Birds of Passage--An Independent Swede--By Sleigh to Ostersund--A Son of
the Forest--Burnt out--A Brave Canadian Girl--Roughing it in the
Shanty--The Kitchen-tent--Blasting the Rock--The Perils of
Nitro-glycerine--Bitter Jests.
We had plenty of strange visitors; almost every day men passing along
the line came in, either to inquire the distance to the next shanty, or
to ask for a meal or drink of milk. Some showed a friendly disposition,
and would entertain us with their full family history. Others, with many
professions of gratitude for our kindness, would eat enough to last them
a week, one would suppose, and go on their way. Others, more taciturn and
independent, took their refreshment in silence, and offered to pay for
what they received. One in particular, a tall, slight man, rather
advanced in years, came in one morning, and made us understand by signs
that he was hungry. When a meal was put before him, he sat down, took his
hat off--this was something unusual--and upon every offer of more edibles
bowed his thanks with much dignity. He could speak neither English nor
French, and looked like a Swede. When his repast was finished, he offered
by signs to mend shoes as payment. Thinking that he was begging for
shoes, we screamed, as every one so oddly does to foreigners--as if it
made our language any more intelligible to them--that we had none for
him. Seeing we did not understand him, he sat down and went through the
pantomime of mending shoes. Still shaking our heads, as we had no shoes
to be mended, he, after fumbling in his pockets, produced a quarter,
which he pressed us all in turn to take. In vain we tried to make him
understand that his breakfast was a gift; going away a step or two, he
came back again and again, still offering the quarter. At last, out of
all patience, Mr. C---- ordered him off the premises. The stranger went
up the hill, but lingered until the coast was clear, to put the quarter
on the ice at the door. Then, thinking perhaps that it might not be seen
there by the right people, he stuck it into a crevice between two logs in
the shed, and went away whistling merrily, his pride relieved of his
obligation, as well as his pocket of his money.
Towards the end of the winter, the sleighing being a little better on the
portages, we drove to Ostersund, the nearest house east of us. It was
Sunday, the 3rd of March, and a bright, clear, cold day. Our conveyance
was a sort of combination arrangement of a long, low platform, with one
seat, on two bob-sleighs, which platform turned on a pivot independent of
the sleighs. This was supposed to be an invention that lessened the bumps
and swings experienced by the traveller, who was jolted over the hills
and hollows of the rough roads. Rough, indeed, they were--up and down
steep hills, among and over huge boulders thrown out by the blasts in
adjacent cuttings, along the edge of narrow rocks, where Carrière had to
hold on to the sleigh on one side, to keep it from swinging round, and
down the face of the jagged cliff, into such deep gullies, that it was a
wonder we were not tipped over on the horse's back, or left behind, when
he went up the ascent. The problem that chiefly occupied me during this
wild huntsman-like ride was: If the combination sleigh were indeed a
success, what would my sensations have been without it?
On the lakes the road was smooth and delightful, and our old broken-down
steed supplied by the Government, derisively dubbed "Pegasus" by Mrs.
C----, achieved something approaching a trot. Poor thing! its hide had
become so hardened by former cruel treatment, that there was no spot on
which the whip had the least effect. We were accompanied by the usual
number of dogs, who ran yelping after the rabbits in all directions. On
one of the portages we passed an old Indian, clad in a long blue blanket
coat, with a red sash round his waist, and beaded leggings, and
mocassins; his long hair was tied back, and a red silk handkerchief was
loosely knotted round his brow. He leant upon his old brown gun, and the
tall trees, through whose leafless branches the sunshine fell in long
streaks on the snow and moss, formed a fitting background for his gaunt
figure. Unheeding the hoarse barking of the dogs, he replied to
Carrière's "Bon jour" with a guttural "Bon jour, nitchee;" but until we
were out of sight remained in the same attitude.
On the 26th of March, an event happened which startled us all out of the
even tenor of our lives. Between ten and eleven in the morning, the roof
of our house caught fire from the kitchen chimney, and having no engine
or fire-extinguisher about the premises, we were houseless, with scarcely
anything to call our own, in half an hour. The moment we discovered the
fire, we ran to the nearest cutting, where there were twenty men, to ask
their assistance. After vainly attempting to get at the fire by chopping
away the roof, they could do nothing but save as much property as
possible. Mrs. C---- was at Kalmar, and being too excited to remain
inactive, I deposited the children in the contractor's shanty, persuading
them to stay there until I returned, and went back to the house to save
what I could. I had plenty of assistance. Never did men work better. I
have seen many a fire in crowded cities, where engines and hundreds of
people were at hand, without half the proportionate amount of goods being
saved; and what was rescued from the flames was not destroyed by rough
handling.
The house was built of logs, the crevices being stuffed with moss, and
lined with thick brown paper, the seams of the latter covered with a
narrow beading of pine. The roof was lined with tar-paper, which made a
dense and blinding smoke. It had been built a year, and was so dry that
it burnt like a tinder-box.
The cook, a bright, pretty Canadian girl, in her anxiety to save her
kitchen utensils, was caught by the flames, getting her eyebrows and hair
singed while making a final dash for the boiler; and in the long weeks
that followed before it could be replaced she never ceased to lament her
failure. She was worth ten men, and saved many things which we did not
think of at the time, but should have found it difficult to do without
afterwards.
We were a motley group, sitting and standing on the hill above the creek
to watch our house burn to the ground. Navvies of every nation; tall,
brawny Scotchmen; jolly-looking Irishmen, their faces a mixture of pity
for our misfortune and enjoyment of the "fun;" stumpy little French
Canadians; solemn, stupid-looking Icelanders and Mennonites. Carrière was
there on his crutches. Poor fellow! standing knee-deep in the lake to cut
ice out had brought on such a severe attack of rheumatism, that it was
with difficulty he moved about at all. We were surrounded by a
heterogeneous mass of household goods: here a pile of bedding, surmounted
by a looking-glass, there a basket of crockery, glass, and china; here a
dismantled stove, with the fire yet burning in it, there a clothes-horse,
still covered with clean clothes ironed that morning. A heap of wearing
apparel, taken out of some cupboard, lay close beside one of the
stove-pipes. All round the house were trophies of household furniture,
just as they had been carried out--the baby's cradle full of books from
the drawing-room table, china vases underneath a heap of dinner plates,
and rolls of plans from the office, blown into every corner of the fences.
And all the time the house blazed on. Then the fire spread, and ran up
the hill at the back, burning the old ice-house and a large tree, which
fell to the ground with a crash the moment after the roof fell in. At the
same moment a stock of cartridges exploded, and a volley of musketry
formed the fitting finale to our fire.
The poor children, who had hitherto been wonderfully good and patient,
now became so nervous and frightened that we could scarcely pacify them.
Our old friend, the contractor's superintendent, coming back to his
shanty shortly after the disaster, with his usual unselfish kindness
insisted on giving it up to us, and going himself into a wretched lean-to
behind the store, until the house could be rebuilt. It would be difficult
to describe the discomfort of the next few days.
Mrs. C---- came home immediately, and we were all busy sorting out the
salvage, retaining what was necessary to furnish the shanty, and storing
the remainder in a log-house used as a workshop. How we raked amongst the
still hot embers in the hope of picking up a relic, or with regretful
interest traced the shape of some favourite object in the ashes! As my
room was the first burned, I saved nothing but a few clothes, most of
which were comparatively useless, silk dresses and a log shanty not being
harmonious combinations. All my books, pictures, jewellery, and those
odds and ends which, though of little money value, had grown priceless to
me from association, were destroyed; and my desk also, containing my
notes of dates and places, so that in these pages I have had to trust
entirely to memory.
In dry weather the shanty we now occupied was a very tolerable one, built
of rough logs, their crevices filled with mud both inside and out; the
roof was of logs also, but cut in halves, scooped out, and ingeniously
interlaced--thus, [Illustration], to allow the water to run off. During
the cold weather these logs had been filled with moss, and when the
spring rains began the water settled in places, rotted them, and came
through.
The shanty was divided into three by a partition reaching half-way to the
roof. In the first room stood one bunk bed filled with straw, in the
second were two narrow ones, so close together that two people could not
get out of bed at the same time. One small window, halfway between each
room, gave light to both. There was no door into the outer room, only a
vacant space in the partition. In the centre was an iron stove set in a
box of sand. There were two narrow windows on each side, and the only
door led into the outer world. When we had made it as comfortable as we
could, the outer room had to be telegraph office (the instrument keeping
up such a continual ticking that we blessed an odd day when the wire was
down) as well as dining-room. The big table filled up half the width of
the room, and the sideboard a quarter, leaving the remainder for the
sofa, small tables--under which were stored boxes and trunks of various
sizes--safe, and chairs. We covered the walls with pictures, nails
whereon to hang everything that would hang, and small shelves. The
matting saved from the hall covered what was otherwise unoccupied of the
shanty floor. In fine weather it was not at all unpleasant, as the
children and I almost lived out of doors, and even when in the shanty
kept our hats on, ready to go out again the moment our office was called
on the line; as it was impossible to impress children, aged two and five
years respectively, with the fact that their merry chatter and a
telegraphic message in course of transition were incompatible.
In wet weather, cooped up as we were, with the roof dripping in a dozen
places, their number increasing after every storm; with all our tin pans
called into requisition to catch the falling drops, and the children
feeling it a duty they owed to society to empty their contents on the
floor the moment our backs were turned; with the instrument at work, and
the current bad, I was often made desperate by the utter impossibility of
keeping the children quiet. Rolling them in a shawl, I would rush out to
a tent pitched about ten feet from the shanty door, and used as a
kitchen, rather than endure any longer the strain upon my nerves in the
shanty. This kitchen-tent had a few rough, heavy planks for floor, and a
stove at one end, with the pipe up through the canvas, and the ridge pole
and uprights studded with nails, whereon hung cups, jugs, pans, and tins.
Two tables stood under the slanting roof, with rows of nails beneath to
hold irons and everything else with a handle. There was a small cupboard
in one corner, and the others were filled with boxes, barrels, and the
maid's trunk. The tent had been used as a cook-house so often that it was
perforated by small holes made by flying sparks, and to touch the canvas
with one's head was to invoke a shower-bath. Soaking in wet weather and
broiling in fine, it was anything but a paradise of cooks, yet it was
wonderful how well the maid managed in it, and how neat and tidy she kept
it.
We were always intensely interested in the blasting of the cutting about
three hundred feet from us. At the sound of the horn we were on the watch
to see the men ran off behind the rock. Then the smoke curled up, and the
report followed, sending the flying stones well into the air, and in a
second we could hear them rattle down all round us, on the roof of the
shanty and far out into the lake. Hearing the horn one day when quite
five hundred feet from the cutting, I turned to watch, believing myself
at a safe distance; and as I saw the stones falling, and thought it a
heavier charge than usual, I heard the hiss of one fast approaching.
Before I could decide whether to run or not it whizzed past--so close to
my ear that I could feel the wind it made--and buried itself in the sand
not two feet behind me; while another fell within a few inches of my feet
in front. Snatching the child who was with me up in my arms, I took care
to get some distance further up the hill before the next charge exploded.
One of the engineers told me he had seen stones thrown thirteen hundred
feet from a cutting. They use nitro-glycerine, and have had several
serious accidents while handling it. One poor lad who was carrying a can
weighing fifty pounds up the dump, tripped, and was blown to atoms; part
of one foot, stuck in the fork of a tree about a hundred feet off, being
all that was found of him. A man lost his sight and one arm from merely
striking a rock where some of the horrid stuff had been spilt. Often have
I watched the long train of packers coming down the hill, each with a can
of glycerine on his back, and wondered how they dared carry it over the
rough roads, knowing that one false step would cost them their lives.
Once when I was out with the children, the dogs barked furiously at one
of these poor men. Calling them off, I seized the opportunity to make
some remark about his load. "Ay, miss!" he said, sadly and bitterly;
"'tis a main mean load fur any man to ha' to carry." Yet, in spite of the
danger and the many accidents, I have heard these packers chaffing each
other when passing. "It's a warm day," says one. "That's so; but maybe
ye'll be warmer 'fore ye're to camp tonight," is the reply. "That's so.
D'ye want any word taken to the divil?" Then again, "Where are ye bound
for, Jack?" "To h---, I guess." "Take the other train, and keep a berth
for me, man!" "Is it ye're coffin ye're carryin', Pat?" asks another.
"Faith, ye're right, an a coroner's inquest into the bargain, Jim!" Yet
the wretched expression of these very men proved that they felt the
bitterness of death to be in their jests.