The light of a cloudless March morning pervaded the circumscribed
landscape when the inmates of the cabin were astir again. Not many
moments later, a sudden booming report broke the stillness and rolled in
sullen echoes back and forth from mountains and forested shores.
"The sunrise gun to Fort Ti," Job said, in reply to the questioning look
of his guests. "They hain't no other use for their powder now."
A fainter report, and its fainter answering echoes, boomed through the
breathless air.
"An' that's Crown P'int Fort, ten mile furder down the lake. They help
to keep us from getting lonesome up here in the woods." And, indeed,
there was a comfortable assurance of human neighborhood and helpful
strength in these mighty voices that shook the primeval forest with
their dull thunder.
"I don't sca'cely ever go nigh the forts," Job continued. "I don't like
them reg'lars an' their toppin' ways."
After fortifying themselves with a breakfast, in no wise differing from
their last meal, the travellers set forth on the last stage of their
journey, Job volunteering to accompany them upon it, and see them
established in their new home. They had not gone far on their way down
the narrow channel of the creek when it brought them to the broad,
snow-clad expanse of the lake, lying white and motionless between its
rugged shores, bristling with the forest, save where, on their left, was
a stretch of cleared ground, in the midst of which stood, like a grim
sentinel, grown venerable with long years of steadfast watch, the gray
battlements of Fort Ticonderoga.
Here and there could be seen red-coated soldiers, bright dots of color
in the colorless winter landscape, and, above them, lazily flaunting in
the light breeze, shone the red cross of England. The old ranger gave
the flag the tribute of a military salute, while his heart swelled with
pride at sight of the banner for which he had fought, and which he had
followed almost to where it now waved, in the humiliation of
Abercrombie's defeat, and here had seen it planted in Amherst's
triumphant advance.
In Seth Beeman's breast it stirred no such thrill. It had no such
associations with deeds in which he had borne a part, and to him, as to
many another of his people, it was becoming a symbol of oppression
rather than an object of pride. To Nathan's boyish eyes it was a most
beautiful thing, without meaning, but of beauty. His heart beat quick as
the rattling drums and the shrill notes of the fife summoned the
garrison to parade.
The oxen went at a brisker pace on the unobstructed surface of the lake,
and the travellers soon came to a little creek not far up which was the
clearing that Seth Beeman had made during the previous summer. In the
midst of it stood the little log house that was henceforth to be their
home, the shed for the cattle, and a stack of wild hay, inconspicuous
among log heaps almost as large as they, looking anything but homelike
with the smokeless chimney and pathless approach. Nor, when entered, was
the bare interior much more cheerful.
A fire, presently blazing on the hearth, soon enlivened it. The floor
was neatly swept with a broom fashioned of hemlock twigs by Job's ready
hands. The little stock of furniture was brought in. The pewter
tableware was ranged on the rough corner shelves. Ruth added here and
there such housewifely touches as only a woman can give. The change,
wrought in so brief a space, seemed a magical transformation. What two
hours ago was but a barren crib of rough, clay-chinked logs, was now a
furnished living-room, cozy with rude, homelike comfort.
Then the place was hanselled with its first regularly prepared dinner,
the first meal beneath its roof at which a woman had presided. Job,
loath to leave the most humanized habitation that he had seen for
months, set forth for his own lonely cabin. Except the unneighborly
inmates of the Fort, these were his nearest neighbors, and to them, for
his old comrade's sake, he felt a closer friendship than had warmed his
heart for many a year.
Though it was March, winter lacked many days of being spent in this
latitude, and, during their continuance, Seth was busy with his axe,
widening the clearing with slow, persistent inroads upon the surrounding
forest, and piling the huge log heaps for next spring's burning. Nathan
gave a willing and helpful hand to the piling of the brush, and took
practical lessons in that accomplishment so necessary to the
pioneer--the woodsman's craft. Within doors his mother, with little
Martha for her companion, plied cards and spinning-wheel, with the
frugal store of wool and flax brought from the old home. So their busy
hands kept loneliness at bay, even amid the dreariness of the wintry
wilderness.
At last the south wind blew with a tempered breath. Hitherto unseen
stumps appeared above the settling snow, the gray haze of woods purpled
with a tinge of spring, and the caw of returning crows pleased their
ears, tired of the winter's silence.
Seth tapped the huge old maples with a gouge, and the sap, dripping from
spouts of sumac wood, was caught in rough-hewn troughs. From these it
was carried in buckets on a neck-yoke to the boiling place, an
open-fronted shanty. Before it the big potash kettle was hung on a tree
trunk, so balanced on a stump that it could be swung over or off the
fire at will. Sugaring brought pleasure as well as hard labor to Nathan.
There were quiet hours spent in the shanty with his father, with little
to do but mend the fire and watch the boiling sap walloping and
frothing, half hidden beneath the clouds of steam that filled the woods
with sweet odor.
Sometimes Job joined them and told of his lonely scouts in the Ranger
service, and of bush fights with Indians and their French allies, and of
encounters with wild beasts, tales made more impressive in their
relation by the loneliness of the campfire, with the circle of wild
lights and shadows leaping around it in the edge of the surrounding
darkness, out of which came, perhaps from far away, the howl of a wolf
or the nearer hoot of the great horned owl.
Sometimes Martha spent part of a day in camp with her brother, helping
in womanly ways that girls so early acquired in the training of those
times, when every one of the household must learn helpfulness and
self-reliance. But the little sister enjoyed most the evenings when the
syrup was taken to the house and sugared off. The children surfeited
themselves with sugar "waxed" on snow, and their parents, and Job, if he
chanced to be there, shared of this most delicious of the few backwoods
luxuries, and the five made a jolly family party.
One morning, when the surface of the coarse-grained old snow was covered
with one of the light later falls, known as "sugar snow," as Seth and
his son were on their way to the sugar place, the latter called his
father's attention to a large track bearing some resemblance to the
imprint of a naked human foot, and tending with some meandering in the
same direction that they were going.
"Why," said Seth, at the first glance, "it's a bear, an' if he's been to
the camp, I'm afraid he's done mischief, for they're meddlesome
creatur's. But there wa'n't much left there for him to hurt," he added,
after taking a brief mental inventory of the camp's contents.
"I can't think of nothing but the hunk of pork we had to keep the big
kittle from b'ilin' over," said Nathan, "and a little mite of syrup that
we left in the little kittle 'cause there was more'n we could carry home
in the pails."
"He's welcome to that if he's left the pork; we hain't no pork to feed
bears."
Now, as they drew near the camp, they heard a strange commotion in its
neighborhood; a medley of smothered angry growls, impatient whines,
unwieldy floundering, and a dull thud and clank of iron, the excited
squalling of a party of jays, and the chattering jeers of a red
squirrel. Running forward in cautious haste, they presently discovered
the cause of this odd confusion of noises to be a large black bear.
His head was concealed in the pot-bellied syrup kettle, held fast in
that position by the bail, that, in his eagerness to lick out the last
drop of stolen sweet, had slipped behind his ears. His frantic efforts
to get rid of his self-imposed muzzle were so funny that, after their
first moment of bewilderment, the two spectators could but shout with
laughter.
Now upreared, the blindfolded bear would strike wildly at the kettle
with his forepaws; then, falling on his back, claw it furiously with his
hinder ones; then, regaining his feet, rush headlong till brought to a
sudden stand by an unseen tree trunk. Recovering from the shock, he
would remain motionless for a moment, as if devising some new means of
relief, but would presently resume the same round of unavailing devices,
with the constant accompaniment of smothered expressions of rage and
terror.
But there was little time for laughter when a precious kettle and a fat
bear might at any moment be lost by the fracture of one and the escape
of the other. Seth had no weapon but his axe, but with this he essayed
prompt attack, the happy opportunity for which was at once offered. In
one of his blind, unguided rushes, the bear charged directly toward the
camp, till his iron-clad head struck with a resounding clang against the
great boiling kettle. As he reeled backward from the shock, half stunned
by it, and bewildered by the unaccustomed sound that still rang in his
ears, Seth was beside him with axe uplifted.
Only an instant he deliberated where and how to strike; at the skull he
dared not with the axe-head, for fear of breaking the kettle, and he
disliked to strike with the blade further back for fear of disfiguring
the skin. But this was the preferable stroke, and in the next instant
the axe-blade fell with a downright blow, so strong and well aimed that
it severed the spinal column just forward of the shoulders. The great
brute went down, paralyzed beyond all motion, to fall in a helpless heap
and yield up his life with a few feeble gasps.
"Oh, father," cried Nathan, the first to break the sudden silence, with
a voice tremulous in exultation, "to think we've got a bear. Won't
mother and Marthy be proud? and won't Job think we're real hunters?"
Waiting but a moment to stroke the glossy fur and lift a huge inert paw,
but such a little while ago so terrible, he sped home to bring his
mother and sister to see the unexpected prize, while the jays renewed
their querulous outcry, and the squirrel vociferously scoffed the fallen
despoiler of his stolen nuts.
The flesh made a welcome addition to the settler's scanty store of meat,
the fat furnished a medium for frying the hitherto impossible doughnut,
and Job promised to bring them a handsome price for the skin, when he
should sell it with his own peltry to the fur traders. But the praise he
bestowed upon Seth's coolness in the strange encounter was sweeter to
Nathan than all else.
As the days went on the advance of spring became more rapid and more
apparent. Already the clearing was free from snow, and even in the
shadow of the forest the tops of the cradle knolls showed the brown mats
of last year's leaves above the surface, that was no longer a pure
white, but littered with the winter downfall of twigs, moss, and bits of
bark, and everywhere it was gray with innumerable swarming mites of snow
fleas. Great flocks of wild geese harrowed the sky. Ducks went whistling
in swift flight just above the tree tops, or settled in the puddles
beginning to form along the border of the marsh. Here muskrats were
getting first sight of the sun after months of twilight spent beneath
the ice.
In the earliest April days of open water, when the blackbirds, on every
bordering elm and water maple, were filling the air with a jangle of
harsh and liquid notes, and the frogs, among the drift of floating
weeds, were purring an unremitting croak, Job took Nathan out on the
marshes, and instructed him in the art of shooting the great pickerel
now come to spawn in the warm shallows.
"Never shoot at 'em," said he, when a shot from his smooth-bore had
turned an enormous fellow's white belly to the sun, and he quickly
lifted the fish into the canoe; "if you do, you won't hit 'em. Always
shoot under, a mite or more, accordin' to the depth o' water."
Powder and lead were too precious to waste much of them on fish, so the
old hunter made his pupil a hornbeam bow and arrows with spiked heads.
With these weapons the boy soon became so skilled that he kept the table
well supplied with this agreeable variation of its frugal fare.
Song-birds came in fewer numbers in those days of wide wildernesses than
now, but there were bluebirds and song sparrows enough to enliven the
clearing with sweet songs, and little Martha found squirrel cups
blooming in the warmest corners of the field. As the days grew longer
and warmer they grew busier, for Seth was diligently getting his crops
in among the black stumps.
Job, having foreseen his friend's need of some sort of water craft when
the lake should open, had fashioned for him a log canoe from the trunk
of a great pine, and modelled it as gracefully as his own birch, though
it was many times a heavier, as it was a steadier, craft.
One pleasant afternoon in early May, when the lake was quite clear of
ice, Seth and his son, with Job as their instructor in the art of canoe
navigation, made a trip in the new boat. They paddled down the creek,
now a broad bit of water from the spring overflow. When they came to the
lake, rippled with a brisk northern breeze, they found their visit well
timed, for a rare and pretty sight was before them, so rare and pretty
that Job paddled back with all speed for the mother and daughter that
they, too, might see it.
A mile below the mouth of the creek a large vessel was coming, under all
sail, with the British flag flying bravely above the white cloud of
canvas. They could hear the inspiring strains of martial music, and,
when the noble vessel swept past not half a mile away, they could see
the gayly dressed officers and the blue-jacketed sailors swarming on her
deck.
"It's the sloop from St. Johns," said Job. "She comes two or three
times, whilst the lake's open, with stores for the garrison to the Fort.
It's an easier trail than the road from Albany. Pretty soon you'll hear
her speak."
Almost at his words a puff of smoke jetted out from her black side, and,
as it drifted across her deck, it was followed by the loud, sullen roar
of the cannon. In response a smoke cloud drifted away from the Fort, and
a moment later a roar of welcome reinforced the failing echoes. Again
and again the sloop and the Fort exchanged salutes, till the new
settlers ceased to be startled by such thunder as they had never before
heard under a cloudless sky.
"They hain't nothin' to do with their powder nowadays, but to fool it
away in sech nonsense," said the Ranger, as the sloop came to anchor in
front of the Fort. "Arter all it's a better use for it than killin'
folks, erless," he deliberately excepted, "it might be Injins."