APPROPRIATELY enough, on this first day of the calendar spring, I am
warned that the ice is unsafe and that I must stay on the island until
the lake is open water. The natives still venture out, but they know the
look of the thin spots and even they are very cautious. Two men started
over from mainland this morning, axes on shoulder, hounds at heel, but
they turned back at the shore, and the dogs, after stepping daintily on
the dark, spongy crust, turned back also. The middle of the lake is
still hard, but there are ditches of water round the edges of the land.
The ice has heaved up into long fissures stretching away from the points,
the clear green water showing between their open sides, and from this
island to the Blakes’ point there is a great crevasse.
Mary declares that she has known Henry to start off in a sleigh over the
lake when the ice was only three inches thick; when he had to drive fast
to keep from breaking in and when the water spurted up from the holes
made by the horse’s hoofs. But Henry was going for the mail, and when he
has been deprived of news for two or three weeks, the papers become
things to risk one’s life for—which is proof that Henry will never be a
true Many Islander. The rest of us are quite willing to wait until
spring, if need be.
So I am “denned in” once more, and before I am free all sorts of things
will have happened. There will be hundreds of little new calves and
lambs lying beside their mothers in the meadows, and scores of
thin-legged colts running beside the mares in the pastures. I shall also
be shut in when the sap buckets hang in the “sugar bush” and the great
black kettles steam over the fires in the dooryards, and I can only hope
that some of my friends will remember to put my name in the pot, and to
save me some syrup and some maple sugar.
Forced to take my exercise on the island, I find new things everywhere,
as I tramp round and round the trails. The snow under the evergreens is
covered with last year’s dry needles; the hemlocks, pines and cedars are
putting on their new, bright green fringes. Under the rotting leaves,
innumerable little new plants are pushing up, princess fern, wild
strawberry, Canada mayflower, and countless other small weeds and herbs,
whose names I do not know. When the leaves and needles are raked away
each stalk is seen standing in a tiny pool of clear ice.
The spring peepers are whistling in the lowlands, the hylodes blows his
little bagpipe, away in the wood the grouse is “beating his throbbing
drum”—no other description fits that thrilling sound—and the first
honeybees are buzzing out from a clump of birches and winging away over
the lake. Underneath all the other spring sounds is the measured
“tonk-tonk” of the air escaping through the holes in the ice, and the
thin, silver sound of trickling streams.
The red-headed woodpecker is here, his crown a spot of splendid crimson
against the snow. “Ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck,” he cries as he darts from
tree to tree, his white tail coverts flashing in the sunlight.
There has been a deer on the island. Through my dreams one night I heard
sounds of a great commotion, the cries of dogs, the crashing of animals
through the underbrush. In the morning, not ten paces from the kitchen
door, the snow was all trampled, soiled and covered with bunches of long
brown hair. Evidently, the place was the scene of the poor animal’s
agony, for those hairs were soaked with blood.
I grieved, for I have liked to think that the island was a place of
refuge for all hunted things—at least for this one year. But if the dogs
had dragged down the deer and killed him, what had become of the carcass?
I wondered. They could not have eaten it so clean that no trace of skin
or bones remained. I pondered this as I followed the deer’s small,
shapely hoof-prints from the shore and up over the hill and through the
bushes all hung with bunches of tell-tale brown hair. I traced the dogs’
tracks also, as they crossed and recrossed the trail, and following them
came to an old mica pit, hidden far back among the cedars a gash in the
hillside, ten or twelve feet deep and four or five yards long, ringed
round with bushes and with a young birch growing in its depths. Indeed,
I fell headlong into that hidden pitfall, and had time to hope, as I went
down, scrambling over the edge and clutching at branches, that I was not
going to land full on a wounded deer.
All tracks stopped at this pit, and the mystery remained a mystery until
late in the spring, when it leaked out that Andy and George Drapeau had
heard the cries of the hounds, had watched their chance, had come over,
dragged off the dogs, and skinned and carried away the deer.
Now the season for hunting deer lasts from November first to November
fifteenth. Only one deer may be shot by each hunter. No hounds may be
allowed to run at large during the closed season and any dog found
running a deer may be shot on sight, and the person shooting this dog may
not be prosecuted. Thus the month of March is not the time for fresh
venison. Venison out of season is “mountain goat,” to be eaten privately
and without boastfulness. Nor is it safe to display a deer’s spring
coat. But if the Drapeaus had left me that hide, would I have informed
on their dogs? I wonder.
My own stupidity robbed me of the only other deerskin rug that I might
have had. Little John Beaulac offered me a beautiful—and seasonable—one
which I bought and sent to the squaw at Maskinonge for tanning. Some
weeks later I mentioned my good fortune to William Foret.
“Are you having the hair left on?” he asked.
“Hair left on!” I echoed. “Of course. I never heard of having the hair
taken off. I want the skin for a rug.”
“Well, you’d ought to have said so,” said William. “Mostly they tans
them for leather round here. They makes fine moccasins and mittens.”
Sure enough, that Indian woman had patiently scraped off all the hair and
I received a superfine piece of buckskin, which was presented to Little
John, I having no use in the world for moccasins or mittens when I should
return to the city.
The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this island and half
a mile away. From this dock I see their barns in silhouette against the
sunsets. Their land rises in fold on fold of meadow, with here and there
a clump of cedars or maples, then a soft slope and slanting cornfield.
Their house is the typical Canadian log shack, a building about sixteen
by twenty feet, divided by a board partition into a kitchen and a tiny
bedroom. A trap door opens into the cellar; a ladder leads up to the
loft where the boys sleep. There is a shed, built at right angles to the
south wall, and here Mrs. Drapeau keeps her washtub, churn, and milk
separator. The place is always crowded with lounging men; the dogs are
everywhere under foot, and the air is thick with the smoke from many old
pipes.
[Picture: “The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this
Island”]
Herring nets hang from the rafters, harness on the walls; drying skins
are stretched across the uprights. In the muskrat season dozens of
furry, brown rats are nailed, by their tails, to the outside walls, and
inside the house great pails of bloody water, piles of raw skins, and
heaps of rats fill the small room.
The Drapeaus believe in the division of labor, and the work of the family
seems portioned out in a thoroughly satisfactory way. Andy, the eldest
son, is the farmer, Lewis the hunter and George the fisherman.
Mrs. Drapeau, though not an old woman, goes back to the early days of the
settlement and knows all the hardships of pioneer life.
“I mind the time,” she says, “when this land was all wilderness and when
the bears and the wildcats come up to the very door. Once I seen four
bear start over across the lake from Blake’s point to your island. They
swum across the narrows, the old he-bear in the lead, the biggest of the
young next, then the little cub and the mother behind. Me an’ the boys
was in the boat—we had been a berryin’—and when the boys seen them bear
they went wild. They rowed up along the island after them, but they
couldn’t go fast enough with me in the boat, so they landed me and rowed
along to head off the bear, an’ blest if they didn’t turn ’em right back
along the shore to where I was a sittin’. I was right in their tracks.
“‘You come back here an’ git me,’ I yelled, ‘an’ don’t you do another
trick like that agin, the longest day you live.’
“There was I a-hollerin’ an’ the boys a-laughin’ an’ the bear a comin’.
Why, I might ’a’ been kilt.”
“What became of them?” I asked.
“The bears? Oh! they got away. What with me a-screechin’ an’ the boys a
shootin’ they was so scared that they climbed off the far side of the
island, an’ the last we saw of them they was over to Henderson’s Bay,
their heads just out of water.”
Mrs. Drapeau tells of the day when she and her husband came over to their
farm in a little flat-bottomed punt, a calf, the beginning of their herd,
tied foot to foot and bellowing in the stern. It was a hard fight to
clear the land and bring it to some sort of cultivation, and in a few
years Drapeau was killed in a lumber camp, leaving her with four young
children to feed. She describes the long winter nights when she spun,
carded, and wove the cloth that kept their shivering little bodies
covered against the bitter cold, of the backbreaking days in the fields
when she hoed the potatoes and planted the corn, that there might be food
for the hungry mouths, and of the long months when she worked at the
miners’ boarding house, cooking and washing for a score of men.
“I never could have done it if it hadn’t been for my neighbors,” she
said. “They was awful good to me. The men cut my wood every winter as
come an’ ketched me my fish until the boys was big enough to work. Eh!
but I did have the hardest time the year my man died. Scarce was he laid
in the ground when the two biggest boys come back from the school at Loon
Lake with the smallpox. George and Andy had it and they had it fearful
bad. I thought sure the other two would have it too. The health doctor
come up all the way from Queensport an’ nailed a notice on my door,
tellin’ the neighbors to keep away, and he forbid me to cross the lake,
on fifty dollars fine. So there I was, the ice just breakin’ and me shut
in with my children that was a dyin’, as you might say. I didn’t want to
go to no one’s house, nor to have them come to mine, but I had little or
nothin’ to eat on the place, and I feared lest my children should starve.
“But I done the best I could, and one day, when the ice was all broke, I
heard Bill Shelly, the frogger, passin’ in a boat. I hollered to him the
fix I was in and told him to fetch me some goods from the store an’ to
tell my father how we was shut in. Bill brung me the goods and we got
along some way, and when all was over an’ the boys was well, here comes
Robinson, the health doctor, to ask how we was all gettin’ along. He
stood off, twenty paces from the door with his white handkerchief to his
face. I was minded to set the dogs on him.
“‘Why don’t you come in?’ I says, ‘All’s safe now. You needn’t to be
afraid. You shut me in here, with my dyin’ children, and not you ner no
one else come anear me, not even to the shore, to ask did I have so much
as a hundred of flour to keep us alive. How did you know we wasn’t all
starved together? Get you off this land,’ I says, ‘fer you haven’t got
the grace of God in yer heart.’ He got off and I ain’t seen him since,
but I ain’t never fergot him.”
All this she tells me, sitting before the fire, her gray woolen petticoat
turned back over her knees, a black three-cornered shawl laid over her
head and pinned firmly under her pointed chin, She was a beauty once.
She is a pretty old woman still, with her flashing black eyes and silver
hair. Even now, at sixty odd, she milks seven cows, makes all the butter
and cheese, cares for the hens, the turkeys and the pigs, works a small
garden, cooks for the boys, nurses them when they fall ill, and finds
time to make wonderful patchwork quilts. Mrs. Drapeau can tell the names
of all the quilt patterns known to Canada.
I love these patchwork quilts. They speak of thrift and industry and
patience, and of the leisure of a life in which small bits of cloth are
of more value than the time it takes to stitch them together. Who in the
cities has time nowadays to sit and make a patchwork quilt? They bring
up pictures of bedfuls of little children, sleeping snug and warm under
mother’s handiwork, and of contented women sewing in the firelight.
Their names are poetry—woman’s poetry. The Log Cabin stands for home,
the Churn Dasher is food, the Maple Leaf means Canada. The Road to
Dublin, and the Irish Chain speak of the homesick Irish heart, but I like
to imagine that the Prairie Rose was named by some happy woman who loved
the wide and blossoming fields of this new land.