Chapter 8
Chapter 8 of Daylight Land by W. H. H. Murray. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 8. Big Game I have hunted every kind of game between Southern Gulf and Great Slave Lake, replied Mr. Osgood, and answered to an interrogation from Colonel Goff as we were sitting one evening in front of our tent at Rush Lake, and I can give you as much or as little information as you wish on the subject
of big or little game, bird or beast. Twenty years ago, the big game of the continent could be found north or south of the international line, and even ten years back, good hunting could be had in several of our states and territories.
But today, he who wishes to find game of the larger sort, many kinds and plenty of it, must come over on this side of the line and hunt northward. What do you mean by northward, Jack? I asked. How far north have you hunted?
Six hundred miles at least, perhaps eight, he answered. Last summer I started from Calgary with a comrade and fetched a trail on horseback well down into the great Mackenzie Basin. The Mackenzie, you know, is a mighty river, bigger than the Mississippi, they say, and a country it drains is an empire in itself.
That's a long way to go for a hunt, Jack, I said, interrupting him. You and I trailed farther than that south and west, he retorted pleasantly. But you must remember, gentlemen, that from the hour you leave Calgary you are in good sporting country. We hugged the foothills from the start, and we had bighorn, goats, bear, antelopes, and wolves with which to amuse ourselves. Then you must remember that we were in the saddle, and trailing through a most lovely country,
without weariness and at no burdensome expense, pushing up into a strange region known only to the Indians and the Hudson Bay post folk, through an atmosphere pure and bracing as man ever rode in. I assure you that had I not fired my rifle from the beginning to the end of it, that two months' trail would have been most enjoyable.
What is the character of the soil and the climate in this north land of yours, Mr. Osgood? queried the judge. The soil's as rich as any on the continent, answered Jack, and the climate's simply perfect. It is milder than it is here, or even in Dakota or Minnesota.
Wheat can be sown earlier, three weeks earlier, I should think, than at the National Line. The days are longer, and the cereal growths get the benefit of the prolonged solar light, a great benefit, I can assure you. It is in bringing a crop along fast. At the northern part of my trail I could read a newspaper at midnight without the aid of candle or moon. It is daylight land up there, and so it might, in truth as well as in poetry, be called.
That is a beautiful name, cried the judge enthusiastically. A beautiful name, Daylight Land. It is not much like the popular conception of Canada, which pictures it as the home of ice and night. I verily believe that half the world thinks of Canada
as a cold, desolate country the year round. The world knows nothing about Canada as a whole, Jack replied warmly, nor do Canadians in general know anything of their own country. They are not travelers, as we Yankees are. The old French stock were great wanderers and explorers,
but their descendants are stay-at-homes. The old-time French Canadians went everywhere. The Grand Sire was a voyager. His descendants today are only habitants. He fed his sinews on the game of the whole continent.
The easy peas and garlic at home. The fact is, Canada knows less of herself than she did a century and a half ago. She is absolutely engaged in rediscovering her own geography. The same thing is happening in Canada, touching her great rivers, lakes, and fertile plains, as happened in Italy in respect to Pompeii and Herculaneum.
They are being uncovered and brought to the light. They have lain buried under a huge deposit of ignorance and are now being exhumed. There are a dozen American sportsmen I could mention who know more about Canada than the geographical department at Ottawa. Why, Jack, I exclaimed, you're quite an orator. The Canadian government ought to put you on a salary
to write their advertising literature and make immigration speeches. You can have as much as you like, returned Jack with good-natured earnestness, but you know I'm right, for you know as much of this great country as I do, and perhaps more. I wish our countrymen would learn the facts about this huge empire of opportunity to the north of them, or that Canadians had knowledge of it themselves.
faith in it, and the right connections with us. Then you would see this western land jump to the front of continental observation. I don't see where immigration is to be found to people this vast country, said Colonel Goff. The United States have thus far preempted the immigration possibilities of the world,
and stand intermediate between the great western movement of population which signalizes our age, and this country. and I can't see how this Canada of the West and Northwest is ever to be peopled. A goodly number of English and Scots are already here, but it will take many years of such slow additions to people these vast areas
which stretch west and north from this spot. The people to populate this country, said Jack, are coining from Great Britain, the north of Europe, and perhaps from the States. Americans as well as Europeans should possess this land. This country is agricultural.
and in a few years a great agricultural movement from the states northward is likely to take place. Our tent is pitched at the center of the wheat area of the continent, 500 miles to the north and as far to the south from where we sit, and 1,000 miles east and west. Measure what I call the great wheat square of the continent.
Here is pure water, a perfect climate, cheap fuel, and a soil that produces 40 bushels of prime wheat to the acre. As the soil to the south under our silly system of agriculture becomes exhausted, as it soon will be, and the average yield per acre shrinks more and more, the wheat growers must and will move northward.
This moving is sure to come. It is one of the fixed facts of the future. It is born of an agricultural necessity, and when it begins to move it will move in with a rush. A million of American wheat farmers ought to be in this country inside of ten years,
and I believe that within that time population will pour in and spread over these Canadian plains like a tide. Jack Osgood, I exclaimed, you are the same sanguine theorist that you were eight years ago. You came to Texas to shoot turkeys for a month
and before half the month had passed you bought 20,000 acres of land. So I did, he rejoined, and I beg you to remember that I paid $1.25 per acre and that I sold out last year, as you know, for $8.50 per acre. It pays to be a theorist in an aging country like this.
Mr. Osgood, said the man from New Hampshire, I am convinced that you and I are adapted to do business as partners. If you can select 20,000 acres anywhere around here that look as those 20,000 you bought in Texas did, I will go halves with you,
"'and we will stake out a city near the center of the section at once.' "'Come, come,' I said when the laughter had subsided. "'Have done with this enthusiastic forecast and your speculative talk, "'and tell me about the big game, as you promised to do at the start. "'How far north did you go, Jack, and what did you find in the way of game?
"'I went as far as a great slave lake. "'The shores of this lake are the favorite haunt of the muskox, and I wanted to get some of the strange-looking creatures. You can find them on all your upper tributaries of the Mackenzie River. A muskox is a sizable game,
for the males weigh four to five hundred pounds and the females nearly as much. They are about eight feet long and four high and have a dark amber-colored coat. In the fall of the year they grow a very fine wool.
They have a flat frontal and the horns, which are very large at the base, grow out of the top of the skull close to each other and curve downward on either side of the head, but turn sharply upward some six inches from the ends
and are finally pointed. They seem to me to resemble a sheep more than an ox, but they do not have a cry like a sheep or a goat, but make a noise like to the snort of a walrus. They signal danger by stamping like a buck
or by striking their horns against the horns of others standing near. They are courageous and fight savagely. Even bears are killed by them. The calf is a feeble thing and can't follow the mother for a month or more after birth. The mothers hide their calves very cunningly and protect them with the utmost affection.
They feed on grasses, mosses, and browse, and their flesh tastes very like moose meat or venison, only it is of a coarser grain. They are shy and keep sentinels well out from the herd when feeding, and hence it is good sport to stalk them. I spent a week hunting them and had good success,
but I had more enjoyment in watching them and studying their habits than killing them, for after I had collected a few specimen skins I had no motive to kill further. That's right, said the judge. Boys are murderous chaps with a gun, but when a man has shot a few years he begins to shoot less and study more,
and finds more pleasure in learning than killing. A true sportsman becomes, as he grows in years and skill, more and more a naturalist, and receives more pleasure from living knowledge he acquires than the dead game he bags. The caribou are very plenty in the north, resumed Jack. There are two varieties, the woodland and the barren ground caribou. They are found in large herds around Athabasca Lake
and southward of Hudson's Bay to Lake Superior. I need not describe them to you, for you have all doubtless seen them. In summer they come from the far north and feed around James Bay. The caribou are good game, for it takes skill, patience, and physical endurance to stalk one successfully. When he finds himself hunted, he travels with a low head, his antlers well back, and keeps his body close to the ground. I found one on the Nelson River four days before I captured him, and he came near bagging me instead of I him,
for I only wounded him, and he charged at me like an elephant. The bare ground caribou is not much known, I fancy, among sportsmen of the states. They are much smaller than the woodland species, weighing only about 100 pounds when dressed. They are very plenty in the Great Slave and the Athabasca Lake region. Small as they are, their antlers are much larger than those on the larger species.
They have more branches on them and are far handsomer. In summer, they are reddish-brown, but in winter, almost snow-white. The skin tans finely, becoming very soft and white, and is used for tents and garments. Their flesh is excellent, and the fat on the rump is highly prized as a great delicacy by the Indians and French voyagers. It is not difficult to stalk them, as they are not shy as the larger kind, and hence it is not much sport to hunt them.
I have seen a hundred or more in a herd. Are the buffalo actually gone, Mr. Osgood? queried the judge. I saw three within fifty miles of Calgary last year, Jack answered. I did not kill them, of course. I dare say they have been killed since. I have a feeling that a few might yet be found by searching among the foothills northwest of us,
and I saw a living trail last summer in the Peace River country, but the buffalo of the plains is practically an extinct animal. There is a family or tribe of buffalo known as a wood buffalo to the north of us, however. I never heard of them before, remarked Mr. Pepperdill. Very likely, said Jack.
I never did until I heard of them from the Indians north of Edmonton last year. There are not more than a thousand all told, perhaps. But they are noble animals, and a sportsman that captures one has a trophy of which he may well be proud. The wood buffalo was much larger and handsomer than his brother of the plains,
his stock by prominent sportsmen of the States. I have not found this to be the case after I have studied their habits and character a little. The first thing I remember in stalking a white goat Is that he is by nature a most curious animal His bump of inquisitiveness is excessively large
You must not attempt to stalk him too much You must let him stalk you If you move he will see you And away he goes at a bound But if you don't move
But remain hidden and expose something to his sight That he does not understand And exercise patience It is ten to one that in half an hour you have drawn him within range. Indeed, the true rule in any form of hunting is to move very little and very slowly, or not at all.
The adage that luck comes to the man who won't go after it is especially verified in stalking. I have killed more game by sitting still than by tramping or riding after it. In the second place I made a very interesting discovery, and I made it by accident one day. I was stalking a fine old billy goat in the mountains north of Bow River with a comrade, a green man, who didn't seem to have an eye in his head.
The game was above me, half a mile away, perhaps, and I was moving up with the utmost circumspection. When to my dismay I saw my comrade suddenly emerge from the scrub five hundred feet above the old fellow and walk carelessly along in full view. I was not surprised that my friend did not see the goat,
for I doubt he would have seen an elephant twenty rods in front of him, but I was surprised that the goat didn't see him, for he was a foxy old chap and kept his eyes open. And then it was that I suddenly made a discovery, a discovery which made goat-stalking easy to me after that,
which was that a goat never expects danger from above, but always from below, and that to stalk a mountain where the goats are successfully, the stalker should work downward from the top and not upward from the base. It is just the same with bighorn sheep, as they are called.
They should be stalked from above. They have a wide range, for I have shot them in southern California and in the Great Bear Lake region. They are not confined to the mountains, as is generally supposed. I have found them in flat country and thick, too. They live in Sonora, in tracks absolutely arid.
At least I could never find any water there. A ram weighs, when fully grown and well-conditioned, about 350 pounds. They grow very fine wool in winter, and the females have horns like a common goat. The old idea that they alight on their big horns when compelled to jump from a cliff is all nonsense. It is like the popular belief that prairie dogs, owls, and rattlesnakes live in one burrow harmoniously.
There is no such happy family arrangement among them, I can assure you. The snakes eat the eggs of the owls, the owls eat the snakes, and the prairie dogs eat the owl chicks at every opportunity. A good many men with big-sounding titles would be much better naturalists if they would become practical sportsmen in trailers for a few years. That's my idea, Mr. Osgood, said the judge with strong emphasis.
If I had a boy and wanted to make a true naturalist of him, I would buy him a sportsman's outfit and give him to you for five years to educate. Well, I could teach him a good many valuable things, I don't doubt, or any other true sportsman could who has trailed the continent as widely as I have, Jack responded, for he would see not only his physical geography and its old races,
now almost extinct, but all its vegetable and arboreal growths, and above all learn how to use his eyes and his ears and his reasoning faculties more sharply and carefully than he could in a recitation room of a college. Mr. Murray and I were graduated from Yale, and we remember our alma mater with scholarly gratitude. But the great University of Men and Things,
as represented by our studentship of the continent, has given us a more valuable knowledge than our study of books ever did. Never mind that now, Jack, I said. You and I can't graduate from the big outdoor university until we have saddled across the Mackenzie Basin
and boated down its current a thousand miles or two thousand, for that matter. I will do that with you any summer, he said. Three months will be all the time we need, and from the day we leave Calgary till our return we shall be in the best hunting region of the continent,
the section where the big game in abundance and all its varieties, excepting the plain buffalo, can now be found. All through this area north of us the Wapiti or Big Elk are found plentifully, both among the foothills and in the woody clumps of timber which patch the plains of the country here and there.
The Wapiti are noble game, and the stalking of them a most manly recreation. As to grizzlies, I never hunt them. I do not admit that a sportsman has such a motive in his sporting adventures as to justify him risking his life,
as you must do in stalking for grizzlies. Mr. Murray saw me run from a grizzly once, and I am confident that he never saw a man of my inches make better time. I have killed two, but in both instances I was so placed that I couldn't run and had to kill or get killed.
So I stood stoutly in for the chances and won. There are two animals I never seek, and always shun if I can, the grizzly bear and the panther. The latter is a king of the American forest and mountains. He is the only beast the grizzly fears.
A lithe cat is more than a match for the monstrous bear. The Indians will tell you that they have found many grizzlies that were certainly killed by panthers, but no one has ever seen the body of a panther that was killed by a grizzly or any other animal. The panther is king of the woods. Moose are numerous in the Peace River country, among the mountains and on the west side of the mountains.
It has been said that no white man can hunt a moose as well as an Indian. As a rule, the saying holds good. To it I have known few exceptions, but only a few. The influence of heredity is in the Indian's favor. His eyesight is a derived faculty.
It is a birthmark. The Indian's eye has ancestors back of it. A thousand years of practice, developed vision is concentrated and peers from under his brows. The aboriginal eye is the best in the world.
It is literally microscopic. In moose stalking this counts. A stalker who can stalk without noise and whose eye is as good or better than the moose's Gets him every time.
The eye wins in moose hunting. Antelopes are not game. They are too pretty to shoot and too simple. Their curiosity is so enormous that it dominates them. It places them entirely at the mercy of the sportsman,
and hence every true sportsman spares the lovely creatures, unless absolutely compelled to kill to appease his hunger. But the big gray wolf is legitimate game, and the great gaunt hulking brute makes a good target, and his pelt is not to be despised
for when full furred it looks well and a dozen of them make a warm robe or overcoat even. These wolves are everywhere to the north of us and often make good sport as you trail onward.
The reason why the great area north of us is to be commended to the American sportsman said Jack in conclusion is because it is the present home of the big game of the continent
and is accessible. The rails bring you to your saddle and the saddle takes you to the end of your trail. And after my way of thinking, there is no method of locomotion so healthy,
so stimulating and so thoroughly enjoyable as you have with a good, tough, easy-gated, well-trained pony under you, trailing over the Great Plains. Pushing down toward the north from Calgary,
you have the prairie land to the east and the rocky mountains to the west in full view. Grasses and flowers, running streams and groves of trees, pure air and lovely campgrounds. a climate of even temperature, long lingering twilights and early dawns,
and that most delightful of all sensations to a trailer, the feeling that you are visiting an unknown section without danger or excessive toil, and in which game is abundant. Even if you cared nothing for game and were only seeking a glorious outing, I can imagine no excursion likely to yield more health or pleasure
to a party of refined and intelligent lovers of the outdoor world and life than one push down toward the north into the Peace River country from Calgary, keeping the snowy summits of the rocky mountains in sight on the left as you journey along. Granted a good-sized prairie sooner, a good cook, good teamster, and a good party, and after my way of thinking you have all the conditions of a good time.
So say I, cried the judge as he rose to his feet and extracted a small package from his coat pocket, and I wish we boys could all start on such a journey tomorrow but one thing Colonel Goff you could not do the court would not allow it you should never be permitted to take that old combination musket of yours along
it is more dangerous than a sugar trust and the judge proceeded to open the package in his hand which proved to contain nothing but small oblong pieces of pasteboard with grotesque pictures on them Judge Dondo what are those things you have in your hands
exclaimed the colonel in a severe voice they look to me like a pagan cryptogram and if Mr. Ignatius Donnelly gets a hold of you that will do interrupted the judge coolly
as he began to move his fingers up and down over the package in a manner to make the slips of paper come and go in a strange fashion that will do
Colonel Goff he added as he prepared to sit down on his campstool these are cards sir This is a poker pack, and in spite of your innocence, I propose that you and I should have a game. Sit down, Judge, said the Colonel kindly as he moved the Judge's stool a little closer to him.
Thank you, Colonel, replied the Judge in a mollified voice, evidently touched by the Colonel's courtesy. I will sit down. And he did. On the grass. You villain! screamed the judge, and jumping to his feet he grabbed the campstool and pursued the man from New Hampshire around the corner of the tent, followed by our volleying laughter, while even the Indians standing around grinned broadly.
End of chapter 8
