light. The two girls sat down close by the river edge and ate a supper
before embarking. Then Massawippa launched the canoe and carefully
placed herself and Claire over the keel.
“Unfasten your cloak and let it fall from your shoulders, madame. You
see my blanket lies on the sack. We must have nothing to drag us under
in case of mischance.”
So, dipping with skillful rapidity, she ventured out across the current.
They fared well until far on in their undertaking. Immediately the
little craft oozed as if its entire skin had grown leaky; but Claire
bailed with desperate swiftness; the paddle dipped from side to side,
flashing in the sun, which now lay level with the rivers.
Massawippa felt the canoe settling, turned it towards the nearest
island, and tore the water with her speed.
“Madame!” she cried, her cry merging into one with Claire’s “O
Massawippa, we are going down!”
They were close to the island’s ribbed side when a bubbling and roaring
confusion overtook Claire’s ears, and she was drenched, strangled, and
still gulping in her death until all sensation passed away.
Life returned through hearing; her head was filled with humming noises,
she was giving back the water which had been forced upon her, and lying
across a rock supported by Massawippa. In the midst of her chill misery
she noted that shadow was settling on the river, and all the cheerful
ruddiness of western light was gone.
“Madame, are you able to get up the rocks now?” anxiously spoke
Massawippa. “We must hide on this island to-night.”
“How did we reach it?” Claire gasped.
“I swam, and dragged you.”
“Then here had been the end of my expedition but for you, Massawippa.”
“There was the end of our supplies. All gone, madame, except the ropes
I put around my waist, and they would have drowned me with their weight
if the island had not been almost under our feet. It is well we ate
and filled ourselves, for the saints alone know where we shall get
breakfast.”
Claire turned her face on the rock.
“My packet of linen and clean comforts, Massawippa!” she regretted.
“The cloak and the blanket were of more account, madame. The
Frenchman’s boat played us a fine trick. But we are here. And we have
still our knives and tinder.”
Before the long northern twilight had double-dyed itself into
night, they crept up the island’s rocky side, explored its small
circumference, and found near the western edge a dry hollow, the socket
of an uprooted tree. Into this Massawippa piled all the loose leaves
she could find, and cut some branches full of tender foliage from the
trees to shelter them. Had her tinder been dry, she dared not make a
light to be seen from the river.
Drenched and heavy through all their garments, they nestled closely
down together and shivered in the chill breath of night. An emaciated
moon lent them enough cadaverous light to make them apprehensive
of noises on the rushing water. Sometimes they dozed, sometimes
they whispered to each other, sometimes they startled each other by
involuntary shivers. But measured by patient breath, by moments of
endurance succeeding one another in what then seemed endless duration,
this second night of their journey passed away, and nothing upon the
island or upon the two rivers terrified them.
Just at the pearl-blue time of dawn canoes grew on the southward sweep
of the St. Lawrence.
Claire touched Massawippa, and Massawippa nodded. They dared scarcely
breathe, but watched along the level of the sward, careful not to rear
a feature above the dull leaves.
Nearer and nearer came the canoes. A splash of unskillful paddling grew
distinct; familiar outlines projected familiar faces.
“Oh, it is Dollard!” Claire’s whisper was a strangled scream. “There
are the men of the French expedition! There is my--”
“Hush!” whispered Massawippa. “Madame, do you want them to see us, and
turn and send us back to Montreal?”
“O my Dollard!” Claire clasped her own hand over her mouth while she
sobbed. “Drowned and wretched and homesick for you, must I see you pass
me by, never turning a glance this way?”
“Hush, madame,” begged Massawippa, adding her hand to Claire’s. “Sound
goes like a bird over water.”
“This is our one chance to reach him,” struggled Claire. “Oh, the
woods, and the rivers, and the Iroquois--they are all coming between us
again!”
“It is no chance at all, madame. I know what my father would do.”
“O my Dollard!” groaned Claire in the dead leaves. “Oh, do not let him
go by! Must he flit and flit from me--must I follow him so through
space forever when we are dead?”
Almost like dream-men, wreathed slowly about by mists, their
alternating paddles making no sound which could be caught by the woman
on the island living so keenly in her ears, the expedition passed into
the mouth of the Ottawa. When they could be seen no more, Claire lay in
dejection like death.
XVIII.
THE WALKING HERMIT.
“THEY have been these five[9] days getting past Ste. Anne,” remarked
Massawippa. “I could not have paddled against that current with the
best of canoes. My father will soon follow; we dare scarcely stir until
my father passes. He would see us if we did more than breathe; the
Huron knows all things around him. And if he finds us, he will put us
back into safety, after all our trouble.”
Claire was weeping on her damp arms, and lay quite as still as the
younger woman could wish, while daylight, sunlight, and winged life
grew around them.
Hour after hour passed. Annahotaha’s canoes did not appear. Still the
half-Huron stoic watched southward, lying with her cheek on the leaves,
clasping her eyelids almost shut to protect her patient sight from the
glare on the water.
“Madame, are you hungry?”
“In my heart I am,” said Claire.
“That is because we were so drenched. My father will soon pass; and
when we have food and dry skins our courage will come up again. There
is only one way to reach the north shore. If my father would go by, I
could cut limbs for the raft.”
Claire gave listless attention.
“We must cut branches as large as we can with our knives, the hatchet
being gone, and we shall be drenched again; but the river’s arm shall
not hold us back.”
When the sun stood overhead without having brought Annahotaha, Claire
could endure her stiff discomfort no longer.
“Lie still, madame,” begged Massawippa.
“My child,” returned Claire, fretfully, “I do not care if the Iroquois
see me and scalp me.”
“And me also?”
“No, not you.”
“Have a little more patience, madame, for I do see specks like wild
ducks riding yonder. They may be the Huron canoes.”
The little more patience, wrung like a last tax from exhaustion, was
measured out, and not vainly.
The specks like wild ducks rode nearer, shaping themselves into Huron
canoes.
In rigid calm the half-breed girl watched them approach, fly past with
regular and beautiful motion of the paddles, and make their entrance
into the Ottawa. Her eyes shone across the leaves, but Annahotaha,
sweeping all the horizon with a sight formed and trained to keenest
use, caught no sign of ambush or human life on the islands.
When the fleet was far off, his young daughter rose up and unsheathed
her knife to cut raftwood.
“My father is a great man,” was the only weakness she allowed herself,
and in this her gratified pride was restricted to a mere statement of
fact.
The raft, made of many large branches bound securely together, occupied
them some time. On this frail and uneasy flooring the half-breed placed
her companion. Claire was instructed to hold to it though the water
should rise around her waist.
The space betwixt island and north shore was a very dangerous passage
for them. Massawippa swam and propelled the raft with the current,
fighting for it midway, while Claire clung in desperation and begged
the brown face turned up to her from the water to let her go and to
swim out alone.
When they finally stood on the north bank, streams of water running
down their persons, Massawippa’s black hair shining as it clung to her
cheeks, and their raft escaping from their reach, they felt that a
great gulf of experience divided them from the island and Jouaneaux’s
house.
“This time we lose our ropes,” said the half-breed girl. “My hands were
too numb. And now we have nothing left but our knives and tinder.”
To Claire the rest of the day was a heavy dream. Giddy from fasting
and exposure, with swimming eyes she saw the landscape. Sometimes
Massawippa walked with an arm around her waist, sometimes held low
boughs out of her way, introducing her to the deeper depths of Canadian
forest. They did not talk, but reserved their strength for plodding;
and thus they edged along the curves and windings of the Ottawa. Claire
took no thought of Massawippa’s destination for the night; they were
making progress if they followed beside the track of the expedition.
Before dark she noticed that the land ascended, and afterwards they
left the river below, for a glooming pile of mountain was to be
climbed. Perhaps no wearier feet ever toiled up that steep during all
the following years, though the mountain was piously named Calvary and
its top held sacred as a shrine, to be visited by many a pilgrim.[10]
Sometimes the two girls hugged this rugged ascent, lying against
it, and paused for breath. The rush and purr of the river went on
below, and all the wilderness night sounds were magnified by their
negations--the night silences.
At the summit of the mountain, starlight made indistinctly visible a
number of low stone structures, each having a rough cross above its
door. These were the seven chapels Massawippa had told about. Whether
they stood in regular design or were dotted about on the plateau,
Claire scarcely used her heavy eyes to discern. She was comforted by
Massawippa’s whisper that they must sleep in the first chapel, and by
the sound of heavy hinges grating, as if the door yielded unwillingly
an entrance to such benighted pilgrims.
The tomb-like inclosure was quite as chill as the mountain air outside.
They stood on uneven stone flooring, and listened for any breathing
beside their own.
“Let me feel all around the walls and about the altar, madame,”
whispered Massawippa.
“Let me continue with you, then,” whispered back Claire. “Have you been
in this place before?”
“I have been in all the chapels, madame.”
Claire held to Massawippa’s beaver gown and stepped grotesquely in
her tracks as the half-breed moved forward with stretched, exploring
fingers. When this blind progress brought them to the diminutive altar,
they failed not to kneel before it and whisper some tired orisons.
After one round of the chapel they groped back to the altar, assured
that no foe lurked with them.
The chancel rail felt like the smooth rind of a tree. Within the rail
Massawippa said a wooden platform was built, on which it could be no
sin against Heaven for such forlorn beings to sleep.
Their clothes were now nearly dry; but footsore and weak with hunger,
Claire sunk upon this refuge, disregarding dust which had settled there
in silence and dimness all the days of the past winter. Exhaustion made
her first posture the right one. Scarcely breathing, she would have
sunk at once to stupor, but Massawippa hissed joyful whispers through
the dark.
“Madame!”
“What is it?”
“Madame, I have been feeling the top of the altar.”
“Do no sacrilege, Massawippa.”
“But last summer the walking woman put bread and roasted birds on the
altars for an offering. She has put some here to-day. Take this.”
Claire encountered a groping hand full of something which touch
received as food. Without further parley she sat up and ate. The very
gentle sounds of mastication which even dainty women may make when
crisp morsels tempt the hound of starvation that is within them could
be heard in the dark. Claire’s less active animal nature was first
silenced, and in compunction she spoke.
“If the hermit put these things on the altar for an offering, we are
robbing a shrine.”
“She was willing for any pilgrim to carry them away, madame. The
coureurs de bois visit these chapels and eat her birds. She is alive,
madame! She is not dead! We shall find her at Carillon and get our
canoe of her; and the saints be praised for so helping us!”
They finished their meal and stretched themselves upon the platform.
Not a delicious scrap which could be eaten was left, but Massawippa
piously dropped the bones outside the chancel rail.
“We are in sanctuary,” said Claire, her eyes pressed by the weight
of darkness. Venturing with checked voice, the sweeter for such
suppression and necessity of utterance, she sung above their heads into
the low arching hollow a vesper hymn in monk’s Latin; after which they
slept as they had slept in Jouaneaux’s house, and awoke to find the
walking woman gazing over the rail at them.
She was so old that her many wrinkles seemed carved in hard wood. Her
features were unmistakably Indian; but from the gray blanket loosely
draping her, and even from her inner wrappings of soft furs, came the
smell of wholesome herbs. She held a long flask in one hand, evidently
a bottle lost or thrown away by some passing ranger, and she extended
it to Claire, her eyes twinkling pleasantly.
Being relieved of it she turned and tapped with her staff--for her
moccasins were silent--slowly around the chapel, mechanically keeping
herself in motion. She was so different from fanatics who bind
themselves in by walls that in watching her Claire forgot the flask.
Massawippa uncorked it.
“This is a drink she brews, madame. I have heard in my father’s camp
that she brews it to keep herself strong and tireless.”
Claire tasted and Massawippa drank the liquid, with unwonted disregard
of a common bottle mouth. It was too tepid to be refreshing, but left a
wild and spicy tang, delicious as the cleansed sensation of returning
health.
“Good mother,” said Claire as she gave the hermit’s flask back, “have
you seen white men in canoes on the river?”
The walking woman leaned lower on her staff with keen attention.
Massawippa repeated Claire’s words in Huron, and added much inquiry of
her own. The walking woman moved back and forth beside the rail, making
gestures with her staff and uttering gutturals, until she ended by
beckoning to them and leading them out of the chapel.
Massawippa interpreted her as saying that she had seen the white men
and the Hurons following them, and had heard a voice in the woods speak
out, “Great deeds will now be done.” She would take care of all whom
the saints sheltered behind their altar, but she chid Massawippa for
prying into mysteries when the girl asked if she had foreseen their
coming. They were to go with her to Carillon and get a canoe.
She had breakfast for them down the mountain north of the chapels.
The world is full of resurrections of the body. It was nothing for two
young creatures to rise up from their hard bed and plunge heartily into
the dew and gladness of morning--the first morning of May.
But the miracle of life is that coming of a person who instantly
unlocks all our resources, among which we have groped forlorn and
disinherited. Friend or lover, he enriches us with what was before our
own, yet what we never should have gathered without the solvent of his
touch.
In some degree the walking woman came like such a prophet to Claire. As
she brushed down the mountain-side with Massawippa, followed by woman
and clinking staff, all things seemed easy to do. The healing of the
woods flowed over her anxiety, and like an urchin she pried under moss
and within logs for an instant’s peep at life swarming there. Never
before had she felt turned loose to Nature, with the bounds of her past
fallen away, and the freedom which at first abashed her now became like
the lifting of wings. Sweet smells of wood mold and damp greenery came
from this ancient forest like the long-preserved essence of primeval
gladness. It did not have its summer density of leafage, but the rocks
were always there, heaving their placid backs from the soil in the
majesty of everlasting quiet.
The walking woman lifted her stick and struck upon their rocky
path, which answered with a hollow booming, as if drums were beaten
underground. She gave Claire a wrinkled smile.
“The rocks do the same far to the eastward,” said Massawippa. “It is
the earth’s heart which answers--we walk so close to it here. And,
madame, I never saw any snakes in this fair land.”
XIX.
THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT.[11]
IT was morning by the Long Saut, that length of boiling rapids which
had barred the French expedition’s farther progress up the Ottawa. The
seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and forty Hurons were encamped
together in an open space on the west bank of the river. Their kettles
were slung for breakfast, the fires blinking pinkly in luminous morning
air; their morning hymn had not long ceased to echo from the forest
around the clearing. Three times the previous day these men had prayed
their prayers together in three languages.
Their position at the foot of the rapids was well taken. The Iroquois
must pass them. In the clearing stood a dilapidated fort, a mere
stockade of sapling trunks, built the autumn before by an Algonquin war
party; but Dollard’s party counted upon it as their pivot for action,
though with strange disregard of their own defense they had not yet
strengthened it by earthworks.
Dollard stood near the brink of the river watching the rapids. His
scouts had already encountered some canoes full of Iroquois coming down
the Ottawa, and in a skirmish two of the enemy escaped. The main body,
hastened by these refugees, must soon reach the Long Saut, unless they
were determined utterly to reject and avoid the encounter, which it was
scarcely in the nature of Iroquois to do.
No canoes yet appeared on the rapids, but against the river’s southward
sweep rode a new little craft holding two women. Having crossed the
current below and hugged the western shore, this canoe shot out before
Dollard’s eyes as suddenly as an electric lancet unsheathed by clouds.
He blanched to his lips, and made a repellent gesture with both hands
as if he could put back the woman of his love out of danger as swiftly
and unaccountably as she put herself into it. But his only reasonable
course was to drag up the canoe when Massawippa beached it.
The half-breed girl leaped out like a fawn and ran up the slope.
Annahotaha came striding down to meet her, and as she caught him
around the body he lifted his knife as if the impulse which drove
the arm of Virginius had been reborn in a savage of the New World.
Massawippa showed her white teeth in rapturous smiling. So absolute was
her trust in him that she waited thus whatever act his superior wisdom
must dictate. That unflinching smile brought out its answer on his
countenance. A copper glow seemed to fuse his features into grotesquely
passionate tenderness. He turned his back towards his braves and hugged
the child to his breast, smoothing her wings of black hair and uttering
guttural murmurs which probably expressed that superlative nonsense
mothers talk in the privacy of civilized nurseries.
But Claire, pink as a rose from sun and wind, her head covered by a
parchment bonnet of birch bark instead of the cap she lost at the
island, her satin tatters carefully drawn together with fibers from
porcupine quills and loosened from the girdle to flow around her worn
moccasins, and radiant as in her loveliest moments, stretched her hands
for Dollard’s help.
He lifted her out of the canoe and placed her upon the ground; he knelt
before her and kissed both of her hands.
“Good-morning, monsieur!” said Claire, triumphantly. “You left no
command against my following the expedition.”
That palpitating presence which we call life seemed to project itself
beyond their faces and to meet. Her pinkness and triumph were instantly
gone in the whiter heat of spiritual passion. She began to sob, and
Dollard stood up strongly holding her in his arms.
“The paving-stone where you knelt--how I kissed it--how I kissed it!”
“I have not a word, Claire; not one word,” said Dollard. “I am blind
and dumb and glad.”
“Oh, do be blind to my rags and scratches! I would have crept on my
hands and face to you, monsieur, my saint! But now I am not crying.”
“How did you reach us unharmed?”
“We saw no Iroquois. Have you yet seen them?”
“Not yet.”
“But there was the river. Massawippa dragged me through that. Your face
looks thin, my Dollard.”
“I have suffered. I did not know heaven was to descend upon me.”
The Frenchmen and Indians, a stone’s-throw away, unable, indeed, to
penetrate this singular encounter of the commandant’s, gave it scarcely
a moment’s attention, but turned their eager gaze up the rapids.
Dollard looked also, as suggestion became certainty.
He hurried Claire to the palisade, calling his men to arm.
Upon the rapids appeared a wonderful sight. Bounding down the broken
and tumultuous water came the Iroquois in canoes which seemed
unnumbered. They flung themselves ashore and at the fort like a wave,
and like a wave they were sent trickling back from the shock of their
reception.
Massawippa sat down by Claire in the small inclosure during this first
brush with the enemy.
There was no time for either Frenchmen or Indians to look with
astonished eyes at these girls, so soon were all united in common
peril and bonds of endurance. Men purified by the devotion of such an
undertaking could accept the voluntary presence of women as they might
accept the unscared alighting of birds in the midst of them.
The Iroquois next tried to parley, in order to take the allies
unawares. But all their efforts were met with volleys of ammunition. So
they drew off from the palisade and began to cut small trees and build
a fort for themselves within the shelter of the woods, this being the
Iroquois plan of besieging an enemy.
Dollard had stored all his supplies and tools within his palisade. He
now set to work with his men to strengthen the position. They drove
stakes inside the inclosure and filled the space between outer and
inner pickets with earth and stones as high as their heads, leaving
twenty loop-holes. Three men were appointed to each loop-hole.
Before the French had finished intrenching themselves the Iroquois
broke up all their canoes, lighted pieces at the fires, and ran to
pile them against the palisade, but were again driven back. How many
attacks were made Claire did not know, for volley followed volley until
the crack of muskets seemed continuous, but the Iroquois attained to a
focus of howling when the principal chief of the Senecas, one of the
Five Nations, fell among their dead.
Morning and noon passed in this tumult of musketry and human outcry. In
the unsullied May weather such gunpowder clouds must have been strange
sights to nesting birds and other shy creatures of the woods.
Claire and Massawippa looked into the supplies of the fort and set out
food, but the water was soon exhausted. Dusk came. Starlight came. The
first rough day of this continuous battle was over, but not the battle.
For the Iroquois gave the allies no rest, harassing them through that
and every succeeding night.
It was after 12 o’clock before Dollard could take Claire’s hands and
talk with her a few unoccupied minutes. When women intrude upon men’s
great labors they risk destroying their own tender ideals, but this
daughter of a hundred soldiers had watched her husband all day in
raptures of pride. To be near him in the little arena of his sacrifice
was worth her heart-chilling vigil, worth her toilsome journey, fully
worth the supreme price she must yet pay.
Earth from the breastworks, distributed by thuds of occasional
Iroquois bullets, spattered impartially both Claire and Dollard. They
had no privacy. Guttural Huron and Algonquin murmurs and the nervous
intonation of French voices would have broken into all ordinary
conversation. But looking deeply at each other, and unconsciously
breathing in the same cadences, they had their moment of talk as if
standing on a peak together. There was a lonesome bird in the woods
uttering three or four falling notes, which could be heard at intervals
when not drowned by any rising din of the Iroquois.
“They sent a canoe down river this afternoon,” said Dollard, “evidently
for their reinforcements from below.”
“How long do you think we can hold out?” inquired Claire.
“Until we have broken their force. We must do that.”