Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
Bert 'Bumpus' Woody was probably fifty-five or sixty years old when I met him. I make this estimate because he shaved only once or twice a week and his white whiskers gave him away. Born in Georgia, USA, it was claimed that he had walked into the Yellowhead area before the railway had been built. Would that have been around 1911? I'll have to check it out.
Bert had a small home in the little company village of Mercoal (don't try to find it on the map because the village doesn't exist any more) and I was never able to find out exactly what his responsibilities were. I'm fairly sure that he was not an underground man because I'd never seen him kitted out in the hard hat, lamp and assorted other gear of a miner. He was probably a general handy man, capable of repairing broken axles, clearing plugged-up lines, reconnecting wires and the myriad other things that could go wrong around a functioning coal mine. It occurred to me years later that he may have already been retired and on pension when I met him.
He was of medium build with a full head of gray hair usually covered by a worn tweed cap, a checkered red flannelette open-necked shirt, grungy woollen tweed pants held up by a time-worn black leather belt and gray woollen sport socks slumped down to a pair of down-at-the-heel black oxfords.
Bert's pack horses were roaming at large in the forest surrounding the village and were rounded up whenever he required them. Their ability to hide themselves to avoid work was uncanny but not as much so as the ability of Bert and his sons to find them and herd them into the village. When I left the coal mine with Graham I told Bert to expect me to return the first week of the big game hunting season and to have enough horses on hand for me and a friend and as many others as he would need.
When we arrived back in Mercoal we were told that Bert was in Edson and would not be back until the following day. What were we to do? After careful consideration we decided to rent a twin-bedded room and then retired to the beer parlour where we sat all afternoon drinking draft beer and eating pickled eggs which tend to produce great thirst.
Cy Thomas, who had grown up in the Coal Branch, hooted with laughter when I told him how we had spent our afternoon in Mercoal. 'I suppose you tried to eat all of the pickled eggs, but never succeeded!' he said.
'As as matter of fact we did,' I said, 'but the pickle jar was a sort of miraculous pitcher.'
'It's a well-known Coal Branch trick,' Cy chuckled. 'The barkeep has a five gallon jar of pickled eggs under the bar; every time you guys weren't looking he'd reach down and scoop up another half dozen or so and plop them into the glass jar sitting on top of the bar. You guys didn't have a chance!'
'Christ! We must have had a dozen pickled eggs apiece during the afernoon!'
'And at least a dozen beers each,' Cy laughed. 'I'm glad I wasn't downwind of you two when you lurched out of the bar! They've probably had to replace the wallpaper in your room, too!' Cy was enjoying himself immensely.
'How so?' I said.
'Are you kidding?' he laughed. 'The sulphur fumes generated by those pickled eggs are the best thing in the world for peeling off wallpaper!' He surrendered himself to giggling once more.
'I think he was just bullshitting you!' Gunner said when I told him what Cy had said.
'Yeah! I think so, too!' I said, feeling relieved.
Bert's house was only about five minute's walk from the hotel and when we arrived there he was fussing with the horses in the back yard. There were four riding horses and four pack horses waiting, heads down, browsing on the scattered patches of grass.
'This is my son Vern,' Bert said, 'he's coming along with us.' He introduced
us to a blonde boy about thirteen years of age wearing 'hand-me-down' clothes and a dirty baseball cap.
'I reckon we'll be gone about two weeks so four pack horses will be about right,' Bert said.
Gunner and I had come prepared for war. I had an ancient lever action Remington and a box of twenty 30/06 shells I hoped would be sufficient. Additionally I carried a leather-holstered High Standard .22 calibre semi-automatic pistol and several boxes of .22 calibre long rifle cartridges. Gunner had a bolt action Springfield .303 calibre rifle and a 20 Gauge shotgun; we were loaded for bear! Just as we were about to head out around 11:00 a.m. Bert held up his hand and stopped the parade.
'Hang on a minute,' he said, 'I forgot my ammunition!' He dismounted, re-entered the house and returned in a couple of minutes carrying two rifle shells in one hand. 'That oughta be plenty! he said, shoving them into his pocket. Gunner and I, feeling like ammunition depots, glanced guiltily at each other but said nothing. We followed the road for about a half mile then cut off onto a bush trail. Bert seemed disinterested in such things as romantic rustic picnics and plodded along non-stop for close to six hours.
I was being 'muy macho', or so I thought and took a large pinch of Copenhagen snuff at one point in our long journey. Never having been a smoker I was unprepared for the effect of the nicotine. My head swam as though I had just swallowed a double shot of Scotch Whiskey. Eventually I found it necessary to dismount and lie for a spell on the ground, holding onto the reins of my bewildered steed. We finally arrived at our chosen campsite and Bert took off to the river to clean and butcher the 'Fool Hens' I had shot with my automatic pistol. Gunner and I, for obvious reasons, both found it more comfortable to lie on our stomachs while eating dinner than to further punish our sensitive bums.
For some bone-headed reason we had discussed whether or not it would be necessary to pitch our tents on this first night. Bert said that the weather forecast was favourable and good sleeping bags would be satisfactory. Nevertheless, common sense prevailed and we pitched them anyway. Accordingly, faithful to Murphy's Law, we had about an inch and a quarter of wet snow that night. When I woke the next morning Bert was already up and had a fire burning under his first boil-up of coffee. I marvelled at the way he would pick up smouldering faggots as though wearing asbestos gloves and shove them into the centre of the blaze.
'Looks like one o' the pack horses has wandered off,' he observed as we ate our breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Bert never 'ate' breakfast, he 'drank' it--- 50% coffee and 50% rum! Incidentally, our deal with Bert was that we would supply all of the food and drink (mostly rum) and he would supply all the horses and associated gear. Not a bad deal compared to what 'dudes' are paying today for pack trips!
'I shouldn't be too long,' he said, walking to the edge of the river which, at this point was really a mountain stream, ice cold, about fifty yards wide, and varying from six inches to a foot in depth. We watched as he bent and rolled up his pant legs to his calves and waited for him to sit down to remove his shoes and socks. But he didn't sit down and he didn't remove his shoes and socks! City boys that we were, we were still talking about his indifference to getting his shoes and socks wet when he appeared again on the far side of the stream, pack horse in tow. How he knew that the horse had forded the stream and where it had gone is still a mystery to me. He tied the horse to a nearby tree then sat down by the fire and removed his shoes and socks. He wrung out each sock carefully and then, instead of propping them up to dry by the fire, he pulled each one on again, pulled on his still wet oxfords and said 'Okay, who wants to go hunting?'
Gunner was content to go off downstream with Vern and Bert and I headed up the side of a mountain back of the camp. The recent snowfall proved a boon and we crossed the spoor of an elk a couple of hundred yards up the side of the hill. Everything became Indian-like at that point and Bert put his fingers to his lips to indicate 'No Talking' and started stealthily following the tracks. Fortunately there was not a breath of wind so we were able to follow along with no concern about warning the animal by our scent. After only a few hundred yards Bert stopped and stepped to one side,waving me forward at the same time. He pointed ahead and I saw the full broadside of a bull elk not much more than fifty yards ahead. Instead of raising my rifle and firing at an almost unmissable target I knelt and took deliberate aim as though firing at an immobile grizzly feeding on a dead horse. Meanwhile, the elk continued to walk slowly across my clear avenue of view and out of my line of sight. Dang! Bert must have been having fits!
'Too late!' I said, standing up once more. 'Do you think we should follow him?'
'Naw! Bert said, 'he'll have seen us by now!' He made an ineffective attempt to conceal his disgust. 'You can go after him if you like, you may get lucky; I'll go back to the camp and see if Gunner shows up.'
As much from embarrassment as expectation I opted to follow the tracks for a while longer and Bert headed back down the mountainside to hunt for Gunner. I pursued my fruitless plan for some time before realizing that the elk tracks had lengthened considerably and he was obviously aware that he was being followed. His tracks had led me back down near the stream and I was surprised to see that they had intersected what seemed to be bear tracks--BIG bear tracks! The bear pads had picked up some of the partially-melted snow and it had then dislodged on top of one of the elk tracks. It had obviously picked up the scent of the elk and turned to follow it into the heavy bush, Very clever, Mr. Holmes! All I had to do now was to follow the bear tracks and Voila!--a trophy grizzly bear rug!
My enthusiasm lasted for about ten paces before I came to my senses. What the hell was I doing, anyway? Tracking a grizzly into heavy brush!---what am I--NUTS! or something? I turned around and walked smartly out of the bush, the hair on the back of my neck standing at full alert. My anal aperture had pretty well unpuckered by the time I got back to our campsite and Gunner was sitting on a log quizzing Bert about every manner of things.
There had been a Canada Jay hanging around our campsite since shortly after our arrival and it was flitting about still emitting its raucous crow-like squawk. As pretty as it was it was still a nuisance and the minute our backs were turned it darted in and stole whatever it could, edible or otherwise. I'll admit I was not in a particularly affable mood
at the time and after it had interrupted us with its impertinent behaviour for about twenty minutes I finally lost all patience.
'Gimme your twenty gauge!' I said abruptly to Gunner. I think he had a pretty good idea of what I had in mind but offered no objection and went over and picked it up and handed it to me.
'I'm gonna need a shell,' I said. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a shell then watched wordlessly as I loaded the gun. The 'Whiskey Jack' was still making its loud noises and flitting from place to place.
'Boom!' stated the shotgun, doubtlessly scaring all of the wild game within two miles. The bird literally disappeared---no corpse, no body, no wings--just a few tiny bluish-gray feathers slowly floating to earth.
'Oh, my! You cruel, heartless bastard!' Gunner said in a sarcastic monotone.
'Yes, I suddenly feel ever so guilty,' I replied.
'Certainly more quiet around here all of a sudden, though!' he added. 'Probably didn't suffer for long!'
'Amen to that!' I said.
I probably should have kept a diary because in later years I could never remember exactly where we had made camp each night. There was the McLeod River camp, the British Properties camp (or was it the British Collieries camp?) and the Southesk Cabin in the shadow of Southesk Mountain. Our furthest camp out was the St. Mary's camp but I had lost track completely of which rivers we had crossed and where but remember the McLeod, the Cardinal and the Southesk.
We considered camping at the Southesk Cabin a rare luxury because we didn't need to pitch our tents and there were 'real' beds inside. We had blown out the candles one night when I heard a rustling around the inside of the cabin which I first thought was probably a squirrel. When it had continued off and on for nearly an hour I decided that I was going to have to take affirmative action if I were to get any sleep that night. I reached for a flashlight, flicked it on and quickly scanned the cabin interior. Sure enough, there was a small rodent crouched amongst the food items on the dining table.
I turned the flashlight beam away from the table and carefully reached over for my automatic pistol. Raised up on one elbow I focused the flashlight beam on the 'midnight intruder' once again and took careful aim with the pistol.
'Bang!' The rodent never ran nor jumped but merely toppled over. In the morning I discovered why; the bullet had entered his ear cavity, leaving a single droplet of blood as the only evidence of entry. Nice shot! He obviously died instantly. A couple of the lads stirred restlessly but never wakened. Regrettably, Bert was sleeping nearby between me and the table. When I took careful aim at the 'packrat' (which it turned out to be) the muzzle of the pistol was only about eight or ten inches above Bert's right ear. When I fired he only jumped about five or six inches into the air.
'Son of a bitch!' he cried. 'What the hell's going on?'
'Relax, Bert, I'm merely disposing of some vermin; go back to sleep!' Surprisingly, that's exactly what he did!
The next day Bert caught a young deer looking the wrong way and we had venison steaks for dinner. At least we did, Bert and Vern had more interest in the deer's liver. No accounting for tastes, I reckon. When I gently reminded Bert that we were really hunting for mountain sheep he uttered a timeless comment.
'They was here a month ago; I reckon they must've all moved over to the other basin!' The other basin? What other basin? I thought. This was a characteristic of Bert's I was to note the more I associated with him. No matter where we were or what we were hunting he would mention 'the other basin' with a look of frustration on his face.
One morning we had just about finished packing up and were ready to move out; Bert had started ahead, mainly because of impatience, and I managed to catch him up about a mile ahead. Vern had waited behind with Gunner while he finished his ablutions or whatever the hell he was doing. Vern suddenly rode up behind us all a-fluster.
'I think you better come back, Mr. Helmer, the doctor has had an accident!'
'An accident? What kind of an accident?'
'Well, his horse bucked him off and he doesn't seem to want to get on again!'
I turned around and rode back to the campsite imagining all sorts of gloomy accidents. Gunner was sitting on the ground, legs spread, staring into space as though he were trying to recall a line of Shakespearean poetry. His horse was standing nearby, grazing placidly on the patches of grass.
'He went right over the horse's head,' Vern said, 'then landed on his own head!'
'Are you all right?' I asked him fatuously, and immediately regretted it. I frisked him quickly and unprofessionally and could find no apparent broken bones. 'Let's see if we can get you back aboard that stupid nag!' We got him to his feet and Vern held the horse steady while I got Gunner back in the saddle. We rode without event until we reached Bert who had been waiting without apparent undue concern. For some reason the encounter had produced an extra piece of leather harness which Vern handed to Bert.
'I'll just hang it on this overhanging branch,' Bert said. 'We won't be able to miss it on the way out!' Interesting enough, when we passed the harness on the way out a week or ten days later, Gunner had no recollection of Bert hanging it there, no recollection of his being bucked off, no recollection of that day's events, in fact. This is apparently typical of concussion victims. We were never sure what had caused the accident but assumed that Gunner had inadvertently kicked his feisty, ill-trained horse in the flanks with the inevitable result. Shades of the time years before on the Saskatchewan farm when my cousin Bob and I were airborne when I accidentally kicked Juno in the flanks.
The pack horse that had wandered off previously was dawdling to the point that the other horses were being held up so Bert decided to have me lead it by its halter the rest of the day.
'Hold the halter in your hand,' he told me, 'it's safer!'
'What's the difference?' I asked.
'Never mind, just do it!' Bert said gruffly. But I didn't 'just do it' as Bert had advised and was soon to find out what the difference was. We ambled along the riverside for a couple of hours with nothing happening. I eventually became bored with holding the pack horse's halter so I took a half hitch around my saddle pommel. I was watching the mountainside for signs of mountain sheep and the edge of the trees for deer or elk. We came to an open mountain meadow where the stream had cut deeply and narrowed substantially. The track crossed the stream in the middle of the meadow and the far side of the cut was about three feet high and steep.
The water was about a foot and a half deep and my horse splashed through it easily then lunged up to reach the top of the far bank. One of his hind legs slipped in the black mud and he gave an extra heave to get himself clear. I guess that's when the trouble began. The pack horse had closed up and was just behind my mount, which, when his leg came clear, trotted ahead to assure himself he was on safe ground. This created a strong tug on the halter just as the pack horse was starting up the slippery side slope. He fell to his knees, but instead of easing up on the halter my horse lunged forward in a panic, pulling the pack horse off balance and causing him to roll onto his side, snorting and groaning in fear.As my horse pulled forward the pack horse was continually pulled off balance.
I had pulled the cinch on the saddle tight when I saddled up but this was an unexpected strain and I felt my saddle gradually being pulled backward toward the horse's rear. If the saddle cinch got back as far as the horse's flank and it started to buck there would really be hell to pay! I wanted to get off my horse for two reasons; one was to do something helpful, the other was to relieve the hurt in my right thigh which was being painfully squeezed down against the saddle. It occurred to me that none of this would have happened if I had '--held the halter in my hand--' like I'd been told!!
Bert fortunately made a timely appearance and cut the halter rope with his pocket knife. The pack horse struggled to its feet and climbed up the bank, none the worse for wear. Bert said nothing but gave me a look that spoke volumes.
We made camp that night close by the stream and it was dusk before we finished our dinner.
'If you boys go down by the bend in the creek where it flattens out a tad, you might get a shot at a moose; they usually cross about this time of night,' Bert suggested.
Having had a couple of belts of rum prior to dinner, Gunner and I were still feeling pleasantly mellow and decided a watch on the river was a capital idea. We broke a cardinal rule of hunting and took a half full bottle of rum with us as we set out to initiate our eventide wait for an unwitting object of prey. We found a comfortable place on the river bank and sat for an hour or so bullshitting about various things and watching it grow dark. It was overcast and we would have had fun trying to find the camp without Gunner's flashlight, especially since we had finished the rum while we sat and told each other lies. Bert was still fussing around the campfire but we did not tarry for long before bidding him good night and heading for our sleeping bags. We nattered quietly for a few minutes then snuffed out the candle. I was half asleep when I heard something brush by the tent followed by the sudden sound of running hooves.
'Did you hear that?' I whispered to Gunner. There was no answer.
A moment later there was a sound of shouting from the direction of Bert's tent.
'Hey, whoa!' I heard Vern yell. then Bert's muffled voice of complaint crying 'What the hell's going on, anyway?' I shook Gunner and told him to wake up then grabbed the flashlight and left the tent. Bert's tent was about twenty feet further from the stream than ours, except that now it had a substantially different appearance than it had previously. It had collapsed around the occupants who were struggling to open it and get out while uttering angry invectives. They finally escaped from the foundered canvas and tried to figure out what had happened.
'Whatever it was ran right over us!' Vern exclaimed excitedly. 'We were lucky it didn't take us with it!' In the meantime Bert had gone with a flashlight of their own and was searching the ground for tracks.
'It was a moose, all right, big bugger too!' he said when he returned a few minutes later. 'Come on,' he said to Vern, 'let's get this tent rigged up again so's we can get some sleep!'
'Do you want some help?' Gunner asked.
'Naw, we'll manage all right, you guys go back to bed.'
While we were having our bacon and eggs the next morning, Bert gave us his considered analysis of what had happened.
'Some big bull moose crossed the stream, probably where he has been crossing for years. He didn't even bother to look up till he climbed the bank then was suddenly confronted with this big white chunk of canvas. That was obviously what spooked him!
'So he took off at the high port and ran smack into your tent!' Gunner said.
'So it seems, he probably never quit running for about ten minutes,' Bert said, chuckling. 'Trouble is, he spooked another of our pack horses while he was at it.'
'Not again!'
'It's no big deal; this old bugger was hobbled so he won't have gone far.'
Speaking of the ability of a moose to run, Gunner and I had climbed up to the top of a steep mountainside one day on the unlikely chance that we might get above a mountain sheep ram. I say unlikely because a ram will position himself as high as possible on a mountainside so that he will have a virtually unhindered view of the valley below. We thought that with luck we might find a ram settled on a ledge just beyond the top ridge of the mountain but facing in the opposite direction. We carefully peered over the edge and scoured the high ledges with our eyes---no luck! Ah, well, it was worth a try! We walked down a few feet from the ridge and sat down for a rest.
We had been seated for only about five minutes when we saw a cow moose trot out of the trees far down at the end of the valley; perhaps we had spooked it during our climb. We watched as she loped up the far mountainside at a steady, unrelenting pace.
'Surely she's gotta stop for a rest, or at least slow down a bit,' I said.
'Hasn't shown any sign of tiring so far,' Gunner said. It had taken us close to three-quarters of an hour to climb to the top of the mountainside. I guessed that the cow moose disappeared over the distant ridge in less than ten minutes. Incredible!
'I gotta figure that old cow's in better shape than we are!' Gunner announced gravely.
'Better looking,too!' I said.
The following day it was decided that Gunner would ride upstream and scout the mountainsides for sheep while I would ride downstream with Vern doing the same. Two or three miles downstream I spotted a group of about five sheep high up on a ridge to the north of us. We rode our horses as far up into the trees as we could, then dismounted, I took my rifle and we started up the mountainside. When we finally reached the top of the ridge we realized that the sheep were over on the next ridge over. Rats!
We calculated that the sheep were about three hundred yards away and there was no way for us to get closer without them spotting us and taking off. The ram was second in line as the sheep grazed slowly down the far ridge and I was lying down with a good solid arm rest. I took slow, steady aim and squeezed off a shot. One of the sheep dropped and we set off toward it immediately. This meant climbing down the side of the ridge we were on and climbing back up the far ridge. We got there to discover that I had hit a sheep all right---but it was a EWE!!
'How the hell could I be that far off?' I asked disgustedly. 'I never saw them move before I fired!'
'There's a hell of a wind blowing up the valley,' Vern said, 'it could have moved the bullet that much!'
'Really?' I said, 'it's hard to believe!'
'Do you think we should take a hindquarter or cut some loins?' Vern asked.
'According to Murphy's Law, if we do that we're virtually sure to run into a Game Warden; he'd bugger about until he found the meat then insist that we take him back to the carcass.'
'Then we'd be in deep shit, right?'
'Exactly! I said. 'He'd confiscate the meat and my rifle and that would just be for starters!'
'I guess you're right,' Vern agreed, 'better we just leave it lie.' So with some reluctance we left the meat and headed back for the horses. Easier said than done!
[Advice to would-be hunters: Never shoot an animal more than a short downhill skid away from your transport, be it truck or horse!]
It was already dusk when we started back and by the time we had gone down, climbed up and gone down again I was starting to show ny lack of conditioning. The sky had cleared and there was a half-moon showing but otherwise it was completely dark by the time we arrived at the timber stand where we thought we had left the horses. We were wrong! After searching vainly for the animals we headed back down to the stream and headed back for the camp. I was exhausted and my legs had begun to lack feeling. What had seemed a pleasant horse ride earlier in the day had became a painful, seemingly endless trudge. Half way back I finally lay down by the trail.
'Go on without me!' I said theatrically to Vern. 'I'll just sleep here tonight!'
'You're just joking, I hope! Come on, it's not that much farther!' I heaved myself to my feet and started to plod along behind him. I had only two thoughts in mind; one was my sleeping bag, the other was a cupful of rum--neat!
After what seemed a painful age we saw the campfire ahead and I refused to answer questions until I had a cup of rum in my hand. Bert was disturbed at first when we told him we had left sheep meat behind but more understanding when we explained the potential ramifications of being intercepted by a Game Warden. To my surprise he seemed less concerned about our loss of the horses.
'Not to worry,' he said, 'they won't go far!' He was correct in that respect; after Vern had given directions as carefully as he was able, Bert took off on his horse and was
back in an hour and a half with the missing animals, apparently none the worse for wear.
— The End —