that he had taken the trouble to do Père Provencher and myself a kindness.”

Louis and Walter had failed to find an unoccupied cabin that could be made ready for the Periers. When Louis suggested that they set to work at once to build one, his mother interposed. It would be better to wait, she insisted, until the Periers arrived. They could stay in her house for a few days. The cabin would be a little crowded to be sure, but there would be room enough to make three extra ones comfortable. “Then M’sieu Perier can decide where he wishes his house and can help to build it,” she concluded.

Walter rather doubted if the apothecary would prove of much help in cabin building, but he yielded to Mrs. Brabant’s decision. He knew she would do everything in her power for the comfort of the homeless immigrants.

While he waited for the coming of his friends, Walter helped Louis prepare the Brabant home for winter. They put fresh mud chinking in the holes between the logs, mended the bark roof, cut firewood and hauled it in Louis’ cart. The cart itself had to have one new wheel rim. The rim, which was about three inches thick, was made in sections, and put together without nails. Louis wanted a new dog sled, and Walter would need snowshoes. For the sled, thin oak boards were bent at one end by steaming them over the big kettle, and lashed together. Louis called the affair a tabagane, the French version of an Indian word. Nowadays we spell it toboggan.

The snowshoe frames were of birch wood bent to the required racket form, the toes turned up a little to prevent tripping. The netting of sinew, Louis explained, must be put in with the greatest care. Where the weight of the foot would rest he used a fine mesh of babiche or twisted sinew. The ankle and toe loops he was careful to make just the right size to slip on and off easily, yet not too loose to hold the foot in the proper position. Walter had been trained to use his hands, and he was deft and sure with them. He made one of the shoes himself, and did a workmanlike job. Learning to walk with the awkward things might be more difficult than making them, he thought.

Louis examined his dog harness and shook his head. “The beasts need a new harness truly,” he said, “but that will have to wait until we can kill a buffalo, and get fresh shaganappy.”

Though the buffalo hunt had been postponed, Walter found plenty of opportunity to use his new gun. Migrating flocks of water fowl passed every night, and many of them stopped to rest and feed by day along the rivers and in the marshes. It was the boys’ duty to keep up the food supply by shooting as many ducks and geese as possible. The weather was now cold enough so the birds could be kept several days. Those that the Brabant and MacKay families could not use were disposed of at Fort Daer. Neil MacKay and Raoul Brabant, who was almost as good a shot as his elder brother, were included in the hunting party.

Every day Walter watched for the Periers. Whenever he heard the creaking of a cart, he hoped that another brigade was arriving from Fort Douglas. He never went a mile from the settlement without wondering if his friends would be there when he came back. As the days passed, he grew more and more anxious. Had disaster overtaken the boats of the second division?

One day, just at dusk, as the four hunters were returning along the bank of the Pembina, there came to their ears, faintly at first, from the prairie to the north, the screeching of ungreased axles. As the noise grew louder, the boys realized that such a squawking and screaming could never come from two or three carts only. A whole brigade must be approaching. Leaving the woods along the river, the lads started across the prairie to meet the cart train. They could hear it much farther than they could see it in the gathering darkness.

Louis was the first to make out a line of black objects against the sky. He and Walter were some distance ahead of their companions when they met the guide of the brigade riding in advance. Louis shouted a question and the reply in Canadian French came promptly:

“We come from Fort Douglas. We bring some of the new colonists.”

At the guide’s words, Walter dropped his gun and his birds and ran towards the carts. He was too impatient to wait for them to come to him. The first vehicle belonged to the guide and his family, but walking beside the second was someone Walter knew, Johan Scheidecker. He and the Scheidecker boys had shared the same tent at York Factory. As he greeted Johan, Walter looked eagerly around for some sign of his friends.

“Where is Monsieur Perier?” he demanded.

“He is not with us.”

“Not with you? Why, what has happened?”

“Nothing, – to the Periers,” was Johan’s reassuring reply. “They remain at Fort Douglas. A man named Kolbach has taken them into his house. I have a letter for you that will explain it all.” He handed Walter a folded packet of coarse paper.

The boy was dumbfounded. The possibility that the Periers might not come on to Pembina had never occurred to him. It was too dark to read his letter, so he fell into step beside Johan and questioned him.

“Are they all right? How did they stand the trip? Are they well?”

“About as well as any of us.”

Even in the darkness Walter could see that Johan was very thin. His voice was husky, and he plodded along with drooping shoulders and bent head. “We were all nearly starved, and some of us were sick, when we reached Fort Douglas,” he explained. “Elise and Max were as well as any, but Perier himself had a bad cough. One of the soldiers who live above the fort, a Swiss, took them into his house. My sister Marianne stays behind too. She was married to one of those soldiers the morning we left. Tell me, can we get food at Fort Daer?” he asked abruptly.