WILD geese flying over, cold mornings, colder nights, warn me that it is
time to lay in supplies of firewood, oil and food against the coming of
winter. Last evening a laden rowboat passed the island, going eastward
under the Moon of Travelers. In the stern were a stove, a chair, a
coffeepot, a frying pan, a great pile of bedding, and, surmounting all, a
fiddle. The man at the oars threw me a surly “Good night,” and turning,
looked back at me with a scowl. It was Old Bill Shelly, the hermit of
the countryside—trapper, frogger, netter of fish, and general
ne’er-do-well. He has built log shacks all round the shores—little,
one-room affairs, filled with a miscellaneous assortment of nets, guns,
dogs, all forlorn and filthy past description. When one becomes
uninhabitable, he leaves it and moves on to the next, but at the approach
of cold weather he always goes into winter quarters at Blue Bay, and his
flitting, like the flitting of the other wild things, means that all
nature is getting ready for “_le grand frête_.”
Poor Shelly! his is the only hostile glance that I have encountered in my
wanderings. Even Old Kate, the witch at Les Rapides, has smiled at me.
“Mind Old Kate,” the neighbors caution me. “If she ever crosses her
fingers at you, it’s all day with you then.”
But when I met her in the road she spoke in quite a friendly way.
“Cold weather coming,” she said. “Get in your wood.”
Doubtless she thinks me another as crazy as herself.
So I must set about getting enough wood to last until the January sawing,
and must pack eggs and butter against the time when hens stop laying and
cows go dry, for there is no shop nearer than Sark, six miles away, and
even if one could reach it, through the winds on the lake, or the drifts
in the roads, there would be no butter or eggs to buy.
Tom Jackson, at the far end of the lake, has consented to sell me eight
cords of hard wood; but to bring it to the island we must hire the big
scow that ferries mica from the mines, and must have Foret’s motor boat
to tug it.
This life is a great education as regards the relative values of things.
Wood and water, oil and food, are seen here in their true perspective.
Already I have learned to rate the wealth of a family by the size of the
woodpile, that stands, like a rampart in the dooryard, for I know what a
big stock of logs means in thrift, foresight, and hard labor. I know
what it cost to get my own wood to my hand.
City folk can pass a loaded woodcart without special emotion, indeed,
half the time they do not see it, so concerned are they with the price of
theater tickets, or the cut of the season’s gowns. But I shall never
look at one without seeing again a great scow moving slowly on the blue
bosom of a lake, and I shall smell the delicious odor of fresh-cut maple,
beech, and cedar, far sweeter than the breath of any summer garden.
Ah me! How prosaic will seem the city’s conveniences of pipes and
furnaces as compared with the daily adventure of carrying in the logs,
and battling down a windswept trail to dip the pails into a pit of
crystal ice water! Never again shall I turn on the spigot in a bathroom
without a swift vision of that drift-filled path through the woods that
leads out on the lake, to where the upright stake marks the water hole,
hidden under last night’s fall of snow.
To one who has only to push a button or strike a match to have a room
flooded with light, the problem of illumination is not perplexing. Here,
the five-gallon oil tank must be ferried across the lake to Blake’s farm;
whence it must be again sent by boat to Jackson’s shore, and there loaded
on a wagon for Sark. Back it must come to the shore, to Blake’s, and to
the island storehouse—all this taking from ten days to two weeks,
according to when Henry Blake is sending in to the store.
The city postman is no very heroic figure, but little Jimmie Dodd is, as
he beats his way across the lake, and through the high drifts on the
island, his slender body bowed under a great bag of mail, his small face
blue with the cold. Letters mean something to us here. They leave the
train at Glen Avon, they come by stage to Sark, then they follow the oil
tank route over water and wood trails to me, and it takes as long to get
a letter from “The States” as to hear from England, “The Old Country.”
To-day a shrill, childish yell sounded from the water. There was Jimmie,
in a boat, with a great basket of eggs. He was fending carefully off
from shore, as the high wind threatened to dash his fragile cargo against
the rocks. Before those eggs were loaded into the skiff a woman had
walked five miles with them on her back. I spent a long, happy
afternoon, standing them upright on their small ends in boxes of salt.
When they were all packed, twenty-four dozens of eggs seemed a great
number for one woman to eat, even if she expected to have a long winter
in which to eat them.
The wood is all stacked on the porch, but it was hard work to get it
there. The scow docked on a beach at the far side of the island, there
the logs were gayly thrown ashore, and there Tom Jackson washed his hands
of all further responsibility concerning them. The duck-shooting had
commenced; no man could be found to draw that wood through the island to
the house, so there it stayed.
At length William Foret came to my aid and promised to haul it, and I was
jubilant. I did not then know that Foret will promise any one anything.
No man can promise more delightfully than he. He is always perfectly
willing, apparently, to help anyone out of any dilemma, he recognizes no
difficulty in the way, and to hear him make light of one’s most pressing
problem is to come to the conclusion that there is no problem there. So
when William promised to get the wood to the house I believed him and was
content.
Meanwhile the days went on, each colder than the last. Each morning I
toiled to and fro from the beach, carrying enough wood, two sticks at a
time, to last the day. Each evening I made a pilgrimage along the shore
to Foret’s to ask why tarried the wheels of his chariot. Sometimes he
was at home and greeted me with a charming cordiality, more often he was
away, fishing or hunting or cutting down a bee-tree. Always he was
coming to the island the very next day. The Forets were cut to the heart
to learn that I was carrying my own wood. But for this reason or that,
William would have been there long ago. I was not to worry at all. That
fuel would be stacked before the snow fell.
I always started to Foret’s with wrath in my heart, I always left there
soothed and comforted, and by the time I had eaten supper in the boat,
had watched the sunset over the islands, and had listened to the bell on
Blake’s old red cow, I would go to bed really believing that William was
coming the next day.
Sure enough, he did appear one afternoon and attacked the woodpile with a
very fury of energy, trundling load after load up the trail for perhaps
an hour. Suddenly he sat down his barrow and gazed fixedly out across
the lake.
“There, I heard my gun,” he observed. “It’s two fellers from Glen Avon,
come to have me cut them down a bee-tree. I told the woman”—meaning Mrs.
Foret—“to take the little rifle and shoot three times if they come, an’
that’s her. I got to go.”
“Oh, Mr. Foret!” I expostulated, almost with tears, “have you the heart
to leave this wood? Here, you take my pistol and shoot for them to come
over and lend a hand with this work.”
But William was already climbing into his boat.
“It’s the little rifle,” he said, sentimentally, “I’ve got to go,” and
away he chugged, leaving me raging on the shore.
After all he did come back, and the very next day, Mrs. Foret and little
Emmie, their adopted child, with him. We all carried wood, Jean and I in
baskets, little Emmie, one stick at a time in her small arms. By evening
it was all stacked and we were exhausted. There it stands, eight feet
high, all round the house and the place looks like a stockade.
After supper William cleaned and oiled the famous pistol; we women washed
the dishes and little Emmie skirmished about, getting in every one’s way,
while Jean Foret shrieked dire threats of the laying on of a “gad” that
one knew would never be applied. The crows flew home across the sky.
The child crept close to William’s side and fell asleep. He moved the
heavy little head very gently, until it rested more comfortably against
his great shoulder.
“Our little girl would have been just the age of this one, if she had
lived,” he said.
There was a sudden hush, while I remembered the Foret baby that had died
at birth, when Jennie had almost died too, and when Dr. Le Baron had said
that she could never have another.
Presently we gathered barrow, baskets and sleeping child, and I watched
their boat go off, threading its way between the islands and points, a
little moving speck on the amber water.
Across, on the shore, Joey Drapeau was plowing for the fall rye. His
voice, bawling threatening and slaughter to the steaming horses, came
across to me, softened by the distance. It was Saturday night. Soon the
work would be done for another week. Then the men would go out on the
lake, jerking along in their cranky little flat-bottomed punts. They
would sing under the stars, girls’ voices mingling with their harsher
tones.
Little fiery clouds broke off from the sides of the crater, into which
the sun had dropped, and were drifting across the quiet sky. A long
finger of light crossed over the island and ran like a torch along the
eastern horizon, turning the treetops to flame color and burnished
copper, and the upland meadows to gold.
On the island the woods were dark, and somewhere in their depths a
screech owl’s cry shuddered away into silence.