6 Whirlpools and Eddies

This was a major village site before the smallpox reduced the Tlexelc, as the Williams Lake Indian band calls itself, Chief Willie Alphonse told me. Numbers had dwindled from 3,500 to 500 and in the 20 years after the Gold Rush in 1858, the surviving members found themselves with no land - it had all been taken by white settlers. The present reserve was obtained only after the band wrote to Queen Victoria expressing the injustice and five local ranches were finally bought on their behalf.

Fraser's accounts of his meetings with the Secwepemc have lessons for today, Alphonse said.

"That's a good demonstration of how the different bands recognized the boundaries of the different nations. The Carriers passed Simon Fraser on to us and we passed him on to the Lillooets," he said.

"You know, Simon Fraser always camped at village sites because he was smart. It was for protection. If you just camped anywhere, you'd be considered to be trespassing and maybe an enemy. You might get yourself killed. But if you camped with people, you were a guest and you were under the chief's protection and you got fed."

At the creek mouth, not far from where you can still find the depressions where the abandoned pit houses that provided winter shelter eventually collapsed, I got a reminder that there are tribes older than any of ours.

Overhead, ravens began to gather, scores of them. Wheeling and soaring in an immense circle, they swooshed down, one by one, touched briefly on the edge of a high bluff, then took off again. On the other side of the river, hundreds more perched in the trees at the edge of the bank, cronking and croaking in that  distinctive raven language. In the trees where I stood watching this mysterious ceremony, a large flock of crows, normally sworn enemies of the raven clan, sat in numbers that bowed the branches, muttering and mumbling.

What it meant, I don't know and I haven't found any references in the scientific literature that can help me understand, but the ravens vanished as suddenly as they had gathered, abruptly peeling off and flying away to all points of the compass.

Later, I thought of something Green said while we stood on a sandbar beside the river.

"When you are in the bush a lot by yourself, you realize that everything - the sky, the clouds, the rivers, the animals - they are all telling you things, but sometimes, coming from our modern world, it's hard to comprehend what they mean," he said.

With the mystery of the ravens and their ritual behind me, I had traveled hundreds of kilometres  on remote back roads on both sides of the Fraser.

Signals of habitation

On a series of cruel switchbacks rising to the Gang Ranch, I met Doug Clawson of Seattle, riding his bicycle solo across the outback to Bella Coola. And on the other side, somewhere between Dog Creek and Alkali Lake, I met Erin O'Brien, a doctoral candidate in biology from the University of Northern B.C. She was doing the lonely, gentle work of counting bluebird chicks, banding them and returning them to their nests.

I crossed the river again and headed south for Farwell Canyon where I hoped to look at pictographs and compare them with those stunning images I'd seen on Stuart Lake, far to the north, but the road was closed and I was forced to turn back.

That disappointment waned, however, when I learned that my river guide had some unusual pictographs to show me that he'd recently discovered right on the Fraser River.

Green said he found them by accident when he was out hunting the previous winter.

"I was following cougar tracks. I saw a kill down on the ice - this was all covered with a glaze of ice - and I slipped and fell. I went down about 150 feet," he said, wincing at the memory.

Luckily, he was able to break his fall by jamming his rifle sideways so that the stock and barrel caught on some trees, but he still wound up on the frozen river and there, when he looked up, were the pictographs, hidden from view. It was, he said, like he'd been led there.

From the river, I made out what looked like five human figures painted inside a bowl that had been hollowed out of the rock by a boulder rolling around in some past age when the river level was higher. In the middle was a white figure. It appeared to be holding hands with red figures on either side.

Dream images? Perhaps a depiction of some supernatural being, like the transformer who created the distinctions between animals and humans? Or was it a depiction of a transformative event so unusual that it entered the realm of myth - for example, the first encounter with white-skinned people?

Green shrugged. "Maybe that goes right back to Simon Fraser. There are things that go back a long time before him. I've heard a story out west about how they hunted woolly mammoths, how they would shoot the arrows straight up in the air and the arrows would come down on the mammoth's head, where there's a soft spot."

I finally bid farewell to this remote and relatively untouched and unvisited stretch of the river and turned south again, following winding roads cut from hardpan clay through the same terrain that plagued Fraser with "a violent pain in my groins which prevents me from being able to walk any distance." His men were wearing out a pair of moccasins a day and their feet were "full of thorns."

Still Fraser pressed the expedition forward, past Dog Creek, Churn Creek, Canoe Creek, China Gulch, Grinder Creek, Lone Cabin Creek, Deadman Creek, French Bar, Big Bar, while the warnings of what lay ahead from his Secwepemc guides became ever grimmer.

By June 9, the journal's entry shows an uncharacteristic sense of pessimism. The rapids, Fraser says, are now the worst yet and seem to have no end.

"I scarcely ever saw any thing so dreary and seldom so dangerous in any country; and at present while I am writing this, whatever way I turn, mountains upon mountains, whose summits are covered with eternal snows, close the gloomy scene."

Finally, at Leon Creek, listening to the advice of Xlo'sem, the chief from Xat'sull at Soda Creek, Fraser decided to continue by land. A scaffold covered with branches was erected to store the canoes and protect them from the scorching sun, food and unnecessary supplies were cached, in the middle of the night a second, secret cache was made of items deemed absolutely necessary to survive a return journey and they set off for the country of the St'at'imc who live at Lillooet.

I tuned in the forecast on my weather radio. The forecast was for rain. I considered how quickly a sprinkle would turn the clay to slippery gumbo, thought about the narrow switchbacks and hairpins I had to negotiate and made a similar decision.

I abandoned camp and high-tailed it for Lillooet on the theory that a bit of backtracking in my search for Simon Fraser was better than having to phone the editor to tell her I needed somebody to pull my car out of a creek.  

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