WE are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I. We have come through a
blizzard. For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along
with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons, bobcats, and bears. We have melted
snow for drinking water, because the drifts cut us off from the lake and
buried the waterhole. We have dug our firewood out from under a pile of
wet whiteness. The mouse came through safely too, although the snow
sifted in through the window screen, and covered him, house and all.
The storm began on the second of February, in the evening. All night
long the wind howled with a violence that threatened to lift the house
bodily and deposit it out on the lake. It searched out every crack and
crevice, chilling me to the bone. It wrenched and tore at the heavy
wooden shutters, it tossed and twisted the trees, every now and again
throwing one to the ground with a grinding crash. It whistled, it
moaned; and, with it came the snow, in blinding, whirling gray clouds
that blotted out everything. The lake was obscured, the outlines of the
neighboring islands were lost. I could see only a smother of drifting,
dancing flakes.
The day passed fairly well, for the mere necessity of keeping up the fire
was an occupation in itself.
“This,” said I to Peter, “is the beginning of the true Canadian winter.
I hope it does not stay too long.”
Peter, having been born last summer, has had no experience of any other
winter. No memories of former blizzards troubled him. He hoped that the
bread would hold out.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon Satan inspired me to go out on
the porch, to survey the prospect. Immediately I smelled smoke.
Now, there is but one thing of which I have been afraid, and that is
fire. A blaze started here would inevitably sweep the island and no one
could stop it. I smelled tar paper burning.
“What a pleasant thing it would be to borrow the cherished summer camp of
a friend and burn it down for her! What a safe thing for oneself it
would be to go to sleep in a smoldering house and have it break into
flames in the night.”
I sniffed and sniffed despairingly. I scrambled out into the snow to
examine the chimneys; I burrowed under the porch floor to look at the
foundations; I climbed the ladder to make sure of the roof, and still
that smell of burning tar persisted. I had a horrible misgiving that
there was fire smoldering between the outer and the inner walls.
There was nothing for it but to get to the Blakes and tell them of my
fears. If Henry could assure me that there was no way of a fire’s
starting, I would believe him and go to bed content. If I had not that
assurance, I should be forced to sit up all night waiting to escape into
the snow. Whatever the weather I had to get to the farm; that was all I
could think of.
I dressed as warmly as I could and set forth, through the drifts, to the
edge of the island. I made fair progress until I stepped off the land on
to the lake. Then I began to have some idea of what I, in my ignorance,
had undertaken.
The lake was like the ocean done in snow. The wind had piled great
breakers of snow one behind another, their crests curled over at the top,
exactly like the waves on a beach. Only these breakers were curled over
the opposite way. They turned over toward the wind, not away from it.
One long ridge followed another with a deep, scooped out furrow to
windward. Looking down on the lake from the level of the porch, these
waves did not look very high. When I stepped off into them they came up
to my armpits.
Even then I had not sense to turn back; even then I had no idea of any
real danger. The wind was at my back. I could feel it behind me like a
wall, as I climbed through each succeeding hillock of snow and out across
the intervening three or four yards of level ice. Wave followed wave,
each higher, deeper, more suffocating than the last. Sometimes I could
walk for a few feet on the top of a drift before sinking into its depths.
I scrambled, fell, rolled, crawled, climbed, and thought that I should
never reach the shore. Counting helped me, as I pulled each foot up out
of the clinging mass and set it down a few inches nearer the land.
“One, two, three, four,” I said aloud, timing my steps to the pounding of
my laboring heart. My breath was coming in gasps, a pulse beat in my
temples, my head swam, there was a ringing in my ears as I plodded on,
now with eyes shut.
A thin, washed out moon came out and looked through wisps of ragged
clouds. Its light served only to make the scene more desolate, the
distance from the shore more terrifying. The only idea that remained in
my stupified brain was that I must somehow find strength to go on lifting
heavy feet one after the other; that I must struggle up from each fall,
must breathe deep and keep a quiet mind.
At last I reached the deeper drifts that fringed the shore, skirted the
hidden waterhole, found traces of the cattle tracks, dragged myself along
the path and finally stepped, with the very last remnant of strength, up
on the porch and into the warm bright kitchen. When Mary Blake caught
sight of me, she sat down suddenly and said: “My God!”
They had not attempted to get to the water hole that day, but had given
the cattle melted snow. They had gone only as far as the barn and
henhouses. Even the house dog had stayed indoors.
I gasped out my fears and Henry Blake laughed at them. There was no way,
he said, for a fire to have started and if one had caught, the house
would have been flat to the ground long before I had crossed the lake.
I heard him with disgust. If that was the way my panic looked, it was
high time for me to return to my home on the island. I rose with much
dignity and walked off to the shore, before the Blakes had adjusted their
minds to the move.
This time the wind was in my face, making the going ten times harder than
before. About forty yards out from shore I stopped and turned my back to
the blast to catch my breath, and there was Henry, dressed in his great
fur coat, striding out after me and looking for all the world like a bear
on its hind legs.
When I saw his thickset figure struggling against the gale it seemed
suddenly a hatefully inconsiderate thing to have brought him away from
his warm fire and out into the storm and I called:
“Go back, Mr. Blake. There is no fire. Don’t attempt to come after me.”
But Henry only stumped on.
“I know there’s nothing burning,” he retorted. “We’re a long way more
worried about you than we are about the camp. You might get confused and
lose your life in this storm.”
On he went ahead of me and I was thankful to follow humbly in his
footsteps.
We reached the house, and, as we stood in the warm room fighting for
breath, I said:
“Mr. Blake, there is some Scotch here. Will you drink some?” And Henry
said he would.
After that I was content to stay indoors until he came with the horses
and broke the tracks through the island.
Such heaps of snow lay piled on the lake and in the woods that it should
have taken months for it to disappear; but in three days there came a
thaw and melted it all away.
The thaw came not a day too soon, for the sixteenth was the time set for
the long anticipated sawing bee at the farm. During January Henry Blake
and Jimmie had been felling trees and dragging them to the house in
preparation for the arrival of the perambulating sawmill, that goes from
farm to farm as soon as the ice will hold. There was a pile of logs, ten
feet high by thirty feet long piled butt end to in the dooryard. When a
farmer announces a bee his neighbors gather from far and near, leaving
their own work to help him put through the particular job in hand. He is
expected to attend their bees in return. The farmer’s wife, who earns a
high seat in heaven if ever woman did, works for days beforehand, cooking
for the ten or a dozen hungry men who will come down on her for dinner,
supper and, perhaps, breakfast, with a night’s lodging thrown in.
Mary Blake had made bread of the lightest and finest, had killed
chickens, taken fish out of brine, and pork from the barrel; had made
cakes and pies; had brought out pickles and preserves, and when I arrived
she was creaming carrots and onions and boiling the inevitable potatoes.
It was a cold, gray day, with the surface of the lake awash. As I
splashed my way through the water, ankle-deep on the ice, I heard the
saw, clear and high, like the note of a violin. There were ten men
working at the bee. The little gasoline engine was drawn up on a bobsled
at the kitchen door, and even as early as ten o’clock it had eaten out a
big hole in the side of the stack of logs. William Foret and Jock
McDougal were at the machine shoveling snow into the boiler, William in a
bright blue jersey and with a squirrel skin cap set at an angle over his
dark, eager face. Henry Blake was at the wheel, to take the sawed-off
chunks from the feeders and throw them to the pile. The rhythm of his
movements was exact. A reach toward the wheel, a heave, a toss over his
shoulder to the ever-increasing pile of chunks and a return to the
wheel—all this at the rate of a chunk every three seconds. This
position, being the hardest work, is always taken by the host at a bee.
Little John Beaulac, Tom Jackson and Uncle Dan Cassidy lifted the logs
and carried them to the saw, where Black Jack held them against the
blade. There were two or three extra men standing ready to take up the
work when one or more should be exhausted.
In the midst of the fray a sleigh was sighted, far out on the ice. It
was bringing Jim McNally from far back of the mica mine. He had heard of
the bee and had come, at a venture, for fear that Henry might be
“shorthanded.” He brought a pail of fresh eggs for Mary Blake and a
great sack of turnips. There was a mighty skurry and mystery about
slipping a bag of salt fish under the seat of the sleigh, for him to find
when he reached home.
At half past eleven the men trooped in to dinner, with many facetious
remarks about the strength of their appetites and the advisability of
letting the dirtiest man wash first.
After a very short smoke time they were at work again and I sat at the
kitchen window, watching the saw bite through the big logs. The men’s
rhythmic movements, the swift interplay of the bright colors of their
jerseys, the long scream of the toothed blade, all lulled me to vacuity
of mind. Long after dark, when I was back at home, I could hear the
sound of the wheel coming across the lake. That song of the saw tells me
just where the mill is working for the day. Going out on the porch I can
tell whether the bee is at Blake’s, Drapeau’s, Foret’s or the mines.
The Blakes are very up to date in their use of the gasoline engine. Many
of the farmers still use the old treadmill, where four teams of horses
walk round and round all day, turning the wheel. Invited to a bee at the
Jacksons’, the other day, I took a camera along, for a picture of the old
tread will soon be a treasured possession. The men had paused in their
work in the kindest way to allow themselves to be “took.” I was walking,
with great dignity, down the slippery hillside, when a treacherous bit of
ice was my undoing. I fell and my demoralization was complete.
Camera flew one way, walking staff another, arms and legs spread out to
the four points of the compass, as I went shooting down that hill. When
I had gathered my scattered members and my wits together, and was
scrambling up with the foolish grin of the newly fallen, I looked
appealingly at the sawing gang, expecting to hear the inevitable laugh.
Not a face did I see. Every man’s back was turned. The picture was
taken amid a sounding silence.
Commenting on that display of good manners to Uncle Dan, I said
fervently: “Never in my life did I see such perfect breeding. It is
almost impossible to help laughing when anyone falls, but not one of
those men smiled. I never expected such politeness.”
Uncle Dan’s Irish eyes twinkled.
“You’d ought to have heard what the b’ys said when you left,” he
observed.
Pondering that cryptic remark, I am inclined to think that it is just as
well that I do not know all that is being said of me in the work gangs
and around the kitchen fires of Many Islands.