“WILLIAM, PREPARE MY BARTH”

A big, thick catalogue has kept many a homesteader

in literature all winter

By N. Vernon-Wood

I GOT A FLOCK OF SPORTING goods catalogues last time I went in for the mail, and Jim and I have been beguiling the long winter evenings buying ourselves a real Fifth Avenue trail outfit. In our minds, I figure that for about $1500 I can just about get the bare necessities of life as it’s lived out in the hills and woods, according to the catalogues above mentioned.

There’s a lot of real useful dooflickers in the books, and a lot that remind me of old Bill Baxton’s teeth. Bill’s been up here ever since Mt. Assiniboine was a hole in the ground. He started out as a packer for the Hector survey, the one that layed out the C.P.R. line here in the ‘eighties. Then he took to prospecting, and did some guiding too, but pilgrims were some scarce in those days. When the Boer War bust out, Bill was single jacking his way into the inside of the main range of the Selkirks, hoping to run down a vein that would assay just about $1000 to the pack-horse load, but quit to go to war in Africa with Strathcona’s Horse.

When that fracas was settled, Bill came back, and did this and that, until the last W. K. war broke loose. By this time he was showing plenty of rings on his horns, but he got into a cavalry outfit and was sent to Calgary to train. The only thing wrong was that he didn’t have what you call a full string of teeth, so the Army staked him to a new set of removable ones.

One of the boys went down to visit Bill, and found him sitting on the steps of a hut, whittling away on his store teeth with a skinning knife. He would try them in his face, cuss a little, and take ’em out and go to hewing on them again.

“That’s the devil of a way to use your teeth, Bill,” says his visitor.

“Oh hell, these are for military purposes only. I spit ’em out before I eat,” says Bill.

Just the same it beats everything what a kick a man can get out of a catalogue. A big, thick one from a mail-order house has kept many a trapper in literature all winter. I bet you that when a pilgrim is buying his first outfit for a hunt, he gets more kick out of it than if his U.S. Steel jumped ten points. It’s surprising, too what a heap of whifflows a good salesman, that’s never slept out in his life, can unload on to a hard-headed wolf on Wall Street, and it’s more surprising how these same get lost, bust, or left in the last camp, when the guides get to handling them.

There was an outfit come up here once, that undertook to show the native hill-billies and the world in general just how it should be done. They spread the news that they were going where the foot of white man had never trod, and that’s some contract, when you figure that the Hudson’s Bay men were ramming around here 200 years ago, and that there must have been two Scotch prospectors in before them, not counting the ones that’s been going up and down and across since. They had everything except a portable tennis court. It would have taken two men and a boy to see all their pack string at once, and I bet they would have had to take two looks at that. I followed them out about two weeks later, and if I had had time and also about ten extra pack ponies I could have accumulated enough stuff that was scattered over the trail to have issued a tricksy catalogue of my own.

When it comes to hitting the trails de lux, though, it takes an Englishman to do it up brown, with butter on both sides. I got me a brace of Woodbiners before the war, and they brought everything except the brick house. They had a chest of silver, and a valet to see that we didn’t pinch the spoons, and to fill the bathtub. Their tents would hold a round-up crew and were as heavy as a green cook’s bannock. The tents had telescope poles, with wooden hickeys to screw on top of the uprights, painted red, white, and blue. That was to show us bally Colonials where we got off at. Their rifles assayed $500 to the ton, and there was anyway $2,000 worth of them. We sure were some relieved when we finally got into hunting country so that all we had to do was about sixteen hours a day hunting and camp chores; some of the ponies were sway-backed from packing that layout.

As soon as we got through moving every day, those Englishmen began to live like the best County families do it. The minute the cook made a move in the morning, one or the other would holler, “William, prepare my barth.” William was the valet, and he would hightail for the creek with two collapsible pails and fill the folding tub, in the portable bath tent. By the time an ordinary outfitter would have fed and got to hunting, they would be just about bathed and shaved. Old Stiggs, the cook, began to get infected too, and opined he would throw some dog, so he made him a white apron out of a flour sack. It was plumb ritzy, too, until one day he was reaching over the cook fire to move a pot of mulligan and his apron caught fire. When we got him extinguished he was shy a flock of whiskers and eyebrows, and that put a crimp into his dog.

I sure felt sorry for William, though. Those birds ran him bow-legged, and he was scared stiff that if he didn’t hit her on the nose he would get the tin can tied to him and left in the Colonies to starve or get scalped by hostiles. When one of his bosses would holler, “William,” the Wrangler would say, “Tell him to go plumb, Bill. Be a man and tell him to go take a jump in the lake.” Bill would just about have a hemorrhage for fear one of the dukes would hear, and that didn’t worry us any.

I had my grief too. I couldn’t persuade those guys to hunt on foot. Their idea was to ride up to the game. “What’s the use of barging around in the forest, when one can ride down the parths,” was their notion. I’ve quit arguing with any pilgrim that wants to tell me how to hunt. The thing to do is give ’em their own way, until they see that it ain’t putting any meat in the pot, or helping the taxidermists to earn an honest dollar. They will come around then and give my system a whirl.

They used to tell us yarns about hunting in India and Africa, where they had a million misguided heathens herd the game past a couple of Morris chairs, in the shade of the fig trees, and then they would take their rifle from the second assistant rifle wallah and plug the galloping gazelle as he fogged by. It kind of got Jim’s nanny. He could see where he might have to get old Stiggs and herd a grizzly through camp while I stood by with a cup of tea and the extra 490 express.¹ So he says one day, “I hope to God you fellers don’t think for one Jeezley minute you are in India now.” “Oh, no,” says one of the earls, “The vegetation is quite different.” That took a load off of Jim’s mind anyway.

There’s a lick just where the Simpson and Vermillion come together, and it’s quite a stamping ground for moose, so we figured that our best bet to horseback our dudes to game was to get up before breakfast some morning and ride down there, and we might jump a moose that was late hitting back to the green timber for the day. We put this proposition to our pilgrims, and they thought that at last I was showing glimmerings of human intelligence. Next morning Jim got in the saddle horses about four o’clock, and we rolled out the valet and he did his stuff. Then the barons started to get ready to commence to begin. They bathed, shaved, massaged, and had a little tonic on their hair. About nine o’clock breakfast is disposed of, and they beat it for one of their rag houses, and went into conference to decide what rifle, knife, field glasses, etc., was the de rigger for that day. Long about ten o’clock William appeared, and says that if Mr. Stiggs would make a cup of tea, the gentlemen would be ready to proceed immediately after.

I could see that Wrangler of mine swelling up, and figured any minute he would blow up and bust. Old Greasy, though, is so ticked with the Mr. Stiggs stuff, that he got into motion, and started to distill his so-called tea. Then William picked the correct spoons from the perambulatin’ safety vault, and packed the onsomble into one of the tents.

Just about then I got interested in an old Billy, about three miles away on a slide, and watched him through my glasses for quite a while. He seemed to have a bum leg, and was not as full of the old sangfroid as a goat generally is. Jim was fiddling around the ponies, and I didn’t take much notice of what he was doing until I heard the ponies hitting up the trail for the rest of the herd. Before I could start to bawl him out he beat me to it, and asked me if it was in the price to let the cayuses stand all day tied to trees, when they had to rustle like hell to scratch a living in this so and so valley of mine anyhow.

I am just about to ask him when he got so full of loving-kindness to a flock of plugs that were only waiting a good chance to kick him in the diagram, when out come the lords, and says, “All right, Wood, Shall we proceed? Oh, I say, where are the mounts?” “Gone to get ’em a cup of tea, blast your armorial bearin’s,” hollered Jim, and that put the tin hat on that day.

Just the same, that had a heap of influence with the baronets, and we got on a whole lot better after. When they got down to earth as far as hunting was concerned, they couldn’t be beat. Under their shells they were good sports and I like ’em, even if I did get mad enough to put coyote poison in their tea sometimes.

I often wonder what happened to William, though. The day we got back to Banff, we packed up our pilgrims’ trophies, and then started up the village to give the bartenders a chance to justify their existence, and we run into Bill down on some errand for one of his marquises. We sort of herded him into our pet bar, and the last I saw of him, he was going up the street, toward the big hotel, and he was sure using a lot of the right way—both sides and the middle—and I heard him tell a mounted corporal, “I’m going up there, and I’m going to tell those bl-blighters, to take an extended sprint an’ plunge into the water.”

The Sportsman, July 1930, 55 and 78