Owindia | Page 4

of that dark-visaged company. And far into the morning hours they sat sipping their favourite beverage, and discussing the last tidings from the woods. Every item of news is interesting, whether from hunter's camp, or trapper's wigwam. There are births, marriages, and deaths, to be pondered over and commented upon; the Indian has his chief, to whom he owes deference and vows allegiance; he has his party badge, both in religion and politics; what wonder then that even the long winter night of the North, seemed far too short for all the important knotty points which had to be discussed and settled!
"You have had good times at the little Lake," said Peter, a brother of Michel's, who was deliberately chewing a piece of dried meat held tight between his teeth, while with his pocketknife he severed its connection with the piece in his hand, to the imminent peril of his nose.
"I wish I were a freedman: I should soon be off to the Lake myself! I am sick of working for the Company. I did not mind it when they set me to haul meat from the hunters, or to trap furs for them, but now they make me saw wood, or help the blacksmith at his dirty forge: what has a 'Tene Jua' to do with such things as these?"
"And I am sick of starving!" said another. "This is the third winter that something has failed us,--first the rabbits, then the fish ran short; and now we hear that the deer are gone into a new track, and there is not a sign of one for ten miles round the Fort. And the meat is so low" added the last speaker, "that the 'big Master' says he has but fifty pounds of dried meat in the store, and if Indians don't come in by Sunday, we are to be sent off to hunt for ourselves and the wives and children are to go to Little Lake where they may live on fish."
"We have plenty of fish, it is true," said Accomba; "we dried a good number last Fall, besides having one net in the lake all the winter; but I would not leave the Company, Peter, if I were you,--you are better off here, man, in spite of your 'starving times!' You do get your game every day, come what may, and a taste of flour every week, and a little barley and potatoes. I call that living like a 'big master.'"
"I had rather be a free man and hunt for myself," put in another speaker; "the meat does not taste half so good when another hand than your own has killed it; and as for flour and barley and potatoes, well, our forefathers got on well enough without them before the white man came into our country, I suppose we should learn to do without them again? For my part, I like a roe cake as well as any white man's bread."
"But the times are harder than they used to be for the Tene Jua (Indian men) in the woods," said Accomba with a sigh; "the deer and the moose go off the track more than they used to do; it is only at Fort Rae, on the Big Lake, that meat never seems to fail; for us poor Mackenzie River people there is hardly a winter that we are far from starvation."
"But you can always pick up something at the Forts:" replied a former speaker; "the masters are not such bad men if we are really starving, and then there is the Mission: we are not often turned away from the Mission without a taste of something."
"All very good for you," said Michel's wife; "who like the white man and know how to take him, but my man will have nothing to say to him. The very sight of a pale face makes him feel bad, and sends him into one of his fits of rage and madness. Oh, it has been dreadful, dreadful," continued the poor woman, while her voice melted into a truly Indian wail, "for my children I kept alive, or else I would have thrown myself into the river many a time last year."
"Bah," said Peter, who being the brother of Michel, would, with true Indian pertinacity, take part with him whatever were his offences; and, moreover, looking with his native instinct upon woman as the "creature" of society, whose duty it was to endure uncomplaining, whatever her masters laid upon her. "Bah; you women are always grumbling and bewailing yourselves; for my part, if I have to starve a little, Kulu (the meat) is all the sweeter when it comes. I suppose Michel has killed enough to give you many a merry night, seated round the camp fire with some good fat