CHAPTER XXXVI

THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES AND MY FARTHEST NORTH Camp Musk-Ox provided many other items of interest besides the Great River, the big Musk-ox, and the Arctic Fox. Here Preble secured a Groundsquirrel with its cheek-pouches full of mushrooms and shot a cock Ptarmigan whose crop was crammed with leaves of willow and birch, though the ground was bright with berries of many kinds. The last evening we were there a White Wolf followed Billy into camp, keeping just beyond reach of his shotgun; and, of course, we saw Caribou every hour or two. "All aboard," was the cry on the morning of August 19, and once more we set out. We reached the north arm of the lake, then turned north-eastward. In the evening I got photos of a Polar Hare, the third we had seen. The following day (August 20), at noon, we camped in Sandhill Bay, the north point of Aylmer Lake and the northernmost point of our travels by canoe. It seems that we were the fourth party of white men to camp on this spot. Captain George Back, 1833-34. Stewart and Anderson, 1855. Warburton Pike, 1890. E. T. Seton, 1907. All day long we had seen small bands of Caribou. A score now appeared on a sandhill half a mile away; another and another lone specimen trotted past our camp. One of these stopped and gave us an extraordinary exhibition of agility in a sort of St. Vitus's jig, jumping, kicking, and shaking its head; I suspect the nose-worms were annoying it. While we lunched, a fawn came and gazed curiously from a distance of 100 yards. In the after-noon Preble returned from a walk to say that the Caribou were visible in all directions, but not in great bands. Next morning I was awakened by a Caribou clattering through camp within 30 feet of my tent. After breakfast we set off on foot northward to seek for Musk-ox, keeping to the eastward of the Great Fish River. The country is rolling, with occasional rocky ridges and long, level meadows in the lowlands, practically all of it would be considered horse country; and nearly every meadow had two or three grazing Caribou. About noon, when six or seven miles north of Aylmer, we halted for rest and lunch on the top of the long ridge of glacial dump that lies to the east of Great Fish River. And now we had a most complete and spectacular view of the immense open country that we had come so far to see. It was spread before us like a huge, minute, and wonderful chart, and plainly marked with the processes of its shaping-time. Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing, ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this going on for thousands of years, and we shall have the hills lowered and polished, the valleys more or less filled with broken rocks. Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of flood. For another age all is below water, dammed by the northern ice, and icebergs breaking from the parent sheet carry bedded in them countless boulders, with which they go travelling south on the open waters. As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow share equally in this age-long shower of erratics. Nor does it cease till the progress of the warmer day removes the northern ice-dam, sets free the flood, and the region of archaean rocks stands bare and dry. It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of mighty power used only to destroy. A waste of shattered granite spotted with hundreds of lakes, thousands of lakelets, millions of ponds that are marvellously blue, clear, and lifeless. But a new force is born on the scene; it attacks not this hill or rock, or that loose stone, but on every point of every stone and rock in the vast domain, it appears--the lowest form of lichen, a mere stain of gray. This spreads and by its own corrosive power eats foothold on the granite; it fructifies in little black velvet spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite, to help the effect. Soon another kind follows--a pale olive-green lichen that fruits in bumps of rich brown velvet; then another branching like a tiny tree--there is a ghostly kind like white chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses higher still. In the less exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade, searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange textures and oriental tones; broad carpets there are of gray and green; long luxurious lanes, with lilac mufflers under foot, great beds of a moss so yellow chrome, so spangled with intense red sprigs, that they might, in clumsy hands, look raw. There are knee-deep breadths of polytrichum, which blends in the denser shade into a moss of delicate crimson plush that baffles description. Down between the broader masses are bronze-green growths that run over each slight dip and follow down the rock crannies like streams of molten brass. Thus the whole land is overlaid with a living, corrosive mantle of activities as varied as its hues. For ages these toil on, improving themselves, and improving the country by filing down the granite and strewing the dust around each rock. The frost, too, is at work, breaking up the granite lumps; on every ridge there is evidence of that--low, rounded piles of stone which plainly are the remnants of a boulder, shattered by the cold. Thus, lichen, moss, and frost are toiling to grind the granite surfaces to dust. Much of this powdered rock is washed by rain into the lakes and ponds; in time these cut their exits down, and drain, leaving each a broad mud-flat. The climate mildens and the south winds cease not, so that wind-borne grasses soon make green meadows of the broad lake-bottom flats. The process climbs the hill-slopes; every little earthy foothold for a plant is claimed by some new settler, until each low hill is covered to the top with vegetation graded to its soil, and where the flowering kinds cannot establish themselves, the lichen pioneers still maintain their hold. Rarely, in the landscape, now, is any of the primitive colour of the rocks; even the tall, straight cliffs of Aylmer are painted and frescoed with lichens that flame and glitter with purple and orange, silver and gold. How precious and fertile the ground is made to seem, when every square foot of it is an exquisite elfin garden made by the little people, at infinite cost, filled with dainty flowers and still later embellished with delicate fruit. One of the wonderful things about these children of the Barrens is the great size of fruit and flower compared with the plant. The cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any one of which might outweigh the herb itself. Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly in beds of a single species. The Lalique jewelry was the sensation of the Paris Exposition of 1899. Yet here is Lalique renewed and changed for every week in the season and lavished on every square foot of a region that is a million square miles in extent. Not a cranny in a rock but is seized on at once by the eager little gardeners in charge and made a bed of bloom, as though every inch of room were priceless. And yet Nature here exemplifies the law that our human gardeners are only learning: "Mass your bloom, to gain effect." As I stood on that hill, the foreground was a broad stretch of old gold--the shining sandy yellow of drying grass--but it was patched with large scarlet mats of arctous that would put red maple to its reddest blush. There was no Highland heather here, but there were whole hillsides of purple red vaccinium, whose leaves were but a shade less red than its luscious grape-hued fruit. Here were white ledums in roods and acre beds; purple mairanias by the hundred acres, and, framed in lilac rocks, were rich, rank meadows of golden-green by the mile. There were leagues and leagues of caribou moss, pale green or lilac, and a hundred others in clumps, that, seeing here the glory of the painted mosses, were simulating their ways, though they themselves were the not truly mosses at all. I never before saw such a realm of exquisite flowers so exquisitely displayed, and the effect at every turn throughout the land was colour, colour, colour, to as far outdo the finest autumn tints of New England as the Colorado Canyon outdoes the Hoosac Gorge. What Nature can do only in October, elsewhere, she does here all season through, as though when she set out to paint the world she began on the Barrens with a full palette and when she reached the Tropics had nothing left but green. Thus at every step one is wading through lush grass or crushing prairie blossoms and fruits. It is so on and on; in every part of the scene, there are but few square feet that do not bloom with flowers and throb with life; yet this is the region called the Barren Lands of the North. And the colour is an index of its higher living forms, for this is the chosen home of the Swans and Wild Geese; many of the Ducks, the Ptarmigan, the Laplongspur and Snowbunting. The blue lakes echo with the wailing of the Gulls and the eerie magic calling of the Loons. Colonies of Lemmings, Voles, or Groundsquirrels are found on every sunny slope; the Wolverine and the White Wolf find this a land of plenty, for on every side, as I stood on that high hill, were to be seen small groups of Caribou. This was the land and these the creatures I had come to see. This was my Farthest North and this was the culmination of years of dreaming. How very good it seemed at the time, but how different and how infinitely more delicate and satisfying was the realisation than any of the day-dreams founded on my vision through the eyes of other men.