GOOD FRIDAY, a heavy fall of snow and winter come again. The ground is
white, the sky dull gray, the lake a dark, bluish green flecked with
windrows of snow. It is more than a week since I have walked on the ice.
It bids fair to be two weeks before I can cross in a boat. At this rate
the ice will never break—I had to chop out the water hole again this
morning. This waiting for the ice to go out is like waiting for a child
to be born, and it seems almost as solemn. It induces a calm,
philosophic, not to say fatalistic, viewpoint. You can’t hurry it, you
can’t stop it, you can’t do anything at all about it. You can only wait.
Again, as in the fall when the ice was forming, there is that strange
blanket of silence over the island. There’s not a rustle in the dry
leaves, not a bird’s voice, not even the scraping of a hanging bough.
The ice field is growing darker, wetter, and cracking into long lines
that form geometric figures—squares, triangles, trapezoids—until the
lake’s surface looks like a gigantic spider’s web. For movement there is
only the water along the shores, creeping up over the stones.
The evening was cold and gray, with a rising wind that whistled up the
rain. In the night came both the former and the latter rains and all
other rains between; then Easter Day, warm and blue and beautiful. As
the Easter lesson sank into my heart, along with the still beauty of sky
and sun and waking life, the first butterfly, emblem of the resurrection,
came forth from his winter sleeping place and fluttered to and fro among
the yellow tassels of the birches.
The years remaining may be many or few for me, but to life’s end I shall
hope to keep some measure of the joy of that one Easter day. I pray that
I may always remember the tender blue of the arching sky, the white of
the wisps of floating cloud, the gray purple of the spring haze lying
over the forests; its silence and its peace. Looking out over the
breaking ice, I remembered the story of two boys who lost their lives in
the lake only last summer. They were forlorn little fellows, held in
bondage by a stupid, tyrannical father. They had never seen anything
that boys love—neither a circus, nor a picture, nor had ever heard a
band. They had never been allowed to go even to Frontenac, the county
seat, ten miles away. All they knew about was work and heavy sleep and
now and then a beating. But they were boys after all, and one bright day
they slipped away from the harvest field and went to the lake to go
afishing. Hearing footsteps and fearing their father’s anger, they tried
to escape it. The younger boy jumped into a rotting punt at the shore
and pushed off on the water. The elder hid behind a rock.
Out on the lake the old punt filled and began to sink. The little
fellow, seeing that he was going down and knowing that he could not swim,
called out:
“Good-by, Charley; Good-by, good-by,” his piping child’s voice sang over
the water.
The elder boy heard him and plunged in to his aid. Both went down, and
when, at last, the grappling hooks brought up the bodies, the brothers
were locked in one another’s arms.
A commonplace story, isn’t it? Such accidents happen almost every
day—somewhere. There’s nothing at all in it but childish joy in freedom,
dread of punishment, terror, then love and sacrifice, and, crowning all,
heroic death. I think of them not as “saints in glory” but as happy
youngsters, trudging, hand in hand the streets of the Eternal City;
seeing, hearing, tasting all the joys that life denied them here.
Resigned to the thought of days and weeks of solitude, I was surprised by
the sound of a long halloo coming from the direction of Blake’s Point.
It was Henry, standing on the extreme end of his land and calling over to
me. His was the first voice I had heard for days.
“Come down to your point,” he yelled.
Scrambling through the underbrush, sliding from rock to rock, plowing
through bogs, wading through patches of snow, I reached the shore, to see
Jimmie Dodd, trotting cautiously across the ice dragging his little
hand-sled, while Henry directed his way from the point. The sled held
loaves of bread, a pat of fresh butter—a great bag of mail and a box of
candy and fruit—the Easter greeting from home. The water was flowing all
round the shore; Jimmie could not come within many feet of the island,
but I waded out on the shelving sand and Jimmie crept as near the edge of
the ice as he dared and tossed the bags to me across the open water.
Then he trotted back again to the farm and I returned to the house to
enjoy my feast alone.
Day followed day, slipping by swiftly, silently. The first phœbe has
come back and is twitching his tail and screaming his “Phœbe, phœbe,
phœbe,” all day long.
Across the sky, in V-shaped wedges, the geese are flying over. From ever
so far I can hear their “honk-honk,” telling me why the April moon is the
Goose moon.
The woodchuck, that lives in a hole by the sundial, comes out and waddles
slowly down to the lake’s edge to dip his black muzzle in the water. He
turns his rat’s face up to the sky, glancing hurriedly from side to side,
his little pig eyes rolling, the white ring of hairs surrounding his
snout standing like a ruff. He is so fat that his short legs hardly lift
his red-brown breast off the ground, and his bushy tail drags as he goes.
He walks with a rolling waddle, like a bear. His gray-brown coat is dry
and dusty.
There are hundreds of wide-open clam shells lying on the sand under the
water, pearl side up. They are the shape and almost the size of the
soles of a pair of baby’s shoes. When I turned over the skiff, that has
lain on the shore all winter, there was a muskrat’s nest under it. The
animal had scooped out a hole in the beach, and a pile of clam shells
showed that he had feasted well.
But though all these other small animals are coming out, I am forlorn,
for Peter, the rabbit, has disappeared! Up and down the island I have
gone, calling him, but he does not come hopping to my feet. No one will
acknowledge having shot him; indeed, it would be a hard-hearted hunter
that would kill so gentle and so trusting a creature. So either the
hounds got him or he felt the call of the spring and wandered away to the
woods full of fresh green. I prefer to think he did that, but I miss him
cruelly.
Here, as in Kipling’s Jungle, spring is the time of new smells. All
winter there were some good smells—the odor of far-off forest fires; the
fragrance of fresh-cut logs; the not unpleasing, pungent scent of Blake’s
cow stable, that came over the ice to me on the crisp, frosty air, but
now there is a very riot of perfume. The rotting leaves, the barks of
trees, the swamps and even the rocks themselves, give forth an incense.
The poplars and the birches shake out sweetness from their waving
tassels, the new green fringes of the evergreens are fragrant, soon will
come the odors from wild cherry, basswood, and wild grape in flower, and
the scents of the new ferns, and then I shall go quite wild with delight
and shall long to shout my joy to heaven, as Rufus, the red squirrel, is
doing now. Far out on a birch limb, in the sun, he is clucking and
chirping away, his plumy tail waving, his whole little tense,
rust-colored body jerking as he gives tongue to his spring ecstasy.
Rufus is not always so harmlessly employed. He and the phœbes wage
perpetual war over a nestful of eggs under the eaves. One or other of
the small householders must stand ever on guard against the red robber
that goes like a flash along the beam. What fluttering of wings, what
scampering of tiny feet, what chattering there is! But the birds will
win, they put the squirrel to flight every time.
Once again I heard a call from Blake’s point. This time it was Mary, out
looking for new-born lambs. Her voice, borne on the wet wind, came clear
over the water between us:
“How are you getting along?”
“Oh, not too bad,” I shouted in the vernacular.
“We think the ice will go out this week.”
“Never,” I screamed. “At this rate it will last until June.”
“Well, I don’t think it. We tried to get over to Jackson’s yesterday,
and the middle of the lake was opening so fast we could not make it.”
“I’ll go to the shore every day at noon, and let you see that I am
alive,” I promised.
“All right,” she answered. “Hang out a white cloth if there’s anything
really wrong, and we’ll try to get over to you somehow.”
And away went Mary, a lamb in her arms, the ewe bleating at her heels.
Then came a day of warm rain, followed by a high wind from the south,
that drove the breaking ice before it and piled great masses of
glistening white fragments on all the beaches. And, sure enough, on the
next Sunday, the eleventh, Henry Blake and Jimmie Dodd came across in a
boat, the first I had seen in the water for four months.
That morning, when I looked out, instead of the solid floor of ice that I
had seen so long, there was a great stretch of dark and tumbling water,
over which two white gulls wheeled and dipped. For an instant I was
startled. I felt as though the island had somehow slipped its moorings
and was being washed away. Then I realized that the ice was gone and, so
far as I am concerned, gone forever, and that the winter, with its bitter
nights, its long quiet days, its flash of sunlight on silver surfaces,
became as the memory of a dream.