experience. Dick used at first to begin at the rear peak and brush as
rapidly as possible toward the opening. The flies, thoroughly aroused,
eddied about a few frantic moments, like leaves in an autumn wind,
finally to settle close to the sod in the crannies between the
tent-wall and the ground. Then Dick would lie flat on his belly in
order to brush with equal vigour at these new lurking-places. The flies
repeated the autumn-leaf effect, and returned to the rear peak. This
was amusing to me, and furnished the flies with healthful, appetizing
exercise, but was bad for Dick's soul. After a time he discovered the
only successful method is the gentle one. Then he began at the peak and
brushed forward slowly, very, very slowly, so that the limited
intellect of his visitors did not become confused. Thus when they
arrived at the opening they saw it and used it, instead of searching
frantically for corners in which to hide from apparently vengeful
destruction. Then he would close his tent-flap securely, and turn in at
once. So he was able to sleep until earliest daylight. At that time the
mosquitoes again found him out.
Nine out of ten--perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred--sleep in open
tents. For absolute and perfect comfort proceed as follows:--Have your
tent-maker sew you a tent of cheese-cloth[*] with the same dimensions
as your shelter, except that the walls should be loose and voluminous
at the bottom. It should have no openings.
[Footnote *: Do not allow yourself to be talked into substituting
mosquito-bar or bobinet. Any mesh coarser than cheese-cloth will prove
pregnable to the most enterprising of the smaller species.]
Suspend this affair inside your tent by means of cords or tapes. Drop
it about you. Spread it out. Lay rod-cases, duffel-bags, or rocks along
its lower edges to keep it spread. You will sleep beneath it like a
child in winter. No driving out of reluctant flies; no enforced early
rising; no danger of a single overlooked insect to make the midnight
miserable. The cheese-cloth weighs almost nothing, can be looped up out
of the way in the daytime, admits the air readily. Nothing could fill
the soul with more ecstatic satisfaction than to lie for a moment
before going to sleep listening to a noise outside like an able-bodied
sawmill that indicates the _ping-gosh_ are abroad.
It would be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to
its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper
mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual
experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure
fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the human mind is
capable.
The picture rises before my mind of the cabin of a twenty-eight-foot
cutter-sloop just before the dawn of a midsummer day. The sloop was
made for business, and the cabin harmonized exactly with the
sloop--painted pine, wooden bunks without mattresses, camp-blankets,
duffel-bags slung up because all the floor place had been requisitioned
for sleeping purposes. We were anchored a hundred feet off land from
Pilot Cove, on the uninhabited north shore. The mosquitoes had
adventured on the deep. We lay half asleep.
"On the middle rafter," murmured the Football Man, "is one old fellow
giving signals."
"A quartette is singing drinking-songs on my nose," muttered the Glee
Club Man.
"We won't need to cook," I suggested somnolently. "We can run up and
down on deck with our mouths open and get enough for breakfast."
The fourth member opened one eye. "Boys," he breathed, "we won't be
able to go on to-morrow unless we give up having any more biscuits."
After a time some one murmured, "Why?"
"We'll have to use all the lard on the mast. They're so mad because
they can't get at us that they're biting the mast. It's already swelled
up as big as a barrel. We'll never be able to get the mainsail up. Any
of you boys got any vaseline? Perhaps a little fly-dope--"
But we snored vigorously in unison. The Indians say that when Kitch'
Manitou had created men he was dissatisfied, and so brought women into
being. At once love-making began, and then, as now, the couples sought
solitude for their exchanges of vows, their sighings to the moon, their
claspings of hands. Marriages ensued. The situation remained unchanged.
Life was one perpetual honeymoon. I suppose the novelty was fresh and
the sexes had not yet realized they would not part as abruptly as they
had been brought together. The villages were deserted, while the woods
and bushes were populous with wedded and unwedded lovers. Kitch'
Manitou looked on the proceedings with disapproval. All this was most
romantic and beautiful, no doubt, but in the meantime mi-dáw-min, the
corn, mi-nó-men, the rice, grew rank and uncultivated; while bis-íw,
the lynx, and swingwáage, the wolverine, and me-én-gan, the wolf,
committed unchecked depredations among the weaker forest creatures. The
business of life was being sadly neglected. So Kitch' Manitou took
counsel with himself, and created sáw-gi-may, the mosquito, to whom he
gave as dwelling the woods and bushes. That took the romance out of the
situation. As my narrator grimly expressed it, "Him come back, go to
work."
Certainly it should be most effective. Even the thick-skinned moose is
not exempt from discomfort. At certain seasons the canoe voyager in the
Far North will run upon a dozen in the course of a day's travel,
standing nose-deep in the river merely to escape the insect pests.
However, this is to be remembered: after the first of August they
bother very little; before that time the campaign I have outlined is
effective; even in fly season the worst days are infrequent. In the
woods you must expect to pay a certain price in discomfort for a very
real and very deep pleasure. Wet, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, difficult
travel, insects, hard beds, aching muscles--all these at one time or
another will be your portion. If you are of the class that cannot have
a good time unless everything is right with it, stay out of the woods.
One thing at least will always be wrong. When you have gained the
faculty of ignoring the one disagreeable thing and concentrating your
powers on the compensations, then you will have become a true woodsman,
and to your desires the forest will always be calling.
X.
CLOCHE.
Imagine a many-armed lake, like a starfish, nested among rugged
Laurentian hills, whose brows are bare and forbidding, but whose
concealed ravines harbour each its cool screen of forest growth.
Imagine a brawling stream escaping at one of the arms, to tumble,
intermittently visible among the trees, down a series of cascades and
rapids, to the broad, island-dotted calm of the big lake. Imagine a
meadow at the mouth of this stream, and on the meadow a single white
dot. Thus you will see Cloche, a trading-post of the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, as Deuce and I saw it from the summit of the
hills.
We had accomplished a very hard scramble, which started well enough in
a ravine so leafy and green and impenetrable that we might well have
imagined ourselves in a boundless forest. Deuce had scented sundry
partridges, which he had pointed with entire deference to the good form
of a sporting dog's conventions. As usual, to Deuce's never-failing
surprise and disgust, the birds had proved themselves most uncultivated
and rude persons by hopping promptly into trees instead of lying to
point and then flushing as a well-taught partridge should. I had
refused to pull pistol on them. Deuce's heart was broken. Then,
finally, we came to cliffs up which we had to scale, and boulders which
we had to climb, and fissures which we had to jump or cross on fallen
trees, and wide, bare sweeps of rock and blueberry bushes which we had
to cover, until at last we stood where we could look all ways at once.
The starfish thrust his insinuating arms in among the distant hills to
the north. League after league, rising and falling and rising again
into ever bluer distance, forest-covered, mysterious, other ranges and
systems lifted, until at last, far out, nearly at the horizon-height of
my eye, flashed again the gleam of water. And so the starfish arms of
the little lake at my feet seemed to have plunged into this wilderness
tangle only to reappear at greater distance. Like swamp-fire, it lured
the imagination always on and on and on through the secret waterways of
the uninhabited North. It was as though I stood on the dividing ridge
between the old and the new. Through the southern haze, hull down, I
thought to make out the smoke of a Great Lake freighter; from the
shelter of a distant cove I was not surprised a moment later to see
emerge a tiny speck whose movements betrayed it as a birch canoe. The
great North was at this, the most southern of the Hudson's Bay posts,
striking a pin-point of contact with the world of men.
Deuce and I angled down the mountain toward the stream. Our arrival
coincided with that of the canoe. It was of the Ojibway three-fathom
pattern, and contained a half-dozen packs, a sledge-dog, with whom
Deuce at once opened guarded negotiations, an old Indian, a squaw, and
a child of six or eight. We exchanged brief greetings. Then I sat on a
stump and watched the portage.
These were evidently "Woods Indians," an entirely different article
from the "Post Indians." They wore their hair long, and bound by a
narrow strip or fillet; their faces were hard and deeply lined, with a
fine, bold, far-seeing look to the eyes which comes only from long
woods dwelling. They walked, even under heavy loads, with a sagging,
springy gait, at once sure-footed and swift. Instead of tump-lines the
man used his sash, and the woman a blanket knotted loosely together at
the ends. The details of their costumes were interesting in combination
of jeans and buckskin, broadcloth and blanket, stroud and a material
evidently made from the strong white sacking in which flour intended
for frontier consumption is always packed. After the first
double-barrelled "bo' jou', bo' jou'," they paid no further attention
to me. In a few moments the portage was completed. The woman thrust her
paddle against the stream's bottom and the canoe, and so embarked. The
man stepped smoothly to his place like a cat leaping from a chair. They
shot away with the current, leaving behind them a strange and
mysterious impression of silence.
I followed down a narrow but well-beaten trail, and so at the end of a
half-mile came to the meadow and the post of Cloche.
The building itself was accurately of the Hudson Bay type--a steep,
sloping roof greater in front than behind, a deep recessed veranda,
squared logs sheathed with whitewashed boards. About it was a little
garden, which, besides the usual flowers and vegetables, contained such
exotics as a deer confined to a pen and a bear chained to a stake. As I
approached, the door opened and the Trader came out.
Now, often along the southern fringe your Hudson's Bay Trader will
prove to be a distinct disappointment. In fact, one of the historic old
posts is now kept by a pert little cockney Englishman, cringing or
impudent as the main chance seems to advise. When you have penetrated
further into the wilderness, however, where the hardships of winter and
summer travel, the loneliness of winter posts, the necessity of dealing
directly with savage men and savage nature, develops the quality of a
man or wrecks him early in the game, you will be certain of meeting
your type. But here, within fifty miles of the railroad!
The man who now stepped into view, however, preserved in his appearance
all the old traditions. He was, briefly, a short black-and-white man
built very square. Immense power lurked in the broad, heavy shoulders,
the massive chest, the thick arms, the sturdy, column-like legs. As for
his face, it was almost entirely concealed behind a curly square black
beard that grew above his cheek-bones nearly to his eyes. Only a thick
hawk nose, an inscrutable pair of black eyes under phenomenally heavy
eyebrows, and a short black pipe showed plainly from the hirsute
tangle. He was lock, stock, and barrel of the Far North, one of the old
_régime_. I was rejoiced to see him there, but did not betray a
glimmer of interest. I knew my type too well for that.
"How are you?" he said grudgingly.
"Good-day," said I.
We leaned against the fence and smoked, each contemplating carefully
the end of his pipe. I knew better than to say anything. The Trader was
looking me over, making up his mind about me. Speech on my part would
argue lightness of disposition, for it would seem to indicate that I
was not also making up my mind about him.
In this pause there was not the least unfriendliness. Only, in the
woods you prefer to know first the business and character of a chance
acquaintance. Afterwards you may ingratiate to his good will. All of
which possesses a beautiful simplicity, for it proves that good or bad
opinion need not depend on how gracefully you can chatter assurances.
At the end of a long period the Trader inquired, "Which way you
headed?"
"Out in a canoe for pleasure. Headed almost anywhere."
Again we smoked.
"Dog any good?" asked the Trader, removing his pipe and pointing to the
observant Deuce.
"He'll hunt shade on a hot day," said I tentatively. "How's the fur in
this district?"
We were off. He invited me in and showed me his bear. In ten minutes we
were seated chair-tilted on the veranda, and slowly, very cautiously,
in abbreviated syncopation, were feeling our way toward an intimacy.
Now came the Indians I had seen at the lake to barter for some flour
and pork. I was glad of the chance to follow them all into the
trading-room. A low wooden counter backed by a grill divided the main
body of the room from the entrance. It was deliciously dim. All the
charm of the Aromatic Shop was in the place, and an additional flavour
of the wilds. Everything here was meant for the Indian trade: bolts of
bright-patterned ginghams, blankets of red or blue, articles of
clothing, boxes of beads for decoration, skeins of brilliant silk, lead
bars for bullet-making, stacks of long brass-bound "trade guns" in the
corner, small mirrors, red and parti-coloured worsted sashes with
tassels on the ends, steel traps of various sizes, and a dozen other
articles to be desired by the forest people. And here, unlike the
Aromatic Shop, were none of the products of the Far North. All that, I
knew, was to be found elsewhere, in another apartment, equally dim, but
delightful in the orderly disorder of a storeroom.
Afterwards I made the excuse of a pair of moccasins to see this other
room. We climbed a steep, rough flight of stairs to emerge through a
sort of trap-door into a space directly under the roof. It was lit only
by a single little square at one end. Deep under the eaves I could make
out row after row of boxes and chests. From the rafters hung a dozen
pair of snow-shoes. In the centre of the floor, half overturned, lay an
open box from which tumbled dozens of pairs of moose-hide snow-shoe
moccasins.
Shades of childhood, what a place! No one of us can fail to recall with
a thrill the delights of a rummage in the attic--the joy of pulling
from some half-forgotten trunk a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which
nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed
years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the
dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol
redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they
are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such
unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here
would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes
would be to rummage, not in the fictions of imagination, but the facts
of the most real picturesque. In yonder square box are the smoke-tanned
shoes of silence; that velvet dimness would prove to be the fur of a
bear; this birch-bark package contains maple sugar savoured of the
wilds. Buckskin, both white and buff, bears' claws in strings, bundles
of medicinal herbs, sweet-grass baskets fragrant as an Eastern tale,
birch-bark boxes embroidered with stained quills of the porcupines,
bows of hickory and arrows of maple, queer half-boots of stiff sealskin
from the very shores of the Hudson Bay, belts of beadwork, yellow and
green, for the Corn Dance, even a costume or so of buckskin complete
for ceremonial--all these the fortunate child would find were he to
take the rainy-day privilege in this, the most wonderful attic in all
the world. And then, after he had stroked the soft fur, and smelled the
buckskin and sweet grasses, and tasted the crumbling maple sugar, and
dressed himself in the barbaric splendours of the North, he could
flatten his little nose against the dim square of light and look out
over the glistening yellow backs of a dozen birchbark canoes to the
distant, rain-blurred hills, beyond which lay the country whence all
these things had come. Do you wonder that in after years that child
hits the Long Trail? Do you still wonder at finding these strange,
taciturn, formidable, tender-hearted men dwelling lonely in the Silent
Places?
The Trader yanked several of the boxes to the centre and prosaically
tumbled about their contents. He brought to light heavy moose-hide
moccasins with high linen tops for the snow; lighter buckskin
moccasins, again with the high tops, but this time of white tanned
doeskin; slipper-like deer-skin moccasins with rolled edges, for the
summer; oil-tanned shoepacs, with and without the flexible leather
sole; "cruisers" of varying degree of height--each and every sort of
footgear in use in the Far North, excepting and saving always the
beautiful soft doeskin slippers finished with white fawnskin and
ornamented with the Ojibway flower pattern for which I sought. Finally
he gave it up.
"I had a few pair. They must have been sent out," said he.
We rummaged a little further for luck's sake, then descended to the
outer air. I left him to fetch my canoe, but returned in the afternoon.
We became friends. That evening we sat in the little sitting-room and
talked far into the night.
He was a true Hudson's Bay man, steadfastly loyal to the Company. I
mentioned the legend of _La Longue Traverse_; he stoutly asserted
he had never heard of it. I tried to buy a mink-skin or so to hang on
the wall as souvenir of my visit; he was genuinely distressed, but had
to refuse because the Company had not authorized him to sell, and he
had nothing of his own to give. I mentioned the River of the Moose, the
Land of Little Sticks; his deep eyes sparkled with excitement, and he
asked eagerly a multitude of details concerning late news from the
northern posts.
And as the evening dwindled, after the manner of Traders everywhere, he
began to tell me the "ghost stories" of this station of Cloche. Every
post has gathered a mass of legendary lore in the slow years, but this
had been on the route of the _voyageurs_ from Montreal and Quebec
at the time when the lords of the North journeyed to the scenes of
their annual revels at Fort Williams. The Trader had much to say of the
magnificence and luxury of these men--their cooks, their silken tents,
their strange and costly foods, their rare wines, their hordes of
French and Indian canoemen and packers. Then Cloche was a halting-place
for the night. Its meadows had blossomed many times with the gay tents
and banners of a great company. He told me, as vividly as though he had
been an eye-witness, of how the canoes must have loomed up suddenly
from between the islands. By-and-by he seized the lamp and conducted me
outside, where hung ponderous ornamental steelyards, on which in the
old days the peltries were weighed.
"It is not so now," said he. "We buy by count, and modern scales weigh
the provisions. And the beaver are all gone."
We re-entered the house in silence. After a while he began briefly to
sketch his own career. Then, indeed, the flavour of the Far North
breathed its crisp, bracing ozone through the atmosphere of the room.
He had started life at one of the posts of the Far North-West. At the
age of twelve he enlisted in the Company. Throughout forty years he had
served her. He had travelled to all the strange places of the North,
and claimed to have stood on the shores of that half-mythical lake of
Yamba Tooh.
"It was snowing at the time," he said prosaically; "and I couldn't see
anything, except that I'd have to bear to the east to get away from
open water. Maybe she wasn't the lake. The Injins said she was, but I
was too almighty shy of grub to bother with lakes."
Other names fell from him in the course of talk, some of which I had
heard and some not, but all of which rang sweet and clear with no
uncertain note of adventure. Especially haunts my memory an impression
of desolate burned trees standing stick-like in death on the shores of
Lost River.
He told me he had been four years at Cloche, but expected shortly to be
transferred, as the fur was getting scarce, and another post one
hundred miles to the west could care for the dwindling trade. He hoped
to be sent into the North-West, but shrugged his shoulders as he said
so, as though that were in the hands of the gods. At the last he fished
out a concertina and played for me. Have you ever heard, after dark, in
the North, where the hills grow big at sunset, _à la Claire
Fontaine_ crooned to such an accompaniment, and by a man of
impassive bulk and countenance, but with glowing eyes?
I said good-night, and stumbled, sight-dazed, through the cool dark to
my tent near the beach. The weird minor strains breathed after me as I
went.
"A la claire fontaine
M'en allant promener,
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je m'y suis baigné,
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime
Jamais je ne t'oublierai."
The next day, with the combers of a howling north-westerly gale
clutching at the stern of the canoe, I rode in a glory of spray and
copper-tasting excitement back to Dick and his half-breed settlement.
But the incident had its sequel. The following season, as I was sitting
writing at my desk, a strange package was brought me. It was wrapped in
linen sewn strongly with waxed cord. Its contents lie before me now--a
pair of moccasins fashioned of the finest doeskin, tanned so
beautifully that the delicious smoke fragrance fills the room, and so
effectively that they could be washed with soap and water without
destroying their softness. The tongue-shaped piece over the instep is
of white fawnskin heavily ornamented in five colours of silk. Where it
joins the foot of the slipper it is worked over and over into a narrow
cord of red and blue silk. The edge about the ankle is turned over,
deeply scalloped, and bound at the top with a broad band of blue silk
stitched with pink. Two tiny blue bows at either side the ankle
ornament the front. Altogether a most magnificent foot-gear. No word
accompanied them, apparently, but after some search I drew a bit of
paper from the toe of one of them. It was inscribed simply--"Fort la
Cloche."
XI.
THE HABITANTS.
During my absence Dick had made many friends. Wherein lies his secret I
do not know, but he has a peculiar power of ingratiation with people
whose lives are quite outside his experience or sympathies. In the
short space of four days he had earned joyous greetings from every one
in town. The children grinned at him cheerfully; the old women cackled
good-natured little teasing jests to him as he passed; the pretty,
dusky half-breed girls dropped their eyelashes fascinatingly across
their cheeks, tempering their coyness with a smile; the men painfully
demanded information as to artistic achievement which was evidently as
well meant as it was foreign to any real thirst for knowledge they
might possess; even the lumber-jacks addressed him as "Bub." And withal
Dick's methods of approach were radically wrong, for he blundered upon
new acquaintance with a beaming smile, which is ordinarily a sure
repellent to the cautious, taciturn men of the woods. Perhaps their
keenness penetrated to the fact that he was absolutely without guile,
and that his kindness was an essential part of himself. I should be
curious to know whether Billy Knapp of the Black Hills would surrender
his gun to Dick for inspection.
"I want you to go out this afternoon to see some friends of mine," said
Dick. "They're on a farm about two miles back in the brush. They're
ancestors."
"They're what?" I inquired.
"Ancestors. You can go down to Grosse Point near Detroit, and find
people living in beautiful country places next the water, and after
dinner they'll show you an old silhouette or a daguerreotype or
something like that, and will say to you proudly, 'This is old Jules,
my ancestor, who was a pioneer in this country. The Place has been in
the family ever since his time.'"
"Well?"