seasons the place would be enlivened with Indian tipis along the edge of the woods bordering the little hay meadow behind the post. Enough hay was raised here to feed a few head of stock and enough potatoes to supply this post and some others farther north.
Across the river was the post of the rival “French Company,” Revillon Frères. In the following weeks I learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company people referred to the other as “The Opposition,” and the Indians called them Opsheeshun.
I soon got acquainted with the Moores, my hosts for the winter, and felt lucky. They were friendly, honest, considerate folk.
It was still autumn, October, and while everyone felt that winter was imminent, we still had some good weather. On October 20 I witnessed an important preparation for winter. On this day they hauled up on the bank the little Inenew (meaning “Indian”) steamer that visited the various fur trading posts, and on which we had come down from Great Whale River. To do this they used every bit of strength in the village, human and animal. In front of one of the buildings was a capstan with a great heavy cable reaching down to the ship. Skids had been laid on the beach for the ship to slide on.
When all was ready everyone—Scotchmen, Indians, a horse, and an ox, pushed and hauled on the spokes of the capstan, round and round, until the boat was safely lodged in its winter berth above the water.
After this important job they all celebrated with whiskey (except the horse and the ox). I find in my journal for the next day the comment: “They were a sadder-looking lot when they went to work this morning.”
My life that winter was varied. I became better acquainted with the Cree Indians. Many of them came to visit the Moores, with whom they seemed to have friendly relations. But one day an Indian woman came to vent her wrath on Mrs. Moore. It seemed that kindly Mrs. Moore had given an Indian boy some meat to eat. Here was that boy’s mother, greatly perturbed. Among the Indians, an animal was always divided into “woman’s meat” and “man’s meat.” Mrs. Moore had unknowingly given the boy woman’s meat.
“Now, dat boy have sore back when he get big!”
This was only one of the many superstitions the Cree Indians had. Several times an Indian would bring Mr. Moore a beaver to eat. Later the Indian would return to get the bones, which he tied in a bundle and hung above the ground in a willow.
Then I learned about their behavior toward the bear. If an Indian came upon a bear while hunting, he would first make a little speech, which I cannot give verbatim, but which was essentially an apology to the bear for the necessary killing. When the bear was killed, its body was carried in on a blanket. The cleaned skull was decorated with black and red bands painted across the forehead and hung in a tree. Such were the bear skulls I had noted along the east coast during the summer. One white man in the village smiled at this custom of making a speech before shooting a bear. But does not this represent a stage in human appreciation of our associated environment, which has widespread expression as Albert Schweitzer’s thought of “reverence for life”?
These Indians appealed to me in many ways. One evening a group of us went out to a flat island to hunt ducks. We left our canoes at the shore and went far inland on our hunt. It was dark when we turned back, but we stumbled along, following a couple of Indians who were leading. Presently one of the other white men turned to me and asked, “Where do you think our canoes are?”
The land was flat; we could only see dimly a little way around us. I pointed in a direction that seemed right to me, but I didn’t really know. The Indians chuckled, and we trudged along in silence. Then suddenly, there were the canoes! How did those Indians know?
While writing this account of experiences with Indians in the Hudson Bay country back in 1914, I am interested now, in 1962, by the necessity of examining critically some bills currently in Congress aimed at laying waste some of the beauty of our outdoors—with huge appropriations for the purpose. And I wonder: can we compare the hectic, unethical motivation in our vast effort to change the face of the earth, with the simple, honest motivation shown by those Indians facing coexistence with fellow creatures in their environment? Which is the more worthy, from the standpoint of human, spiritual progress—those of us who blindly use machinery and kill polar bears in the Arctic from airplanes, or those who many years ago felt humbly apologetic in shooting down a bear? We can smile at primitive beliefs, but it is the human motivation behind them that counts.
As the season went on at Moose Factory I collected specimens, for I had the zeal to add to our scientific knowledge and to add specimens to the museum collections somewhere. But, also I could not help being aware of the culture I was living in. There were, of course, the alcoholic sprees found anywhere. Here they occurred on special occasions, to celebrate something. On the other hand, my blacksmith-landlord, Mr. Moore, often sat reading the Bible of an evening.
There were other activities. During the whole snow-free autumn the snow buntings and especially the horned larks were about in flocks. Two boys with whom I often associated would hunt them with bow and arrow. One of the boys was the Moores’ son Harry; I don’t recall the name of the other. Most of the white people here, the “servants” of the Company as they were called, were Scottish. I used the American way of pronouncing words, and so pronounced Harry’s name in this soft manner. One day the other boy undertook to correct me: “Not Harry—Hah-rry!” And he rolled the r delightfully.
I have always had a strong feeling for color, whether in the sky or in the earthy landscape. It was still autumn weather on October 30, when I wrote in my notes an account of what I saw at Moose Factory, apart from anything human:
“This evening was perfect. The water was smooth, reflecting the dull, deep gold of the nearer islands, the deep blues of the more distant spruce woods, and in the west one little daub of coppery red gleaming through the dark trees where the sun had gone down. The clouds were tinted a dull purplish, deepening in the eastern sky. Along the shores is a narrow edging of ice, drifted upriver by the tide, tinted a delicate purplish pink with blue shadows. It was a rare, peaceful scene, a fine northern autumn evening, which makes one glad to be alive and makes indoor work seem unbearable.”
Two days later, on November 1, I looked out to see snow falling quietly, whitening everything. Later in the day it grew colder and blew hard from the northeast, drifting the snow. The trees were whitened by the moist snow, and the river looked dark in contrast. A few snow buntings went whirling by among the snowflakes.
The significance of all this came to me that evening. Just before dark I heard excited voices outside. When I hurried out, I heard someone call, “The wavies are going!”
At first there was only a babel of voices in the darkening snowfall, but soon I made out dim lines of birds flying by in the distance. They were the “wavies,” the blue geese, and a few white ones, all going up the river, flock after flock. Winter had come to this southern outpost of Hudson Bay, and the birds knew it was time to leave.
In the spring and summer these geese had nested on Baffin Island and in other parts of the Arctic north of Hudson Bay; they had come down to spend a month in the autumn on the lush tidal flats of James Bay. Now their delightful feeding vacation was over and, in response to long racial experience, they set off in the first real snowstorm on the next long journey to the southland, near the Gulf of Mexico. They knew! The next day more flocks were passing over.
A strange feeling came over me as I listened to those bird voices. My companions and others had gone by canoe back to civilization, the horned lark flocks had gone, and now the geese were leaving. Winter had come to the northland, and I was entering a new life experience. But in spite of these thoughts, I was looking forward
