CHILDREN OF THE FOREST.
There could hardly be a wider contrast than between Captain Argent's
usual dinner at his regimental mess, and that of which he now partook in
the lumbermen's shanty. Tables and chairs were as unknown as forks and
dishes among the _gens de chantier_; a large pot of tea, dipped into by
everybody's pannikin, served for beer and wine; pork was the _piece de
resistance_, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a
Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an
occasional remark in Irish or Scottish brogue.
'Your men seem to be temperance folk,' observed Argent to the foreman.
'Weel, they must be,' was the laconic reply. 'We've no stores where they
could get brandy-smash in the bush, and it's so much the better for
them, or I daursay they wad want prisons and juries next. As it is,
they're weel behaved lads eneugh.'
'I'm sure it must be good in a moral point of view; but do you find them
equal to as much work as if they had beer or spirits?' asked Captain
Argent. 'And lumbering seems to me to be particularly laborious.'
'Weel, there's a fact I'll mak a present to the teetotallers,' answered
the foreman. 'Our lumberers get nothing in the way of stimulant, and
they don't seem to want it. When I came fresh from the auld country, I
couldna hardly b'lieve that.'
'Au large, au large!'
At this word of command all hands turned out of the shanty, and went
back to work in their several gangs. Again the fellers attacked the
hugest pines; the hewers sprang upon the fallen, lining and squaring
the living trees into dead beams; and the teamsters yoked afresh their
patient oxen, fitting upon each massive throat the heavy wooden collar,
and attaching to chains the ponderous log which should be moved towards
the water highway.
Argent and Arthur found themselves presently at the foot of a colossal
Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as
disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the
Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the
abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the
shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception
upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that
it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre in the neighbourhood
might travel easily and safely to the water's edge; and forty yards of
bedding timbers lay a ready-made couch, for its great length.
'I daursay now, that stick's standing aboot a thousand years: I've
counted fourteen hunder rings in the wood of a pine no much bigger. Ou,
'twill mak a gran' mast for a seventy-four--nigh a hunder feet lang,
and as straight as a rod.'
Stripping off the bark and dressing the knots was the next work, which
would complete its readiness for Devonport dockyards, or perchance for
the Cherbourg shipwrights. During this operation the foreman made an
excursion to visit his other gangs, and then took his visitors a little
aside into the woods to view what he termed a 'regular take-in.' It was
a group of fine-looking pines, wearing all the outward semblance of
health, but when examined, proving mere tubes of bark, charred and
blackened within, and ragged along the seam where the fire had burst
out.
'How extraordinary!' said Argent. 'Why were they not burned equally
through?'
'I hae been thinkin' the fire caught them in the spring, when the sap
rins strong; so the sap-wood saved thae shells, to misguide the puir
axmen. I thought I had a fair couple o' cribs o' lumber a' ready to
hand, when I spied the holes, and found my fine pines naething but empty
pipes.'
He had been fashioning two saplings into strong handspikes, and now
offered one each to the gentlemen. 'Ye'll not be too proud to bear a
hand wi' the mast aboon: it'll be a kittle job lugging it to the pond;
so just lend us a shove now and then.'
The great mass was at last got into motion, by a difficult concerted
starting of all the oxen at the same moment.
Round the brilliant log fire, while pannikins of tea circulated, and
some flakes of the falling snow outside came fluttering down into the
blaze, the lumberers lay on their bunks, or sat on blocks, talking,
sleeping, singing, as the mood moved. French Canadians are native-born
songsters; and their simple ballad melodies, full of _refrain_ and
repetition, sounded very pleasing even to Argent's amateur ears.
'I can imagine that this shanty life must be pleasant enough,' said
Argent, rolling himself in his buffalo robe preparatory to sleep by the
fire.
'I'll just tell ye what it is,' returned the foreman; 'nane that has
gane lumbering can tak' kindly to ony ither calling. They hae caught
the wandering instinct, and the free life o' the woods becomes a
needcessity, if I might say sae. D'ye ken the greatest trouble I find
in towns? Trying to sleep on a civilised bed. I canna do't, that's the
fact; nor be sitting to civilised dinners, whar the misguided folk spend
thrice the time that's needfu', fiddling with a fork an' spune. I like
to eat an' be done wi' it.'
Which little social trait was of a piece with Mr. Foreman's energy and
promptness in all the circumstances of life. In a very few minutes from
the aforesaid speech he was sound asleep, for he was determined to waste
no time in accomplishing that either.
Argent and Arthur left this wood-cutting polity next morning, and
worked, or rather hunted their way back to the settled districts. The
former stayed for another idle week at Cedar Creek; and then the
brothers were again alone, to pursue their strife with the forest.
It went on, with varying success, till 'the moon of the snow crust,' as
the Ojibbeways poetically style March. A chaos of fallen trunks and
piled logs lay for twenty-five acres about the little shanty; Robert
was beginning to understand why the French Canadians called a cleared
patch 'un desert,' for beyond doubt the axe had a desolating result, in
its present stage.
'Why, then, Masther Robert, there's one thing I wanted to ax you,' said
Andy, resting a moment from his chopping: 'it's goin' on four months now
since we see a speck of green, an' will the snow ever be off the ground
agin, at all, at all?'
'You see the sun is only just getting power enough to melt,' returned
his master, tracing with his axe-head a furrow in the thawing surface.
'But, sure, if it always freezes up tight agin every evenin', that
little taste of meltin' won't do much good,' observed Andy. 'Throth,
I'm fairly longin' to see that lake turn into wather, instead ov bein'
as hard as iron. Sure the fish must all be smothered long ago, the
crathurs, in prison down there.'
'Well, Andy, I hope they'll be liberated next month. Meanwhile the ice
is a splendid high road. Look there.'
From behind a wooded promontory, stretching far into the lake, at the
distance of about half a mile from where they were chopping, emerged the
figure of a very tall Indian, wrapped in a dark blanket and carrying a
gun. After him, in the stately Indian file, marched two youths, also
armed; then appeared a birchen traineau, drawn by the squaw who had
the honour of being wife and mother respectively to the preceding
copper-coloured men, and who therefore was constituted their beast of
burden. A girl and a child--future squaws--shared the toil of pulling
along the family chattels, unaided by the stalwart lords of the creation
stalking in front.
'Why, thin, never welcome their impidence, an' to lave the poor women
to do all the hard work, an' they marchin' out forenenst 'em like three
images, so stiff an' so sthraight, an' never spakin' a word. I'm afeard
it's here they're comin.' An' I give ye my word she has a child on her
back, tied to a boord; no wondher for 'em to be as stiff as a tongs whin
they grows up, since the babies is rared in that way.'
Not seeming to heed the white men, the Indians turned into a little
cove at a short distance, and stepped ashore. The woman-kind followed,
pulling their traineau with difficulty over the roughnesses of the
landing place; while husband and sons looked on tranquilly, and smoked
'kinne-kanik' in short stone pipes. The elderly squaw deposited her baby
on the snow, and also comforted herself with a whiff; certain vernacular
conversation ensued between her and her daughters, apparently about the
place of their camp, and the younger ones set to work clearing a patch
of ground under some birch trees. Mrs. Squaw now drew forth a hatchet
from her loaded sledge, and chopped down a few saplings, which were
fixed firmly in the earth again a few yards off, so as to make an oval
enclosure by the help of trees already standing.
'Throth an' I'll go an' help her,' quoth good-natured Andy, whose native
gallantry would not permit him to witness a woman's toil without trying
to lighten it. 'Of all the ould lazy-boots I ever see, ye're the biggest,'
apostrophizing the silent stoical Indians as he passed where they
lounged; 'ye've a good right to be ashamed of yerselves, so ye have,
for a set of idle spalpeens.'
The eldest of the trio removed his pipe for an instant and uttered the
two words--'I savage.' Andy's rhetoric had been totally incomprehensible.
'Why, then, ye needn't tell me ye're a savidge: it's as plain as a
pikestaff. What'll I do with this stick, did ye say, ma'am? Oh, surra
bit o' me knows a word she's sayin', though it's mighty like the Irish
of a Connaught man. I wondher what it is she's tryin' to make; it
resimbles the beginnin' of a big basket at present, an' meself standin'
in the inside of the bottom. I can't be far asthray if I dhrive down the
three where there's a gap. I don't see how they're to make a roof, an'
this isn't a counthry where I'd exactly like to do 'athout one. Now
she's fastenin' down the branches round, stickin' 'em in the earth, an'
tyin' 'em together wid cord. It's the droll cord, never see a rope-walk
anyhow.'
Certainly not; for it was the tough bast of the Canadian cedar,
manufactured in large quantities by the Indian women, twisted into all
dimensions of cord, from thin twine to cables many fathoms long; used
for snares, fishing nets, and every species of stitching. Mrs. Squaw,
like a provident housekeeper, had whole balls of it in her traineau
ready for use; also rolls of birch-bark, which, when the skeleton wigwam
was quite ship-shape, and well interlaced with crossbars of supple
boughs, she began to wrap round in the fashion of a covering skirt.
Had crinoline been in vogue in the year 1851, Robert would have found
a parallel before his eyes, in these birch-bark flounces arranged
over a sustaining framework, in four successive falls, narrowing in
circumference as they neared the top, where a knot of bast tied the
arching timbers together. He was interested in the examination of
these forest tent cloths, and found each roll composed of six or seven
quadrangular bits of bark, about a yard square apiece, sewed into a
strip, and having a lath stitched into each end, after the manner in
which we civilised people use rollers for a map. The erection was
completed by the casting across several strings of bast, weighted at
the ends with stones, which kept all steady.
The male Indians now vouchsafed to take possession of the wigwam.
Solemnly stalking up to Andy, the chief of the party offered his pipe to
him for a puff.
'Musha thin, thank ye kindly, an' I'm glad to see ye've some notions o'
civiltude, though ye do work the wife harder than is dacent.' But after
a single 'draw,' Andy took the pipe in his fingers and looked curiously
into its bowl. 'It's the quarest tobacco I ever tasted,' he observed:
'throth if I don't think it's nothin' but chips o' bark an' dead leaves.
Here 'tis back for you, sir; it don't shute my fancy, not bein' an
Indjin yet, though I dunno what I mightn't come to.' The pipe was
received with the deepest gravity.
No outward sign had testified surprise or any other emotion, at the
discovery that white men had settled close to their 'sugar-bush,' and
of course become joint proprietors. The inscrutable sphinx-like calm of
these countenances, the strangeness of this savage life, detained Robert
most of the afternoon as by a sort of fascination. Andy's wrath at the
male indolence was renewed by finding that the squaw and her girls had
to cut and carry all the firewood needful: even the child of seven years
old worked hard at bringing in logs to the wigwam. He was unaware that
the Indian women hold labour to be their special prerogative; that this
very squaw despised him for the help he rendered her; and that the
observation in her own tongue, which was emphasized by an approving
grunt from her husband, was a sarcasm levelled at the inferiority and
mean-spiritedness of the white man, as exemplified in Andy's person.
One of the young fellows, who had dived into the forest an hour before,
returned with spoil in the shape of a skunk, which the ever-industrious
squaw set about preparing for the evening meal. The fearful odour of the
animal appeared unnoticed by the Indians, but was found so hateful by
Robert and his Irish squire, that they left the place immediately.