C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

The Unrelenting North 79"My dad," he told us, "thrashed me when I was a youngster for some skylarkingthat 1'd never done. I wasn't going to swallow that whole, so I went to him and Isaid: 'I'm going over the sea, dad, and I'll never come home till you ask mypardon.' The old man said: 'I'll never do that so long as I live but 1'11 leave thestring of the doorlatch outside for ye, Robbie, dinna forget. '""Well, I went, and that string was always outside, you may bet your bottomdollar on that, you may. It must have been a dozen years later that I picked up apaper and saw the Glasgow bank had failed. I knew the old folks' savings was allinvested in it and I wrote home and sent a cheque, for 1'd made a little moneythat winter, trapping on the Liard River. What d'you guess the old dad did? Hedidn't stop to write and return that cheque, he telegraphed refusal. He wasn'tgoing to take no help from his runaway son, not ifhe was down to bedrock. I cansee now that Dad had the fine old covenanting spirit, he wouldn't change his waysor thoughts for any god or devil, he'd have been grand stuff for this country.""1' d soon spent that money and 'twas the year of a big gold rush in Alaska. Abloke in Edmonton put up the grub stakes for me and for three partners and Iremember we tried to get in from the Mackenzie side, with horses and grub for I2weeks. Gosh! but I'll never forget the silence in that great basin of country, it wasdeep as hell and wide as the sea, but do you think we could get out of it? Not we.It was like some cruel trap we were in and every time we tried to break through themountains, we failed. I can tell you we pretty nigh lost our reason those two years,the bigness of the country fair got on our nerves, it was like some unseen devilholding us in there and mocking at us. When the grub was through we ate ourhorses and then there was only the fish lines and our guns to help us. We stuck itthough. In the end some Indians led us over that blamed watershed and when wegot down into the Selkirk country, why, that gold rush was old as Adam and Eve."On two burning questions, missionaries and the intermarriage of white menwith squaws, Captain Cameron had a fund of stories and reminiscences. To oursurprise this hardened old sinner held the most rigid notions about the improprietyof white men marrying Indians or Eskimos."'Tis a degradation of manhood," he asserted, "and that's all there is to it."He himself, he told us, would always draw a line across his tent or cabin. Whitevisitors would feed with their host on one side of that line, coloured ones on theother. Often he had found himself obliged to say to a friend: "You can eat herewith me, but your wife doesn't come across that line for natives."