Train to Moose Factory

by JOHN J. ROWLANDS

1

A YOUNG Indian mother with a placid brown baby under one arm and a bulging pack-sack slung from her shoulder hurried toward me anxiously inquiring, “Moose? . . . Moose?” Before I could straighten out an obvious case of mistaken identity, several voices assured her in broken English and James Bay Cree that the train behind me was the right one for “Moose.” On the timetable it is “Moosonee.”

Departure of the Ontario Northland’s mixed train, which runs twice a week from Cochrane, Ontario, some two hundred miles “down north” to the end of steel at Moosonee, is somewhat of an event. Moosonee’s tar-papered houses and log cabins squat on high spots in the swampy flats along the Moose River, and early in the summer when the Indians return from the fur country it becomes a tent village of Moose Band Crees and thieving sled dogs that howl in the sorrows of starvation night and day. A few miles to the north the Moose, some two miles wide here, empties into James Bay, the lower part of Hudson Bay.

When we went to the station at Cochrane that August morning, the Moosonee train consisted of an assortment of freight cars, three old and faded blue wooden passenger coaches which were already well filled with Indian families, and a caboose that had weathered from red to chalky pink. The dusty but capable-looking locomotive with clanking driving rods somehow gave the impression it was being sent into a wilderness Coventry for some misdemeanor on the high iron of the main line. Now and then it left us for a while, announcing its return each time by a jolt as it added another car to the train. The final count was twenty-five.

An hour after scheduled starting time, word got around that we were being held to take on an official car attached to the Northland Express, coming from the south. While we waited the Indian families gradually left the cars and fanned out for a last look at the stores along the dusty main street which parallels the tracks. Every time a locomotive whistled they stampeded back to the train, sat awhile in alert silence, and then trickled back to their window shopping.

A Finnish pulpwood cutter, who had come aboard some time before with a case of ale, scurried unsteadily from the train and came back triumphantly shouldering another, which he stowed behind my seat with a grunt of great satisfaction.

The express, a string of sleek Pullmans and shining steel coaches, finally arrived and slid to a stop farther down the platform as if to avoid contact with a shabby relative. The official car was switched to our train and, an hour and a half late, we were ready to go.

Just before we left, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable and a Provincial police officer walked through the train, scrutinizing every stranger and keeping an eye open for any sign of forbidden liquor in the packs of the Indians. Several times they stopped to ask passengers, “What is your destination? Have you a job? How long do you plan to stay?” It was done quietly and courteously, and everyone in the train was accounted for in one way or another. It’s a good thing to have a reason when you head into the sub-Arctic Canadian bush.

Our goal was Moose Factory, second oldest post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, at the mouth of the Moose River. This is the jumping-off place for the Eastern Arctic posts. From there we would go by canoe to Hannah Bay, that vast and lonely tidal rendezvous of the waveys, the blue and the snow geese, which stop to feed and rest on their long migration from the desolate Arctic barrens to the wintering grounds in the Southern states. Our reason: wildlife photography.

You can make a lot of friends in an hour on a frontier train, and before we were fifty miles north of Cochrane the passengers were moving about. No one introduced himself; people just came and sat on the arm of your seat and began talking.

Our conductor wore faded blue overalls and a cotton engineer’s cap, but he pulled on a blue uniform with the brass buttons of his office for the leisurely process of taking tickets. Then the coat came off.

The dark girl who, as we left Cochrane, had fixed her eyes on the spruce-fringed southern horizon with what seemed a look of desperate loneliness was an Indian Affairs Department nurse on her way to an isolated Arctic post for a stay of three years. A middle-aged prospector, an oldtimer who was going in “just to look around,” assured the girl she would like the east coast of Hudson Bay.

“The only ones who need to worry are them that live alone in the bush,” he told her. “Then you’ve got to learn to tell when you’ve been in long enough. One way is to nail a piece of gunny sack to the door and every time you go out you touch it. When it begins to feel like silk it’s time to head south. Another way to know when the bush is getting you is when you quit wanting to go out. That’s long enough to stay, Miss, for sure. But take a man — when he begins to think Indian women are pretty, he hits the back trail — that is, if he’s got any sense. But you’ll be with folks at the post and working hard, and you’ll enjoy it.” The girl thanked him. Then as if to reassure her, he added, “You’re in luck. Up to last year they had only one mail a year along the east coast of The Bay. Now you get it four times by plane — September, December, March, and June.”

The train halted every few miles, often for no apparent reason. At Mile 23 we stopped by a log cabin in a clearing hacked out of the wall of black spruce and tamarack. The baggageman lowered four bottles of milk to a young fellow while a tiredlooking woman with a very small baby in her arms watched dully from the cabin doorway. The conductor leaned across me and waved through the window. “We bring them milk from the hospital at Cochrane,” he explained. “The baby pretty nearly didn’t live at first. It’s puny and needs special feeding. We’re glad to help. They’re having a tough time trying to make a homestead out of the bush.” The train moved on.

2

COCHRANE is on the Canadian National Railway’s transcontinental line and the region between it and James Bay lies in Northern Ontario’s great clay belt. Here all streams run north and most of them carry the color of the tawny clay through which they flow. Except for waterways in the muskeg, where the brown water is often clean and cold, fishing in this region is poor.

White pine, poplar, white spruce, and the frowzy, slender jack pine thrive on the high land, but in the muskeg, which covers vast areas, the black spruce with tufted tops grow in closed ranks, shouldering each other in the eternal struggle to reach open sunlight. And where the pale feathery tamarack can find standing room it, too, flourishes in the black muck under the sphagnum moss. The bright purplish-red glow of fireweed covers burnedover areas along the track, hiding the blackened bones of dead trees and fire-scaled boulders.

Our northward progress was slow. Stations as such became further and further apart, and mileposts replaced them as scheduled stops. The woodcutter’s ticket read: “From Cochrane to Mile 144.” From time to time we stopped to drop a pulp or flat car on a rusty spur track and then every man, woman, and child got off the train. Indian children played tag through and under the cars, and men talked about the summer being hot and dry, and the danger of bush fires. There was a haze in the sky and the faint, disturbing smell of smoke that came on the wind from a fire a hundred miles to the west.

Hemmed in by high walls of black spruce with the endless drainage ditches on either side, the track stretched straight ahead, two gleaming streaks of steel that merged far away to a thin line of silver rippling in the heat waves. We were in the soft muskeg country and the roadbed was built on tangled mats of spruce and tamarack felled where they stood and covered with gravel. In most places the permanent frost was less than four feet below the surface. In the muck by the right of way wore the sharp imprints of moose tracks.

There are few deer north of the transcontinental line, but moose are fairly plentiful and the black bear is common and sometimes a nuisance. Timber wolves still roam the region, but they are more numerous to the west and south, for they follow the deer. The James Bay region is still a profitable fur district and there is good reason to believe that government regulation of trapping in certain sections will eventually make it a richer fur country than it was when the white man first trod its forests.

The fine-looking, white-haired man who sat with his wife opposite us was hard to place. In any capital of the world he could have been an elder statesman; he could have been a judge or a great surgeon, yet he belonged to the north in that indefinable way that balks explanation. His shoulders drooped a little and he sat looking straight ahead in the way of a man of years who no longer needs to look to know. A seal ring on his left hand bore a crest of a sheaf of grain surmounted by a helmet with visor open.

At first he treated us with the peculiar reserve of men of the north toward strangers. When we crossed the Abitibi and I remarked I had come down the river by canoe prospecting for gold in 1911, which was long before the Ontario Northland line had been thought of, even before the Transcontinental Railway had been finished, he warmed. Unknown to each other, we had worked in Cobalt when that great silver camp was a shining place in the mining world, and we had seen Porcupine and then Kirkland Lake grow from tented prospect camps to become one of the world’s great goldmining regions. Now after thirty-seven years I had come back and I needed no other credentials. He was purchasing agent at the power plant on the Abitibi and was on his way home after several months in the hospital at Cochrane.

He was still a bit shaky, he explained. They had taken him out with pneumonia and other complications early in March — fifty miles on a gasoline speeder with the temperature at twenty below zero.

“Don’t know how I made it,” he said; “perhaps I can thank my stout Scotch Highland ancestors. Keeping alive comes high up here when you get sick. They will send an engine and baggage car down from Cochrane in case of emergency, but that costs $195. The speeder was cheaper but very cold.”

He had gone in as chief accountant when they built the power plant twenty years ago, he told us.

“I was fifty then and we’ve been here ever since. Always planned to go outside — no place for a woman, you know — but somehow it didn’t work out. The years tramp you down and jobs are not easy to find.”

But they were very comfortable — lights in the house, a bathroom, and electric stove and refrigerator— all the comforts and plenty of wood. “But still it was the bush, the everlasting, endless silent bush,” he said. “To this day bears come in to eat the blueberries near our house, and in winter we hear the wolves off to the west. We miss a lot, of course, but there are some compensations. The trout fishing, I might say, is admirable just below the spillway.”

From the train we looked down the gorge of the Abitibi where the great powerhouse stands athwart the frothing river, the self-contained, omnipotent giant of a tiny community of company houses in the wilderness, but tethered securely to civilization by a leash of shining aluminum strands.

In the bush, time and distance take on new meanings. A young fellow on the train was intently writing a letter to his girl, the daughter of a Hudson’s Bay Company man at a post seven hundred miles north. Before lie got off the train halfway down he asked me to mail the letter at Moosonee. It would go north on the September plane and with luck he’d have an answer by Christmas.

Somewhere around Mile 120 the woodcutter came back to retrieve the case of ale he had cached behind my seat The quality and the quantity of the brew had done its work and he was well on the way to oblivion. Opening the case, he invited all to join him as he pulled out a bottle, clamped the cap between his teeth at the corner of his mouth, and yanked downward. The caps flew off, one after another, and with a nice gesture to the science of sanitation he carefully wiped the tops of the bottles on his coat sleeve before passing them around.

Preparations for getting the woodcutter off at the pulp camp near Mile 144 required the combined efforts of the conductor and brakeman, for the man had lost track of his packsack and refused to leave his ale to hunt it. They were still searching when the train stopped, but by that time he had reached the fighting stage and refused to budge. The wellpracticed train crew dragged him to the platform and pushed him off into the watery muskeg ditch by the track. His packsack followed him and then what was left of the case of ale. The carton landed on a boulder and the sound of splintering bottles brought a howl of anguish from the owner. Then in a dazed silence he lurched toward the crumpled carton, dropped to his knees in the muck beside it, and stared at the mass of broken glass. Slowly and with loving touch he lifted the fragments one by one and dropped them into the ditch. His shoulders were shaking convulsively and when we pulled away he was still kneeling by the box, sobbing from deep in his breast as only a man can weep in drunken grief.

“That’s the second time this summer,” said the brakeman, crumpling his cap to wipe the sweat off his face.

3

LIFE on the train to Moosonee was easygoing. Coats and ties were discarded, for the Canadian summer, already shortened by a laggard spring and a cold June, was making the most of the time that was left. It was ninety outside and still warmer in the cars.

At noon sharp the train stopped in the middle of a desolate stretch of country, and after a prolonged blast on the whistle the engineer and fireman walked back to the caboose. It was dinnertime and for an hour the train stood in the quiet wilderness while the crew enjoyed beef stew and baking soda biscuits cooked on a coal range by the conductor’s pretty wife.

If we hadn’t made a late start, the stop for dinner would have been further north where the track crosses a particularly fine creek that flows through a black spruce swamp. The conductor, a fisherman of some reputation, carries a rod and a hatful of flies and it is his custom whenever possible to spend part of his lunch hour dropping flies on the cool, brown water of a pool beside the track. It is said that under proper conditions and with fair luck trout are browning in bacon fat on the caboose stove less than twenty minutes after the train stops.

Part of our coach was partitioned off for a lunch counter, and while the train crew ate we got in line for dinner, a surprisingly complete menu of good roast beef, bread, potatoes, cabbage, pie, and coffee. The price was seventy-five cents. A quiet little man from one of the other cars came in, took a seat next me, and before starting his meal bowed his head for a whispered blessing.

An uninhibited man from Indiana, who with his wife and son was adventuring in the north, held forth at the far end of the counter. He had been talking every mile of the way down from Cochrane.

“Let me tell you,” he was saying to all who cared to listen, “this young fella and his sister that run the lunch counter could show our boys a thing or two about puttin’ on a meal for a price. Why, say, back in Indiana this meal would cost you two to three dollars. But our coffee is better’n yours. Always heard they make poor coffee up here. Most of you folks drink tea, I guess, but I don’t go for that.” His wife beamed agreement, but the son looked uneasy. He finished his meal first and went out to walk beside the train.

“Pop’s pretty excited about this trip,” he told us later as though he felt an explanation were needed. “When he was a kid he pined to be a fur trader, and ever since, he’s read everything about the north he could get his hands on. Wrote when I was overseas that when I got back we’d all come up here. All these years he’s been planning a trip like this, and he’s certainly getting a kick out of it. It’s his first vacation in five years and he deserves it. Pop’s a grand guy; you can see that.” And we did.

Not long after we left the dinner stop the train came to a grinding halt and suddenly began backing up at a good rate, a practice which is safe only on a one-track, one-train line. Heads craned from every window to see what was happening, but not until we had retraced two miles of track was the reason apparent. There beside the track by the bank of a stream was an old Indian with a canoe, a dirty mattress, and several rolls of dunnage. Looking back along the train for signs of hotboxes, the engineer had by mere chance spotted the old man climbing up on the track and waving in what seemed a hopeless gesture. No one was disturbed, least of all the old Indian; for in the bush, time makes ample allowance for the unexpected. The crew helped him load his canoe and camp equipment into the nearest open boxcar and we were on our way again without any rushing to make up lost time.

An hour later we were flagged down at a river crossing to take on ten Indians, their canoes and much winter dunnage, as well as several lean sled dogs which snarled at each other while the canoes were being loaded. There was a lot of good-natured banter in Cree between the new passengers and Indians on the train. A Canada jay, known wherever men travel in the north as the moosebird or whiskey-jack, watched the trappers’ departure from the shadows of a spruce. It had, no doubt, followed them on their trip out for the morsels it could pick up on the way.

The track foreman’s wife, an ample and cheerful person in a gingham dress, got off at Mile 166, where her husband’s work train stood on a siding beside a stretch of country that had been burned over twenty years ago. The various pails she carried were for raspberries. It was good berrying land.

In July, she told me, she picked blueberries down around Coral Rapids. That is as far north as they grow in this region, but the raspberries thrive right down to The Bay and out on the Islands.

“You won’t find bigger or better-flavored berries this side of Heaven,” she said. “Big as a thimble, they are. I took eighty quarts back two weeks ago and I’m down now to get more for jam to send to my married daughter.”

The biggest and best berries, she philosophized, are, like anything else of special value, harder to find. Mostly they ripen in the warm shade right under a leaf, but by kneeling down and looking up through the canes you spot them and do the rest by touch. After you’ve been berrying a few years you learn to know just the kind of a leaf a prime berry likes to hide under.

“I’ve been out in The Bay for wild strawberries, too,” she added. “The berries that grow out on those sandy islands are large and easy to pick, which is something to brag about if you’ve ever been after the wild ones. And flavor! — never tasted anything like them, ‘specially with thick cream. So sweet they don’t need sugar. But the mosquitoes are enough to drive you crazy and the tides are dangerous, so folks don’t go after them much. Breaks my heart to think of hundreds of bushels going to waste.”

4

THE official car, which was the subject of a good deal of curiosity, was carrying a Crown Commission of medical men sent by the government to study the problem of tuberculosis among the Indians in the Hudson Bay region. There were six of them and a woman social service specialist. They had planned to start earlier, but the spring was late and the ice didn’t go out of James Bay until July 15. It was now the middle of August and they had only until the end of September to complete their survey.

Undertaking the impossible is an everyday chore in the north country. The medical men were carrying complete X-ray equipment, including a heavy gasoline engine and generator to produce power for the tubes, as well as much other apparatus. All this, weighing several tons, had to be transported by boat from post to post of the Hudson’s Bay Company and overland to isolated Indian reservations along the west coast of Hudson Bay. The doctors walked through the train several times, looking over the Indian passengers with the cool professional detachment of medical research specialists.

The Ontario Northland line crosses the Moose River on a high steel trestle which is the best part of a mile long. Our approach to the flag stop at the river was heralded by an excited yell from the Indiana adventurer, whose head had spent most of the trip outside the window.

“Say, Helen, get an eyeful of this. It’s the famous Moose River! Why, say, I’ve read about this place for years. Used to be the main fur trade route in the good old days. Funny, but somehow I thought it’d be bigger. Look at those rapids! George, how’d you like to run them in a canoe? So this is the great Moose. S-o-m-e river! Wait till I tell the boys back home about this.”

Indians, waiting to see the train come in, walked along beside the cars, grinning and reaching up to shake hands with friends and strangers alike. A big Cree trapper climbed aboard, followed by his wife, who was staggering under a heavy shoulder pack and carrying a shabby suitcase in each hand. Without so much as a gesture of assistance, he ordered her to hurry. That is the way of the Indian and no one paid any attention.

The heavily built, close-coupled man who sat with a plump and pleasant-looking woman in a seat at the end of the car was quiet most of the way down. He kept his hat on all day long, his small brown eyes watching the passengers constantly. Once in a while they twinkled with amusement. At intervals during the afternoon he folded into a boneless huddle, laid his head on the window sill with hat brim over his eyes, and dropped to sleep in the way of a man long used to taking his rest any-time, any-where.

He was a free trader, specializing in white fox furs, who with the aid of his wife had carved out a bleak little empire of his own well up on the east coast of Hudson Bay. People who knew him when he ran a lunchroom in the gold camps twenty years ago said he must be making a tidy fortune.

Most of the Indians who passed through the car in a continual procession to buy pop at the lunch counter recognized the trader and several stopped to shake hands with him. There was obvious respect and apparently some affection for him. A network of fine lines, the familiar effect of glare from snow and ice, fanned out from the edges of the man’s eyes, and when the sun slanted through the window they instantly narrowed to thin slits. The free trader and his wife come out for a month or so nearly every year. They were returning now from a trip to California.

“Glad to be going home again,” he said. “It was a good trip, but The Bay country will look fine to us. Life here is simple; you take time to see where you’re going and what for.” He wondered why people in the cities think that rushing gets you there any faster; “sure, into a hole in the ground faster!”

The trader didn’t have much to say about his business. He had bought a lot of supplies, for the Eskimos of the offshore islands depended on him for outfitting. His gasoline freight boat would be at Moosonee to take them and the supplies home, five hundred miles across The Bay. He hoped the trade goods had arrived, for time was getting short and the treacherous weather of fall on The Bay was not far away. He liked the Eskimos better than Indians. “Clean, happy, and more resourceful,” he said, “and their word is as good as a contract.”

His wife remarked that the only unpleasant part of their trips outside was getting used to the noise of civilization. In Nebraska, where they visited her sister for a week, they had to go to the back of the house and close all the windows to get any rest, and at that they lost a lot of sleep.

“Don’t believe I could stand it for a steady way of living,” she thought. “We’re so used to the silence of the north that city noises make us nervous. Where we live you can almost hear the lemmings breathing.”

The trader’s wife talked steadily and hungrily, now telling, now asking. She wanted to know about our families and what they did. She spoke of books. They were precious to her. Someone had sent her one that she read three times in one winter. Had I ever read the Bible? — It was good reading. She had saved magazines for years and now some of them were so nearly forgotten she felt sure they would seem almost brand-new when she read the stories this year.

Events that happened years before were summoned out of time in clear detail as though they had occurred but yesterday. She told us much about their summer of travel, speaking of scenes and people and the minutiae of their lives. I had the feeling that she was reviewing her experiences, not just because she wanted to tell us, but as a means of etching the images still deeper in her memory.

She listened to our talk in the way of one to whom every word, no matter how trivial, had enormous value. She was instinctively and industriously garnering thoughts, ideas, scraps of information, to store away as a reserve against the long dark winter when with great thrift, word by word and thought by thought, it would be withdrawn from the shelves of her memory.

There were times, she told us, when you needed everything you had to think about. One was when her husband left on a trading trip that usually took only a week and didn’t come back for a month. She waited alone with only an old sled dog for companionship. A storm had broken up The Bay ice and her husband was marooned at an Eskimo camp on one of the offshore islands. She didn’t worry much, she said, for as far as she could see, fear hadn’t ever brought anybody back. The thing to do was to sort out in your mind all the things that could happen and then try to decide which was the right one. “Stormed in” was the natural choice in winter and then you held on tight to that explanation without doubting through the days and nights until it was over. “Singing to myself helped a lot,” she added, “and talking to the dog was good.”

“When we get in to Moosonee,” she told us, “two of our Indians will be waiting to pack the stuff down to the boat on the river. They’re Whale River men, a different kind and more loyal workers than the Moose Band Crees. They are much taller, with a cast to the face that reminds you of the Eskimo. Neither one of them has ever seen a train or an automobile, but you would never know it. Watch their faces — they’d make great poker players. But those fellows have flown more miles in airplanes than most city people. That’s the way it is down here.”

The only person who formally introduced himself on our journey was a tall and scholarly-looking man who spent most of his time making notes and diagrams on a yellow pad. He was a professor of architecture in a Canadian university who had been commissioned by the government to design and supervise construction of a school for the Indians. The problem was how to make a safe and solid foundation for a heavy brick building in ground which was solid black ice four feet below the surface. That would take a bit of planning and he went back to his seat to see what he could figure out.

5

LATE in the afternoon when the sun was almost down to the jagged spruce tops, we ran through a long stretch of country covered with stunted spruce and tamarack struggling for survival amid huge gray boulders and bracken. It was typical moose barrens and the shadow of our train writhed over the land, a dragon with black smoke streaming from its head. Twilight lingered until, swallowed by darkness, it was but a pale afterglow in the west.

Our approach to Moosonee was announced by a long wind-tossed wail from the locomotive, which, like a horse on the way home, had suddenly picked up speed, and now we were reeling down the grade to the river flats.

The soft, yellow light from the car windows was the only illumination on the station platform, where Indians — men, women, and children — swarmed about the train, laughing and calling to friends. A young Cree darted past us and with the litheness of a mink slid down between the cars, ducked under the coupling, and became part of the darkness on the opposite side of the train. He had spotted the Royal Canadian Mountie on the platform.

“Must have had a bottle,” muttered the man behind me.

The crowd milled back and forth. Back in the shadows someone was playing a mouth organ and for a few moments there was a snatch of song. An energetic and serious Dominican Brother, whose long black cassock was smudged with dust, pushed a baggage truck through the crowd, calling in Cree for the Indians to make way. He loaded his freight into a truck and jolted away through the mud of the one and only street in Moosonee.

As we waited for our duffel to be unloaded the eerie greenish glow of the aurora borealis crept up the northern sky from the horizon. The color changed to rose and amber, then back to green, and swept northeastward toward The Bay as it swiftly changed to a pearly radiance. The faces of the few white men on the crowded platform stood out like waxen masks.

The man whose bald spot shone in the light was the Indian Affairs doctor from Moose Factory who came to meet the medical men and go north with them. A young Hudson’s Bay Company man was already loading their baggage on a mud-caked truck, for they would start down the Moose on the high tide at midnight.

A soft night breeze stirred from the west and the smell of smoke from the engine was replaced by the mossy scents of the swamp, a faint smell of freshly peeled logs and pine wood smoke from the houses and the tents of the Indian summer camp. The big Cree who had come from Moose Factory to take us on in canoes shouldered our packs and without a word strode away on the mile-long board sidewalk running on stilts over the muskeg to the banks of the Moose River.

For a few minutes there was only the steady hollow thumping of our feet on the boardwalk and then from somewhere in the darkness behind I heard the voice of Indiana.

“So this is Moosonee! S-o-m-e burg, folks!”