A DISCOVERY
Ray at once made his older brother comfortable by placing a rolled
blanket under his head. “Good gracious, Bruce!” he exclaimed, “you
certainly look as if you had been in a fight.” And with these words he
began to wash the blood from Bruce’s face, and Bruce came to very soon.
But he could not tell how his left hand had become lacerated, nor did
he even know that he had several bad scratch-wounds on his legs and
body. Ray washed the wounds with warm water, dressed them with softened
moose tallow and bandaged them with strips of clean bandanna
handkerchiefs, the only thing in camp suitable for this purpose.
Ganawa had rushed out with his gun, and in a few minutes Ray heard him
shoot. “I killed two,” he reported when he returned. “The others ran
away, and I think they will not trouble us again.”
The wolf which Bruce had killed was very lean. Bruce estimated that he
weighed at least seventy pounds, ten pounds more than a bushel of
wheat. In good condition he would have weighed about ninety pounds.
Fortunately the wounds which Bruce had received in his fight with the
wolf did not fester, and a week later the campers had boiled wild
chicken with wild rice and hominy for their Sunday dinner. It was Bruce
who had brought a little hominy from the “Soo” to be used on very
special occasions. Bruce had not found it very difficult to secure
three grouse with blunt arrows, but he had not forgotten to take his
gun and knife along, although no wolves had been seen or heard near the
camp since he had had his great fight.
Ganawa was very proud of the victory of his white son. “If you were a
Chippewa,” he told Bruce, “you would be allowed to wear an eagle
feather for killing mahungeen. I know of only one Indian who killed
mahungeen in a hand-to-hand fight, but he had a knife.”
Winter lasts a long time in the North Country, but the campers always
found something to do, and as Ganawa could tell stories and Indian
legends by the hour, the lads had no time to be unhappy, although they
eagerly watched and waited for signs of spring. From time to time they
tried fishing through the ice, but by the middle of February the ice
was three feet thick and cutting a hole through it meant a great deal
of labor.
At last, about the middle of April, the margins of the lakes began to
thaw, ducks and geese began to come north, and on warm, sunny days the
sap of the white birches ran freely. The sap of birch-trees runs as
freely in spring as the sap of maples, but it contains so little sugar
that it is not suitable for the making of syrup or sugar.
It was on a warm afternoon late in April, when Ray came to camp greatly
excited by something he had discovered.
“Father,” he called out of breath to Ganawa, “I have found a log cabin.
It is a very small cabin. Nobody lives in it, but it must have been
built by a white man.
“Come along, Bruce; let me show it to you. It is in the Wolf Swamp,
only about a hundred yards from the spot where you killed the wolf.”
This was indeed real news to the camp. Could this be the clue to Jack
Dutton’s camp? Why should anybody want to hide himself in the Wolf
Swamp, as Ray had called the place, when there was a good camping-place
on Lake Anjigami?
Ray proudly led the way to his discovery. Sure enough, there was the
log cabin, but it was not a cabin any man had lived in.
“It was a cache,” Ganawa told the lads. “A place where somebody kept
fur. But they must have had a camp close by,” he added. A dim trail led
away from the cache to the other side of the narrow swamp, and there
was the camp-site plain enough, and several signs indicated that the
campers had been white men. The camp showed a larger outside fireplace
than Indians would have used, and they had cut much wood.
Bruce began at once to examine the cuts on the stumps near the
camp-site, and very soon the young man, who was generally very calm,
sprang up, swung his arms around and called: “I have found it, Father!
I have found it! Look, here is the same ax-mark we found last fall at
the camp-site on Lake Anjigami. I noticed the same marks on the logs in
the cache cabin.”
“No, Bruce, you are mistaken,” Ray argued. “The ax-marks are not the
same. The ax at this camp had a much smaller nick.”
“It had a smaller nick,” Bruce admitted, “and I can tell you why. The
campers, of course, had no grindstone. They may have had a file or a
small whetstone, or they may have used an ordinary rock to keep their
ax in fair condition. Had they had a grindstone, they would have given
their ax a complete keen edge, but as it was they only reduced the nick
in size. But you will notice that the nick is in the same place, near
the front part of the ax.”
Both Ganawa and Ray were convinced that Bruce was right, but the
question who these mysterious campers were was not at all solved by
what they had found. Were they Jack Dutton and his partner or some
unknown strangers? Perhaps two adventurous Frenchmen had penetrated
into this region while it still contained an abundance of the most
valuable fur-bearers: marten, beaver, and otter. All three of them
searched carefully for signs to solve this riddle, but darkness came on
before they had discovered any further clues to the solution of their
problem.
“If this was Jack Dutton’s camp,” Bruce remarked as they walked along
the trail, “something must have muddled his head. He does not meet us
at Mackinac nor at the Soo, and he leaves no letter or word with
anybody. If there were whales in Lake Superior, I should say he
suffered the fate of Jonah. A trader at the Soo told us that a man
cannot disappear in the Indian country. It seems to me Jack Dutton did
the trick to perfection.
“If the camp-sites we have found belonged to him, why didn’t he leave
some kind of message? I have had a vague hope that we might find him in
this region. It is the kind of country he and I used to talk and dream
about when we were boys on the farm. But now I begin to fear that Jack
is dead. Perhaps the wolves finished him as they came near doing with
me. Jack was always a dare-devil and he would not realize that the
wolves in this wild country are much bolder than they are in Vermont.”
Soon after daylight, the three hunters were again diligently searching
for some clue that might point to the identity of the mysterious
campers. Ray was the first who pointed out something that aroused some
discussion. Who tore off half of the birch-bark roof of the log cabin
cache? A bear might have done it, but no claw-marks were visible. If it
had been done by a storm, why were there no indications of a violent
wind on the trees close by?
“Somebody tore off the roof,” Ganawa gave as his opinion, “but I cannot
tell why he did not open the cache by pulling out the logs that were
put in loose to serve as a door.”
Bruce followed a plan of his own in the search for a clue. He slowly
walked around the old tepee poles of the camp-site in a gradually
enlarging spiral. “If there is anything,” he thought, “I am bound to
find it in this way.” And he did find a broad blaze on a rough old
birch-tree and on the blaze was some lettering, but it was hard to
read. The letters seemed to have been scratched in with the point of a
knife and then blackened, or rather made dull gray, with a piece of
pointed lead. Bruce’s heart beat fast and he forgot to call his friends
as he tried to decipher the scrawls, and no discoverer of long buried
records has ever been more absorbed in deciphering their meaning than
Bruce was in reading the words on the blaze:
GONEAWEATHIEFSTOLE
MARTENFYRROTTENLVCK
LOOKYOVNGBIRCHTREE
Bruce could make nothing out of the lettering until he discovered that
the writer had run two or three words together and had misspelled
“week”; after that the message suddenly flashed out plainly enough.
“Gone a week. Thief stole marten fur. Rotten luck. Look young
birch-tree.”
It took Bruce but a moment to find the young birch-tree with smooth
white bark, on which a longer message was written a little more
plainly.
“We go back to lake,” read the message. “Bad luck here. Intend to
go to Michipicoten Island, and to Island of Yellow Sands. Rotten
luck here. Maybe the yellow sand is gold. If we catch the thief, he
will never steal again.
J. D.”
And then Bruce gave a yell. “Come here, friends!” he called. “I have
found a message from Jack Dutton.”