has a place that slopes down to the water through white birch trees,
and it is of the kind very tenacious of its own land. In two hundred
years this will be a great resort; bound to be--beautiful, salubrious,
good sport, fine scenery, accessible--"
"Railroad fifty miles away; boat every once in a while," said I
sarcastically.
"Accessible in two hundred years, all right," insisted Dick serenely.
"Even Canada can build a quarter of a mile of railway a year.
Accessible," he went on; "good shipping-point for country now
undeveloped."
"You ought to be a real estate agent," I advised.
"Lived two hundred years too soon," disclaimed Dick. "What more
obvious? These are certainly ancestors."
"Family may die out," I suggested.
"It has a good start," said Dick sweetly. "There are eighty-seven in it
now."
"What!" I gasped.
"One great-grandfather, twelve grandparents, thirty-seven parents, and
thirty-seven children," tabulated Dick.
"I should like to see the great-grandfather," said I; "he must be very
old and feeble."
"He is eighty-five years old," said Dick, "and the last time I saw him
he was engaged with an axe in clearing trees off his farm."
All of these astonishing statements I found to be absolutely true.
We started out afoot soon after dinner, through a scattering growth of
popples that alternately drew the veil of coyness over the blue hills
and caught our breath with the delight of a momentary prospect. Deuce,
remembering autumn days, concluded partridges, and scurried away on the
expert diagonal, his hind legs tucked well under his flanks. The road
itself was a mere cutting through the miniature woods, winding to right
or left for the purpose of avoiding a log-end or a boulder, surmounting
little knolls with an idle disregard for the straight line, knobby with
big, round stones, and interestingly diversified by circular mud holes
a foot or so in diameter. After a mile and a half we came to the corner
of a snake fence. This, Dick informed me, marked the limits of the
"farm."
We burst through the screen of popples definitely into the clear. A
two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle
distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land,
and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and
gained the house. Dick was at once among friends.
The mother had no English, so smiled expansively, her bony arms folded
across her stomach. Her oldest daughter, a frail-looking girl in the
twenties, but with a sad and spiritual beauty of the Madonna in her big
eyes and straight black hair, gave us a shy good-day. Three boys, just
alike in their slender, stolid Indian good looks, except that they
differed in size, nodded with the awkwardness of the male. Two babies
stared solemnly. A little girl with a beautiful, oval face, large
mischievous gray eyes behind long black lashes, a mischievously quirked
mouth to match the eyes, and black hair banged straight, both front and
behind, in almost mediaeval fashion, twirked a pair of brown bare legs
all about us. Another light-haired, curly little girl, surmounted by an
old yachting-cap, spread apart sturdy shoes in an attitude at once
critical and expectant.
Dick rose to the occasion by sorting out from some concealed recess of
his garments a huge paper parcel of candy.
With infinite tact, he presented this bag to Madame rather than the
children. Madame instituted judicious distribution and appropriate
reservation for the future. We entered the cabin.
Never have I seen a place more exquisitely neat. The floor had not only
been washed clean; it had been scrubbed white. The walls of logs were
freshly whitewashed. The chairs were polished. The few ornaments were
new, and not at all dusty or dingy or tawdry. Several religious
pictures, a portrait of royalty, a lithographed advertisement of some
buggy, a photograph or so--and then just the fresh, wholesome
cleanliness of scrubbed pine. Madame made us welcome with smiles--a
faded, lean woman with a remnant of beauty peeping from her soft eyes,
but worn down to the first principles of pioneer bone and gristle by
toil, care, and the bearing of children. I spoke to her in French,
complimenting her on the appearance of the place. She was genuinely
pleased, saying in reply that one did one's possible, but that
children!--with an expressive pause.
Next we called for volunteers to show us to the great-grandfather. Our
elfish little girls at once offered, and went dancing off down the
trail like autumn leaves in a wind. Whether it was the Indian in them,
or the effects of environment, or merely our own imaginations, we both
had the same thought--that in these strange, taciturn, friendly,
smiling, pirouetting little creatures was some eerie, wild strain akin
to the woods and birds and animals. As they danced on ahead of us,
turning to throw us a delicious smile or a half-veiled roguish glance
of nascent coquetry, we seemed to swing into an orbit of experience
foreign to our own. These bright-eyed woods people were in the last
analysis as inscrutable to us as the squirrels.
We followed our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another
clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they
stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a
startlingly sudden repose.
"V'la le gran'père," said they in unison.
At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and
confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened
and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a
Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide,
clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His
movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand
across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the
quality of his work--a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause,
a painful recovery--labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but
wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without
haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the
toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent
hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the
end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly
along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes,
like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame,
gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of
Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble
seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of
another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to
exchange slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the fact that his
seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his
audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body
politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the
impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the
park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water,
the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to
substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.
Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps
as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We
conversed.
Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the
forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of
his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had
blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said,
eighty-seven--that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It
is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always
food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had
not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.
We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no
danger of loneliness.
Yes, he went on, he was old--eighty-five. He was not as quick as he
used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's
work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance. He
wished us good-day.
We left him seated on the pine log, his axe between his knees, his
great, gnarled brown hands hanging idly. After a time we heard the
_whack_ of his implement; then after another long time we heard it
_whack_ again. We knew that those two blows had gone straight and
true and forceful to the mark. So old a man had no energy to expend in
the indirections of haste.
Our elfish guides led us back along the trail to the farmhouse. A girl
of thirteen had just arrived from school. In the summer the little ones
divided the educational advantages among themselves, turn and turn
about.
The newcomer had been out into the world, and was dressed accordingly.
A neat dark-blue cloth dress, plainly made, a dull red and blue checked
apron; a broad, round hat, shoes and stockings, all in the best and
quietest taste--marked contrast to the usual garish Sunday best of the
Anglo-Saxon. She herself exemplified the most striking type of beauty
to be found in the mixed bloods. Her hair was thick and glossy and
black in the mode that throws deep purple shadows under the rolls and
coils. Her face was a regular oval, like the opening in a wishbone. Her
skin was dark, but rich and dusky with life and red blood that ebbed
and flowed with her shyness. Her lips were full, and of a dark cherry
red. Her eyes were deep, rather musing, and furnished with the most
gloriously tangling of eyelashes. Dick went into ecstasies, took
several photographs which did not turn out well, and made one sketch
which did. Perpetually did he bewail the absence of oils. The type is
not uncommon, but its beauty rarely remains perfect after the fifteenth
year.
We made our ceremonious adieus to the Madame, and started back to town
under the guidance of one of the boys, who promised us a short cut.
This youth proved to be filled with the old, wandering spirit that
lures so many of his race into the wilderness life. He confided to us
as we walked that he liked to tramp extended distances, and that the
days were really not made long enough for those who had to return home
at night.
"I is been top of dose hills," he said. "Bime by I mak' heem go to dose
lak' beyon'."
He told us that some day he hoped to go out with the fur traders. In
his vocabulary "I wish" occurred with such wistful frequency that
finally I inquired curiously what use he would make of the Fairy Gift.
"If you could have just one wish come true, Pierre," I asked, "what
would you desire?"
His answer came without a moment's hesitation.
"I is lak' be one giant," said he.
"Why?" I demanded.
"So I can mak' heem de walk far," he replied simply.
I was tempted to point out to him the fact that big men do not outlast
the little men, and that vast strength rarely endures, but then a
better feeling persuaded me to leave him his illusions. The power, even
in fancy, of striding on seven-league boots across the fascinations
spread out below his kindling vision from "dose hills" was too precious
a possession lightly to be taken away.
Strangely enough, though his woodcraft naturally was not
inconsiderable, it did not hold his paramount interest. He knew
something about animals and their ways and their methods of capture,
but the chase did not appeal strongly to him, nor apparently did he
possess much skill along that line. He liked the actual physical
labour, the walking, the paddling, the tump-line, the camp-making, the
new country, the companionship of the wild life, the wilderness as a
whole rather than in any one of its single aspects as Fish Pond, Game
Preserve, Picture Gallery. In this he showed the true spirit of the
_voyageur_. I should confidently look to meet him in another ten
years--if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long--girdled
with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the
portage load, trolling _Isabeau_ to the silent land somewhere
under the Arctic Circle. The French of the North have never been great
fighters nor great hunters, in the terms of the Anglo-Saxon
frontiersmen, but they have laughed in farther places.
XII.
THE RIVER.
At a certain spot on the North Shore--I am not going to tell you
where--you board one of the two or three fishing-steamers that collect
from the different stations the big ice-boxes of Lake Superior
whitefish. After a certain number of hours--I am not going to tell you
how many--your craft will turn in toward a semicircle of bold,
beautiful hills, that seem at first to be many less miles distant than
the reality, and at the last to be many more miles remote than is the
fact. From the prow you will make out first a uniform velvet green;
then the differentiation of many shades; then the dull neutrals of
rocks and crags; finally the narrow white of a pebble beach against
which the waves utter continually a rattling undertone. The steamer
pushes boldly in. The cool green of the water underneath changes to
gray. Suddenly you make out the bottom, as through a thick green glass,
and the big suckers and catfish idling over its riffled sands,
inconceivably far down through the unbelievably clear liquid. So
absorbed are you in this marvellous clarity that a slight, grinding jar
alone brings you to yourself. The steamer's nose is actually touching
the white strip of pebbles!
Now you can do one of a number of things. The forest slants down to
your feet in dwindling scrub, which half conceals an abandoned log
structure. This latter is the old Hudson's Bay post. Behind it is the
Fur Trail, and the Fur Trail will take you three miles to Burned Rock
Pool, where are spring water and mighty trout. But again, half a mile
to the left, is the mouth of the River. And the River meanders
charmingly through the woods of the flat country over numberless
riffles and rapids, beneath various steep gravel banks, until it sweeps
boldly under the cliff of the first high hill. There a rugged precipice
rises sheer and jagged and damp-dark to overhanging trees clinging to
the shoulder of the mountain. And precisely at that spot is a bend
where the water hits square, to divide right and left in whiteness, to
swirl into convolutions of foam, to lurk darkly for a moment on the
edge of tumult before racing away. And there you can stand hip-deep,
and just reach the eddy foam with a cast tied craftily of Royal
Coachman, Parmachenee Belle, and Montreal.
From that point you are with the hills. They draw back to leave wide
forest, but always they return to the River--as you would return season
after season were I to tell you how--throwing across your
woods-progress a sheer cliff forty or fifty feet high, shouldering you
incontinently into the necessity of fording to the other side. More and
more jealous they become as you penetrate, until at the Big Falls they
close in entirely, warning you that here they take the wilderness to
themselves. At the Big Falls anglers make their last camp. About the
fire they may discuss idly various academic questions--as to whether
the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the
legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether
it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by
sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls;
and so on.
These questions, as I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler
is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the
finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition
to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of
it. Already he commands ten miles of water--swift, clear water--running
over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he
has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast. It is to be waded
in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the
mood suits him. One bank is apt to be precipitous, the other to stretch
away in a mile or so of the coolest, greenest, stillest primeval forest
to be imagined. Thus he can cut across the wide bends of the River,
should he so desire and should haste be necessary to make camp before
dark. And, last, but not least by any manner of means, there are trout.
I mean real trout--big fellows, the kind the fishers of little streams
dream of but awake to call Morpheus a liar, just as they are too polite
to call you a liar when you are so indiscreet as to tell them a few
plain facts. I have one solemnly attested and witnessed record of
twenty-nine inches, caught in running water. I saw a friend land on one
cast three whose aggregate weight was four and one half pounds. I
witnessed, and partly shared, an exciting struggle in which three fish
on three rods were played in the same pool at the same time. They
weighed just fourteen pounds. One pool, a backset, was known as the
Idiot's Delight, because any one could catch fish there. I have lain on
my stomach at the Burned Rock Pool and seen the great fish lying so
close together as nearly to cover the bottom, rank after rank of them,
and the smallest not under a half pound. As to the largest--well, every
true fisherman knows him!
So it came about for many years that the natural barrier interposed by
the Big Falls successfully turned the idle tide of anglers'
exploration. Beyond them lay an unknown country, but you had to climb
cruelly to see it, and you couldn't gain above what you already had in
any case. The nearest settlement was nearly sixty miles away, so even
added isolation had not its usual quickening effect on camper's effort.
The River is visited by few, anyway. An occasional adventurous steam
yacht pauses at the mouth, fishes a few little ones from the shallow
pools there, or a few big ones from the reefs, and pushes on. It never
dreams of sending an expedition to the interior. Our own people, and
two other parties, are all I know of who visit the River regularly. Our
camp-sites alone break the forest; our blazes alone continue the
initial short cut of the Fur Trail; our names alone distinguish the
various pools. We had always been satisfied to compromise with the
frowning Hills. In return for the delicious necks and points and forest
areas through which our clipped trails ran, we had tacitly respected
the mystery of the upper reaches.
This year, however, a number of unusual conditions changed our spirit.
I have perhaps neglected to state that our trip up to now had been a
rather singularly damp one. Of the first fourteen days twelve had been
rainy. This was only a slightly exaggerated sample for the rest of the
time. As a consequence we found the River filled even to the limit of
its freshet banks. The broad borders of stone beach between the
stream's edge and the bushes had quite disappeared; the riffles had
become rapids, and the rapids roaring torrents; the bends boiled
angrily with a smashing eddy that sucked air into pirouetting cavities
inches in depth. Plainly, fly-fishing was out of the question. No
self-respecting trout would rise to the surface of such a moil, or
abandon for syllabubs of tinsel the magnificent solidities of
ground-bait such a freshet would bring down from the hills. Also the
River was unfordable.
We made camp at the mouth and consulted together. Billy, the half-breed
who had joined us for the labour of a permanent camp, shook his head.
"I t'ink one week, ten day," he vouchsafed. "P'rhaps she go down den.
We mus' wait." We did not want to wait; the idleness of a permanent
camp is the most deadly in the world.
"Billy," said I, "have you ever been above the Big Falls?"
The half-breed's eyes flashed.
"Non," he replied simply. "Bâ, I lak' mak' heem firs' rate."
"All right, Billy; we'll do it."
The next day it rained, and the River went up two inches. The morning
following was fair enough, but so cold you could see your breath. We
began to experiment.
Now, this expedition had become a fishing vacation, so we had all the
comforts of home with us. When said comforts of home were laden into
the canoe, there remained forward and aft just about one square foot of
space for Billy and me, and not over two inches of freeboard for the
River. We could not stand up and pole; tracking with a tow-line was out
of the question, because there existed no banks on which to walk; the
current was too swift for paddling. So we knelt and poled. We knew it
before, but we had to be convinced by trial, that two inches of
freeboard will dip under the most gingerly effort. It did so. We
groaned, stepped out into ice-water up to our waists, and so began the
day's journey with fleeting reference to Dante's nethermost hell.
Next the shore the water was most of the time a little above our knees,
but the swirl of a rushing current brought an apron of foam to our
hips. Billy took the bow and pulled; I took the stern and pushed. In
places our combined efforts could but just counterbalance the strength
of the current. Then Billy had to hang on until I could get my shoulder
against the stern for a mighty heave, the few inches gain of which he
would guard as jealously as possible, until I could get into position
for another shove. At other places we were in nearly to our armpits,
but close under the banks where we could help ourselves by seizing
bushes.
Sometimes I lost my footing entirely and trailed out behind like a
streamer; sometimes Billy would be swept away, the canoe's bow would
swing down-stream, and I would have to dig my heels and hang on until
he had floundered upright. Fortunately for our provisions, this never
happened to both at the same time. The difficulties were still further
complicated by the fact that our feet speedily became so numb from the
cold that we could not feel the bottom, and so were much inclined to
aimless stumblings. By-and-by we got out and kicked trees to start the
circulation. In the meantime the sun had retired behind thick, leaden
clouds.
At the First Bend we were forced to carry some fifty feet. There the
River rushed down in a smooth apron straight against the cliff, where
its force actually raised the mass of water a good three feet higher
than the level of the surrounding pool. I tied on a bait-hook, and two
cartridges for sinkers, and in fifteen minutes had caught three trout,
one of which weighed three pounds, and the others two pounds and a
pound and a half respectively. At this point Dick and Deuce, who had
been paralleling through the woods, joined us. We broiled the trout,
and boiled tea, and shivered as near the fire as we could. That
afternoon, by dint of labour and labour, and yet more labour, we
made Burned Rock, and there we camped for the night, utterly
beaten out by about as hard a day's travel as a man would want to
undertake.
The following day was even worse, for as the natural bed of the River
narrowed, we found less and less footing and swifter and swifter water.
The journey to Burned Rock had been a matter of dogged hard work; this
was an affair of alertness, of taking advantage of every little eddy,
of breathless suspense during long seconds while the question of
supremacy between our strength and the stream's was being debated. And
the thermometer must have registered well towards freezing. Three times
we were forced to cross the River in order to get even precarious
footing. Those were the really doubtful moments. We had to get in
carefully, to sit craftily, and to paddle gingerly and firmly, without
attempting to counteract the downward sweep of the current. All our
energies and care were given to preventing those miserable curling
little waves from over-topping our precious two inches, and that
miserable little canoe from departing even by a hair's-breadth from the
exactly level keel. Where we were going did not matter. After an
interminable interval the tail of our eyes would catch the sway of
bushes near at hand.
"Now," Billy would mutter abstractedly.
With one accord we would arise from six inches of wet and step swiftly
into the River. The lightened canoe would strain back; we would brace
our legs. The traverse was accomplished.