Others Seem To Sail
For The Pure Pleasure Of The Thing, Their Canoes Decorated With
Handfuls Of The Tall Purple Epilobium.
Yonder goes a whole family, grandparents and all, making a direct
course for some favorite stream and camp-ground.
They are going to
gather berries, as the baskets tell. Never before in all my travels,
north or south, had I found so lavish an abundance of berries as
here. The woods and meadows are full of them, both on the lowlands
and mountains - huckleberries of many species, salmon-berries,
blackberries, raspberries, with service-berries on dry open places,
and cranberries in the bogs, sufficient for every bird, beast, and
human being in the territory and thousands of tons to spare. The
huckleberries are especially abundant. A species that grows well up
on the mountains is the best and largest, a half-inch and more in
diameter and delicious in flavor. These grow on bushes three or four
inches to a foot high. The berries of the commonest species are
smaller and grow almost everywhere on the low grounds on bushes from
three to six or seven feet high. This is the species on which the
Indians depend most for food, gathering them in large quantities,
beating them into a paste, pressing the paste into cakes about an
inch thick, and drying them over a slow fire to enrich their winter
stores. Salmon-berries and service-berries are preserved in the same
way.
A little excursion to one of the best huckleberry fields adjacent to
Wrangell, under the direction of the Collector of Customs, to which I
was invited, I greatly enjoyed. There were nine Indians in the party,
mostly women and children going to gather huckleberries. As soon
as we had arrived at the chosen campground on the bank of a trout
stream, all ran into the bushes and began eating berries before
anything in the way of camp-making was done, laughing and chattering
in natural animal enjoyment. The Collector went up the stream to
examine a meadow at its head with reference to the quantity of hay it
might yield for his cow, fishing by the way. All the Indians except
the two eldest boys who joined the Collector, remained among the
berries.
The fishermen had rather poor luck, owing, they said, to the sunny
brightness of the day, a complaint seldom heard in this climate. They
got good exercise, however, jumping from boulder to boulder in the
brawling stream, running along slippery logs and through the bushes
that fringe the bank, casting here and there into swirling pools at
the foot of cascades, imitating the tempting little skips and whirls
of flies so well known to fishing parsons, but perhaps still better
known to Indian boys. At the lake-basin the Collector, after he had
surveyed his hay-meadow, went around it to the inlet of the lake with
his brown pair of attendants to try their luck, while I botanized in
the delightful flora which called to mind the cool sphagnum and carex
bogs of Wisconsin and Canada.
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