II

For several days we lingered on the Lake of the Beautiful River, trying

the fishing. We explored all the favourite meeting-places of the trout,

at the mouths of the streams and in the cool spring-holes, but we did

not have remarkable success. I am bound to say that Patrick was not

at his best that year as a fisherman. He was as ready to work, as

interested, as eager, as ever; but he lacked steadiness, persistence,

patience. Some tranquillizing influence seemed to have departed from

him. That placid confidence in the ultimate certainty of catching fish,

which is one of the chief elements of good luck, was wanting. He did not

appear to be able to sit still in the canoe. The mosquitoes troubled

him terribly. He was just as anxious as a man could be to have me take

plenty of the largest trout, but he was too much in a hurry. He even

went so far as to say that he did not think I cast the fly as well as I

did formerly, and that I was too slow in striking when the fish rose. He

was distinctly a weaker man without his pipe, but his virtuous resolve

held firm.

There was one place in particular that required very cautious angling.

It was a spring-hole at the mouth of the Riviere du Milieu--an open

space, about a hundred feet long and fifteen feet wide, in the midst

of the lily-pads, and surrounded on every side by clear, shallow water.

Here the great trout assembled at certain hours of the day; but it was

not easy to get them. You must come up delicately in the canoe, and make

fast to a stake at the side of the pool, and wait a long time for the

place to get quiet and the fish to recover from their fright and come

out from under the lily-pads. It had been our custom to calm and soothe

this expectant interval with incense of the Indian weed, friendly to

meditation and a foe of “Raw haste, half-sister to delay.” But this year

Patrick could not endure the waiting. After five minutes he would say:

“BUT the fishing is bad this season! There are none of the big ones here

at all. Let us try another place. It will go better at the Riviere du

Cheval, perhaps.”

There was only one thing that would really keep him quiet, and that

was a conversation about Quebec. The glories of that wonderful city

entranced his thoughts. He was already floating, in imagination, with

the vast throngs of people that filled its splendid streets, looking up

at the stately houses and churches with their glittering roofs of tin,

and staring his fill at the magnificent shop-windows, where all the

luxuries of the world were displayed. He had heard that there were more

than a hundred shops--separate shops for all kinds of separate things:

some for groceries, and some for shoes, and some for clothes, and some

for knives and axes, and some for guns, and many shops where they sold

only jewels--gold rings, and diamonds, and forks of pure silver. Was it

not so?

He pictured himself, side by side with his goodwife, in the salle a

manger of the Hotel Richelieu, ordering their dinner from a printed

bill of fare. Side by side they were walking on the Dufferin Terrace,

listening to the music of the military band. Side by side they were

watching the wonders of the play at the Theatre de l'Etoile du Nord.

Side by side they were kneeling before the gorgeous altar in the

cathedral. And then they were standing silent, side by side, in the

asylum of the orphans, looking at brown eyes and blue, at black hair and

yellow curls, at fat legs and rosy cheeks and laughing mouths, while the

Mother Superior showed off the little boys and girls for them to choose.

This affair of the choice was always a delightful difficulty, and here

his fancy loved to hang in suspense, vibrating between rival joys.

Once, at the Riviere du Milieu, after considerable discourse upon

Quebec, there was an interval of silence, during which I succeeded in

hooking and playing a larger trout than usual. As the fish came up to

the side of the canoe, Patrick netted him deftly, exclaiming with an

abstracted air, “It is a boy, after all. I like that best.”

Our camp was shifted, the second week, to the Grand Lac des Cedres; and

there we had extraordinary fortune with the trout: partly, I conjecture,

because there was only one place to fish, and so Patrick's uneasy zeal

could find no excuse for keeping me in constant motion all around the

lake. But in the matter of weather we were not so happy. There is always

a conflict in the angler's mind about the weather--a struggle between

his desires as a man and his desires as a fisherman. This time our

prayers for a good fishing season were granted at the expense of our

suffering human nature. There was a conjunction in the zodiac of the

signs of Aquarius and Pisces. It rained as easily, as suddenly, as

penetratingly, as Miss Miller talked; but in between the showers the

trout were very hungry.

One day, when we were paddling home to our tents among the birch trees,

one of these unexpected storms came up; and Patrick, thoughtful of

my comfort as ever, insisted on giving me his coat to put around my

dripping shoulders. The paddling would serve instead of a coat for him,

he said; it would keep him warm to his bones. As I slipped the garment

over my back, something hard fell from one of the pockets into the

bottom of the canoe. It was a brier-wood pipe.

“Aha! Pat,” I cried; “what is this? You said you had thrown all your

pipes away. How does this come in your pocket?”

“But, m'sieu',” he answered, “this is different. This is not the pipe

pure and simple. It is a souvenir. It is the one you gave me two years

ago on the Metabetchouan, when we got the big caribou. I could not

reject this. I keep it always for the remembrance.”

At this moment my hand fell upon a small, square object in the other

pocket of the coat. I pulled it out. It was a cake of Virginia leaf.

Without a word, I held it up, and looked at Patrick. He began to explain

eagerly:

“Yes, certainly, it is the tobacco, m'sieu'; but it is not for the

smoke, as you suppose. It is for the virtue, for the self-victory. I

call this my little piece of temptation. See; the edges are not cut. I

smell it only; and when I think how it is good, then I speak to myself,

'But the little found child will be better!' It will last a long time,

this little piece of temptation; perhaps until we have the boy at our

house--or maybe the girl.”

The conflict between the cake of Virginia leaf and Patrick's virtue must

have been severe during the last ten days of our expedition; for we

went down the Riviere des Ecorces, and that is a tough trip, and full

of occasions when consolation is needed. After a long, hard day's work

cutting out an abandoned portage through the woods, or tramping miles

over the incredibly shaggy hills to some outlying pond for a caribou,

and lugging the saddle and hind quarters back to the camp, the evening

pipe, after supper, seemed to comfort the men unspeakably. If their

tempers had grown a little short under stress of fatigue and hunger, now

they became cheerful and good-natured again. They sat on logs before

the camp-fire, their stockinged feet stretched out to the blaze, and the

puffs of smoke rose from their lips like tiny salutes to the comfortable

flame, or like incense burned upon the altar of gratitude and

contentment.

Patrick, I noticed about this time, liked to get on the leeward side of

as many pipes as possible, and as near as he could to the smokers. He

said that this kept away the mosquitoes. There he would sit, with the

smoke drifting full in his face, both hands in his pockets, talking

about Quebec, and debating the comparative merits of a boy or a girl as

an addition to his household.

But the great trial of his virtue was yet to come. The main object

of our trip down the River of Barks--the terminus ad quem of the

expedition, so to speak--was a bear. Now the bear as an object of the

chase, at least in Canada, is one of the most illusory of phantoms. The

manner of hunting is simple. It consists in walking about through the

woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet a bear; then you try

to shoot him. This would seem to be, as the Rev. Mr. Leslie called his

book against the deists of the eighteenth century, “A Short and Easie

Method.” But in point of fact there are two principal difficulties. The

first is that you never find the bear when and where you are looking for

him. The second is that the bear sometimes finds you when--but you shall

see how it happened to us.

We had hunted the whole length of the River of Barks with the utmost

pains and caution, never going out, even to pick blueberries, without

having the rifle at hand, loaded for the expected encounter. Not one

bear had we met. It seemed as if the whole ursine tribe must have

emigrated to Labrador.

At last we came to the mouth of the river, where it empties into Lake

Kenogami, in a comparatively civilized country, with several farm-houses

in full view on the opposite bank. It was not a promising place for the

chase; but the river ran down with a little fall and a lively, cheerful

rapid into the lake, and it was a capital spot for fishing. So we left

the rifle in the case, and took a canoe and a rod, and went down, on the

last afternoon, to stand on the point of rocks at the foot of the rapid,

and cast the fly.

We caught half a dozen good trout; but the sun was still hot, and we

concluded to wait awhile for the evening fishing. So we turned the canoe

bottom up among the bushes on the shore, stored the trout away in the

shade beneath it, and sat down in a convenient place among the stones

to have another chat about Quebec. We had just passed the jewelry shops,

and were preparing to go to the asylum of the orphans, when Patrick

put his hand on my shoulder with a convulsive grip, and pointed up the

stream.

There was a huge bear, like a very big, wicked, black sheep with a

pointed nose, making his way down the shore. He shambled along lazily

and unconcernedly, as if his bones were loosely tied together in a bag

of fur. It was the most indifferent and disconnected gait that I ever

saw. Nearer and nearer he sauntered, while we sat as still as if we had

been paralyzed. And the gun was in its case at the tent!

How the bear knew this I cannot tell; but know it he certainly did,

for he kept on until he reached the canoe, sniffed at it suspiciously,

thrust his sharp nose under it, and turned it over with a crash that

knocked two holes in the bottom, ate the fish, licked his chops, stared

at us for a few moments without the slightest appearance of gratitude,

made up his mind that he did not like our personal appearance, and then

loped leisurely up the mountain-side. We could hear him cracking the

underbrush long after he was lost to sight.

Patrick looked at me and sighed. I said nothing. The French language, as

far as I knew it, seemed trifling and inadequate. It was a moment when

nothing could do any good except the consolations of philosophy, or a

pipe. Patrick pulled the brier-wood from his pocket; then he took out

the cake of Virginia leaf, looked at it, smelled it, shook his head, and

put it back again. His face was as long as his arm. He stuck the cold

pipe into his mouth, and pulled away at it for a while in silence.

Then his countenance began to clear, his mouth relaxed, he broke into a

laugh.

“Sacred bear!” he cried, slapping his knee; “sacred beast of the world!

What a day of the good chance for her, HE! But she was glad, I suppose.

Perhaps she has some cubs, HE? BAJETTE!”