Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: "The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple told
all the tale."--_p._ 20]
DICK'S DESERTION
A Boy's Adventures
in Canadian Forests
A TALE OF THE EARLY SETTLEMENT OF ONTARIO
By
MARJORIE L. C. PICKTHALL
WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS
Toronto:
The Musson Book Company, Limited.
1905
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. IN THE HEART OF THE WOODS
II. THE FALL OF THE TREE
III. FRIENDS INDEED
IV. A DAY IN THE WOODS
V. A BACKWOODS CHRISTMAS
VI. THE CALL OF THE FOREST
VII. A MESSAGE FROM THE WANDERER
VIII. A WOOD'S ADVENTURE
IX. ON THE PRAIRIE
X. IN THE GRIP OF THE STORM
XI. BACK TO STEPHANIE
XII. TO A GOODLY HERITAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
"The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple told all the
tale." . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"'If I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes, I could not leave Stephanie.'"
"They began to sing the old carols their mother had taught them long
before."
"He flung out his arm, circled with savage ornaments--flung it out with
a wild gesture, and began to speak."
"He held out a tiny package, wrapped in birch-bark, with an inquiring
glance towards her."
"'For pity's sake, let me alone!' Dick pleaded. 'Go on and leave me.'"
"'Dick! Dick! Where are you?'"
DICK'S DESERTION:
A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests.
CHAPTER I.
In the Heart of the Woods.
It was early fall, and all the world was golden. Golden seemed the
hazy warmth of the sky; golden were the willow leaves and the delicate
foliage of the birches; even the grass, pale from the long heat of the
summer, had taken on a tinge of the all-pervading colour. Far as the
eye could reach, the woods and uplands were bright with gold, relieved
only by the deep sombre green of pines and hemlocks. Save for these,
it seemed a country that some gracious Midas had touched, turning
everything to ethereal, elfin gold.
The Midas-touch had even included the little log-cabin and its untidy
clearing, for broad-disced sunflowers were scattered over the neglected
garden, and between them bloomed late goldenrod, which had crept in
from the wilds outside; and a small patch of ground was covered with
shocks of Indian corn, roughly bound together, yellowing also beneath
the influence of sun and frost.
The land was beautiful to look upon--Ontario scenery, marred little by
the works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious Majesty
George IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing were
picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack
of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the
garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up
into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and
seeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrels
would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the
birds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and left
through their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulus
vines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and the
few shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few of
these fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother and
kill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of the
woman who had cherished them.
In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees,
heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a little
hollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy was
lying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of the
forests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim his
English birth. His clothes were of very coarse homespun, and he wore a
pair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudy
Indian-work of beads and dyed grasses. The whole clearing was crying
out for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from the
encroaching wilderness; but this sturdy lad lay there with all the busy
idleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark.
He seemed a fit occupant for the tangled garden and the half-cultivated
fields.
Five years before, a certain Captain Underwood, flying from financial
disaster in England, had come to Canada with his wife and his two
children, Dick and Stephanie. There was roving blood in the
Underwoods, so perhaps it was not surprising that the unfortunate
captain should have ranged farther afield in Ontario than others had
then done; for he left the settlements and the surveyed townships
behind him, and struck farther north, wishing to get as far away as
possible from the world that had brought him ruin. In the friendly
forests, a little beyond the region where the white settlers had
penetrated, but not entirely out of touch with them, he found a natural
clearing, and here he had built his tiny cabin and roughly marked out
his small fields. Here, perhaps, the poor man, knowing nothing of the
country, had thought to live a sort of idyllic hermit existence. But
he found it very different. It was a terrible life to which he had
brought his wife and children; and when Mrs. Underwood died, three
years after leaving England, he blamed himself for her death. Most of
his heart he buried with her in that lonely grave under the mighty
maples on the hill; and afterwards he turned to the wild life around
him as to his only help and comfort.
But he had no longer the courage to fight the farmer's fight, the
primitive conflict between man's skill and nature's strength. Soon the
garden that his wife had loved became overgrown with native flowers and
weeds. Soon the bushes and the grass crept inwards over his fields.
Soon his son and daughter shot up from childhood to youth, perfectly
healthy in their hard life. Stephanie was fifteen years old, and being
as strong as a young lynx, she did all the work of the log-cabin. She
made a rough sort of corn cake which served for bread, she prepared the
endless pea-soup and pork, she washed and mended and even made the
clothes. Dick helped his father, or idled away on little hunting
expeditions of his own, from which he returned happy and rarely
empty-handed.
It was a strange life for a boy and girl, carefully and lovingly
brought up amid English comforts and ease, to lead. Their nearest
neighbours, the Collinsons, with whom Captain Underwood did most of his
little trading, were twenty miles distant. Kindly Mrs. Collinson had
offered Stephanie a home when Mrs. Underwood died, but the girl had
chosen to stay with her father and Dick, and be the one influence which
restrained that little household in the woods from lapsing into the
happy-go-lucky sort of savagery to which even the most cultivated are
liable in a new land.
I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the life
which was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swamp
and bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thriving
towns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those first
settlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to which
the land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon it
rather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living,
than as a goodly country given them that they and their children and
their children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoy
it--and fight and die for it if need were. All their love and
remembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but,
willy-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada.
They fought against hardships and privations that were almost
incredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the New
World to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly of
making provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil went
to the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wrought
indeed better than they knew.
No prophetic vision of the mighty future came to Dick Underwood as he
lay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety years
ago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capable
to his fading memories of his English home, even as his father
did--laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place.
But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward in
vast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of his
adoption--not the possibilities of trade and agriculture, which seldom
attract youth--but to the more alluring chances of those great Unknown
Lands, to the wonder and mystery of the Indian-haunted North.
He did not put this feeling into words. Indeed, he did not know how to
describe it, or what it was. But it is written in the history books
that in Talon's time the welfare of the French colony was endangered by
the number of young men who took to the woods, obeying the "call of the
wild." It was this that moved Dick Underwood. It moved him then as he
lay lazily in the sweet, new-fallen leaves, so deftly shaping that
little canoe of birch bark; and he wished, with a half smile at
himself, that it might turn out to be a fairy canoe, suddenly growing
to full size, and bearing him away on some new risen fairy river, into
the land of his dreams. "But if I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes,"
he said to himself with a sigh, "I could not leave Stephanie."
[Illustration: "'IF I HAD FIFTY RIVERS AND FIFTY CANOES, I COULD NOT
LEAVE STEPHANIE.'"]
It was the old struggle, though he did not know it--the voice of the
wilderness striving against the voice of the home ties. This time the
voice of the home ties sang in triumph at thought of Stephanie; but
there comes a time occasionally in a man's life when his mother the
woman may mean less to him for a space than his mother the earth.
But with Dick the crisis had not yet come; and he scrambled to his feet
very contentedly, and proceeded to a little marsh close at hand, where
all sorts of fair swamp plants grew--feathery green things, and
jewelled touch-me-not, and jacks-in-the-pulpit, and long-stemmed
violets in season. For the tiny canoe was to be filled with little
ferns and soft mosses as a gift for Stephanie, and that thought of the
fairy river was forgotten.
This important business attended to, he turned slowly and reluctantly
towards home. But the woods were full of sights and sounds that
appealed to every half-awakened instinct in the boy's soul.
A small, brown, hawk-faced owl lay stupidly at the mouth of a sort of
tunnel it had made for itself in the long, bleached grasses. So
perfectly did it resemble a piece of decayed and mottled wood that even
Dick's keen eye almost passed it over, until it sprang up from this
cosy day-time retreat, and blundered away among the trees.
Dragon-flies, unlike their brethren of the earlier year, in that they
were clad in crimson and russet plush, and not in green and pink and
sapphire mail, took their flashing flights among the faded undergrowth.
The air was warm and golden still, but a keen nose might detect in it a
threatening of frost; and the fallen leaves yielded a delicate
fragrance as of damp earth and new mown hay.
A chipmunk ran down a tree trunk and scolded him viciously, and then
fled before him to another tree, where it awaited him angrily,
evidently under the impression that he was following it with evil
designs upon its winter stores. In this way it preceded him to the
edge of the corn-field, and finally vanished into a hole in a half-dead
pine that stood near the clearing, putting out its head once more with
a last outpouring of abuse. "Oh! little fellow," said Dick, "I am
afraid your nuts will be wasted, for to-morrow we chop the tree down.
But I 've promised Stephanie that first I 'll climb up and poke you out
with a stick--and get bitten for my pains, I suppose, you little
spitfire. So you need not be afraid you 'll be killed." He ran a hand
over the smooth bark, blue-black, mottled with fragile green lichens,
with no thought of its beauty. "Half rotten," he said to himself, "and
it ought to go down as easily as a bulrush." And he turned away, his
mind full of the fascinating way in which the bright blades of the axes
would bite deep through that beautiful dark bark into the
sweet-smelling white wood beneath; of how the chips would scatter and
fly, and lie like creamy shreds of ivory underfoot; of the tremor that
would seem to shake the neighbouring woods at the sound of the falling
of the tree.