region is renowned; yet the undoubted facts related around our
campfires, and otherwise, a few of which follow, almost beggar belief.
Mr. Young, of our party, an old Hudson's Bay officer, knew of sixteen
trackers who, in a few days, consumed eight bears, two moose, two bags
of pemmican, two sacks of flour, and three sacks of potatoes. Bishop
Grouard vouched for four men eating a reindeer at a sitting. Our
friend, Mr. d'Eschambault, once gave Oskinnegu,--'The Young Man'--six
pounds of pemmican. He ate it all at a meal, washing it down with a
gallon of tea, and then complained that he had not had enough. Sir
George Simpson states that at Athabasca Lake, in 1820, he was one of a
party of twelve who ate twenty-two geese and three ducks at a single
meal. But, as he says, they had been three whole days without food.
The Saskatchewan folk, however, known of old as the Gens de
Blaireaux--'The People of the Badger Holes'--were not behind their
congeners. That man of weight and might, our old friend Chief Factor
Belanger, once served out to thirteen men a sack of pemmican weighing
ninety pounds. It was enough for three days; but there and then they
sat down and consumed it all at a single meal, not, it must be added,
without some subsequent and just pangs of indigestion. Mr. B., having
occasion to pass the place of eating, and finding the sack of pemmican,
as he supposed, in his path, gave it a kick; but, to his amazement, it
bounded aloft several feet, and then lit. It was empty! When it is
remembered that in the old buffalo days the daily ration per head at
the Company's prairie posts was eight pounds of fresh meat, which was
all eaten, its equivalent being two pounds of pemmican, the enormity of
this Gargantuan feast may be imagined. But we ourselves were not bad
hands at the trencher. In fact, we were always hungry. So I do not
reproduce the foregoing facts as a reproach, but rather as a meagre
tribute to the prowess of the great of old--the men of unbounded
stomach!"