Eddie could not wait until June. When the earliest April buds became
tiny, pale-green beads--that green which is like the green of no other
substance or season--along certain gray branches in the park across the
way, when there was a hint and flavor of stirring life in the morning
sun, then there came a new bristle into Eddie's hair, a new gleam into
his glasses, and I felt that the wood gods were calling, and that he
must obey.
"It is proper that one of us should go on ahead," he argued, "and be
arranging for guides, canoes and the like at the other end."
I urged that it was too soon--that the North was still white and hard
with cold--that preliminaries could be arranged by letter. I finally
suggested that there were still many things he would want to buy. He
wavered then, but it was no use. Eddie can put on a dinner dress with
the best and he has dined with kings. But he is a cave-, a cliff- and a
tree-dweller in his soul and the gods of his ancestors were not to be
gainsaid. He must be on the ground, he declared, and as for the
additional articles we might need, he would send me lists. Of course, I
knew he would do that, just as I knew that the one and mighty reason
for his going was to be where he could smell the first breath of the
budding North and catch the first flash and gleam of the waking trout in
the nearby waters.
He was off, then, and the lists came as promised. I employed a sort of
general purchasing agent at length to attend to them, though this I
dared not confess, for to Eddie it would have been a sacrilege not easy
to forgive. That I could delegate to another any of the precious
pleasure of preparation, and reduce the sacred functions of securing
certain brands of eating chocolate, camp candles, and boot grease (three
kinds) to a commercial basis, would, I felt, be a thing almost
impossible to explain. The final list, he notified me, would be mailed
to a hotel in Boston, for the reason, he said, that it contained things
nowhere else procurable; though I am convinced that a greater reason was
a conviction on his part that no trip could be complete without buying a
few articles in Boston at the last hour before sailing, and his desire
for me to experience this concluding touch of the joy of preparation.
Yet I was glad, on the whole, for I was able to buy secretly some things
he never would have permitted--among them a phantom minnow which looked
like a tin whistle, a little four-ounce bamboo rod, and a gorgeous Jock
Scott fly with two hooks. The tin whistle and the Jock Scott looked
deadly, and the rod seemed adapted to a certain repose of muscle after a
period of activity with the noibwood. I decided to conceal these
purchases about my person and use them when Eddie wasn't looking.
But then it was sailing time, and as the short-nosed energetic steamer
dropped away from the dock, a storm (there had been none for weeks
before) set in, and we pitched and rolled, and through a dim disordered
night I clung to my berth and groaned, and stared at my things in the
corner and hated them according to my condition. Then morning brought
quiet waters and the custom house at Yarmouth, where the tourist who is
bringing in money, and maybe a few other things, is made duly welcome
and not bothered with a lot of irrelevant questions. What Nova Scotia
most needs is money, and the fisherman and the hunter, once through the
custom house, become a greater source of revenue than any tax that could
be laid on their modest, not to say paltry, baggage, even though the
contents of one's trunk be the result of a list such as only Eddie can
prepare. There is a wholesome restaurant at Yarmouth, too, just by the
dock, where after a tossing night at sea one welcomes a breakfast of
good salt ham, with eggs, and pie--two kinds of the latter, pumpkin and
mince.
I had always wondered where the pie-belt went, after it reached Boston.
Now I know that it extends across to Yarmouth and so continues up
through Nova Scotia to Halifax. Certain New Englanders more than a
hundred years ago, "went down to Nova Scotia," for the reason that they
fostered a deeper affection for George, the King, than for George of the
Cherry Tree and Hatchet. The cherry limb became too vigorous in their
old homes and the hatchet too sharp, so they crossed over and took the
end of the pie-belt along. They maintained their general habits and
speech, too, which in Nova Scotia to-day are almost identical with those
of New England. But I digress--a grave and besetting sin.
I had hoped Eddie would welcome me at the railway station after the long
forenoon's ride--rather lonely, in spite of the new land and the fact
that I made the acquaintance of a fisherman who taught me how to put
wrappings on a rod. Eddie did not meet me. He sent the wagon, instead,
and I enjoyed a fifteen-mile ride across June hills where apple blossoms
were white, with glimpses of lake and stream here and there; through
woods that were a promise of the wilderness to come; by fields so
thickly studded with bowlders that one to plant them must use drill and
dynamite, getting my first impression of the interior of Nova Scotia
alone. Then at last came a church, a scattering string of houses, a
vista of lakes, a neat white hotel and the edge of the wilderness had
been reached. On the hotel steps a curious, hairy, wild-looking figure
was capering about doing a sort of savage dance--perhaps as a
preparation for war. At first I made it out to be a counterpart of
pictures I had seen of Robinson Crusoe on his desert island. Then I
discovered that it wore wide spectacles and these in the fading sunlight
sent forth a familiar glare. So it was Eddie, after all, and no edged
tool had touched hair or beard since April. I understood, now, why he
had not met me at the station.