Thetime of great winds has come, the heavy November gales that roar down the lakes, lashing the water into white-capped waves, dashing the driftwood against the rocks and decking the beaches with long wreaths of yellow foam. The swell is so strong and the waves so high that even the men do not care to venture out. When I must get over to Blake’s farm I hug the shore of the island to the point, then dash across the channel between this land and his, and the wind turns my light skiff round and round before I can catch the lee again.
All night the house rocks and shivers and the trees creak, groan and crash down in the woods. I am afraid to walk the trails because of falling branches, for if I were struck down I should lie in the path for days and no one would know that I had been hurt.
These winds give the strangest effect of distant music. I am always thinking that I can almost hear the sound of trumpets, blowing far away.
Inside the house is warm and comfortable, with its creamy yellow walls of unpainted wood, its many windows, its pictures, its books; but I am lonely; I cannot settle to any occupation. The constant roaring of the wind unnerves me, the gray, scudding clouds depress me. A hound on the shore bays and howls day and night. I have heard no human voice for more than a week.
The storm died away in a smothering fog that settled down on the very surface of the lake, blotting out everything. I could not see one inch beyond the shore. The mainland was hidden, the opposite island was invisible—everything was gone except the land on which I stood. I could hear voices at the farms, the sound of oars, and people talking in the boats as they passed. Men were hunting on the mainland, almost a mile away. I could hear their shots and the cries of the hounds, but I might as well have been stricken blind, for all that I could distinguish. All sorts of fears assailed me. Suppose men should land on the island in the fog, how could I see to escape them? Suppose the fog should last and last, how would I dare to go out in a boat for any provisions? Suppose Ishould be ill, or hurt, how could I signal to the farm for help?
By evening the fog had thoroughly frightened me; it was time to pull myself together. So I cooked a particularly good dinner, read a new book for awhile, then went to bed praying that the sun would be shining in the morning.
After being asleep for what seemed hours, I was aware of a loud shouting, followed by heavy steps on the porch and a voice calling as someone knocked and pounded on the door. I stumbled out of bed, half asleep, and groped my way to the lamp, fortunately forgetting all about the pistol laid by my side for just such an emergency. When the door was finally opened, the shapeless bulk of a woman confronted me—the very largest woman I have ever seen. She loomed like a giant against a solid bank of fog that rolled in behind her.
“I don’t know where I am,” she announced. “I’m all turned round. I’ve been rowing hours and hours in the fog, and I’ve a boy, a pail of eggs, a mess of catfish and a little wee baby in the boat.”
“For mercy’s sake,” I ejaculated, “what areyou doing out in a boat with a baby on a night like this? Who are you anyway?”
“I’m from Spriggins’ farm,” she answered, “the place where you gits yer chickens at. I’ve been over at Drapeau’s spending the evening and I started to row home two hours ago. But the fog got me all turned round, and when I struck this shore I says: ‘This must be the island where the woman’s at. Ef she’s to the house I’ll wake her and git me a light.’”
I gave her a lantern and she went off to the shore, while I threw fresh logs on the smoldering fire and tried to wake myself.
Presently a dismal procession returned: a boy, laden with shawls and wraps, the woman carrying a baby. When that infant was unwrapped, it needed not its proud mother’s introduction to tell me whose child it was. Harry Spriggins is a small, wiry man, with sharp, black eyes and a face like a weasel. The baby was exactly like him. They were a forlorn trio, and, oh, so dirty! My heart sank as I surveyed them, realizing that they were on my hands for the night. Then I felt properly ashamed of myself, for if the poor soul had not found the island she might havebeen on the lake in an open boat until daylight; and by this time a rain was falling, quite heavily enough to have swamped so unseaworthy a craft as her small, flat-bottomed punt.
For some time we sat gazing at one another, while I tried to determine what should be done with my guests. Finally I sent the boy to the storehouse for extra mattresses, and prepared them beds on the floor. Clean sheets were spread over everything. Probably the woman had never slept on clean sheets before, but I reasoned that sheets could be washed more easily than blankets, and just then washing seemed to me very essential.
About one o’clock we all settled down for the night, but not to sleep—oh, no! The woman was far too excited for that. Thanks to the fire that I had made, in my stupidity, and to the air in the cabin, I could not sleep either, so I heard a great deal of the inside history of the neighborhood, before morning.
I learned that minks are a menace to the poultry industry here about. In Spriggins’ own barnyard, a flock of thirty-six young turkeys were found all lying dead in a row, with their necks chewed off—a plain case ofmink, and a dire blow to the finances of the family.
At three o’clock I had the life history of a Plymouth Rock rooster, of superlative intelligence, that always crowed at that precise hour. At four I was roused from an uneasy doze by the query: “Do you know anything about Dr. So-and-So’s cure for ‘obsidy’?”
After puzzling over the word for some minutes I gathered that “obesity” was what was meant, for my guest went on, pathetically enough, to tell me how hard her work was and how she suffered in doing it, burdened with that mountain of flesh.
“There’s another cure,” she went on. “It’s Mrs. So-and-So’s, but it calls for a Turkish bath, and where could I get that? Beside, I could never do all that rolling and kicking.”
Peering through the gloom at what looked like the outline of an elephant on the floor, I did not see how she could, but I felt that if there were any known way of getting that woman into a Turkish bath I would cheerfully bear the expense.
At six I gave up the struggle and rose for the day, stumbling about from cabin to kitchento cook breakfast in the semi-darkness, for the fog was still thick. At nine, the day being a little lighter, I made the mistake of suggesting that the boy row over to Blake’s for some bread and the mail. He departed, and stayed for hours. Soon his mother began to fidget and finally set off for the shore to search for him, leaving that changeling of a baby in my care.
There it lay on my bed, staring at me with its black beads of eyes, and looking as old as the Pharaoh of the Exodus and as crafty. The mother stayed and stayed away. I had visions of being left with that child on my hands all winter. I saw myself walking it up and down the cabin through the long nights. I saw myself sharing with it my last spoonful of condensed milk, but, as I surveyed it, I knew what I would do first. I would give it the best bath it had ever had in its short life and I would burn its filthy little clothes.
But while I was harboring these designs against that innocent child its mother came back, her hands full of green leaves. She had not found the boy, but she had gathered what she called “Princess Fern.”
“This is awful good fer the blood,” she announced. “Ef yer blood is bad, this will make it as pure as spring water; if it’s pure, this will keep it so. It’s good fer you either way.”
The mention of blood led naturally to the recital of the various accidents she had seen, and I learned that there are several blood healers in the neighborhood—persons who can stop the flow by the recitation of a certain verse of Scripture. A man can perform this miracle for a woman and a woman for a man, but a man cannot cure another man, nor a woman another woman. This charm must never be revealed. It can only be transmitted at death. It is a sure cure for blood flow and quite authentic, according to Mrs. Spriggins, who has seen the blood stopped.
While we were discussing this mystery the boy came back, smilingly, from quite a different direction from the one in which he had been sent. He had never found the farm, but had been all this time wandering in the fog. It was all too like a nightmare. I did not tempt fate by offering any more suggestions. Instead, I bundled the party into their various wrappings, led them to their boat, andturned their faces firmly in the direction of home. Then I sat on the porch, tracing their progress down the lake by the wailing of that wretched baby. When the sounds had finally died away, I went in and scrubbed the cabin from end to end with strong, yellow soap.
And the sequel to all this? She was not Spriggins’ wife at all, but “Spriggins’ woman,” and she was not lost.
When I mentioned her visit the neighbors shook their heads.
“You couldn’t lose old Jane on Many Islands,” they scoffed. “She wanted to see you, that was all; and she knowed you wouldn’t let her land if she come by day.”
But two men were lost on the lake that night, and I believe that Jane was lost too.
With the rural love of scandal and the usual disregard of all laws of probability, the people accuse this woman of all sorts of outrageous crimes. It is said that she murdered her daughter for the girl’s bit of life insurance, that she has strangled her own babies, that she bound her aged aunt face downward on a board, and pushed her out on the lake to drown. And here was I, all ignorant of the character of my guest, gravely discussing withthis alleged criminal the proper feeding of infants and the rival merits of toilet soaps.
I stopped at her house the other day to inquire my way. She greeted me with much cordiality.
“You was certainly fine to me that night,” she said. “I donno what we would a-done, ef you hadn’t took us in. The baby would a-been drownded, I guess.”
Now I am glad that I was “fine” to her, for poor Jane is gone, and she died as she had lived—without help and without hope.
Her children’s father was away at a dance in Sark when she fell in their desolate house. Seeing that she did not rise, one frightened child crept out of bed and covered her nakedness with an old quilt. In the morning two little boys, crying and shivering, made their way along the shore to the place where the man was sleeping off his debauch.
“Come home, Pop,” they cried. “Mom’s dead.”
But he would not heed them.
“It’s only one of them spells she gits,” he grunted. “She’ll be all right.”
“No, it ain’t no spell, Pop,” they cried. “She’s dead, I tell you. She’s cold.”
Then the neighbors, who had never gone to that house when Jane was alive, went now and comforted the children. They followed the poor body along the ice to its grave, and Mrs. Spellman, who has six little ones of her own, went over and took the baby home.
There are a great many of these irregular unions here, for Canada is no land of easy divorce. If you are a poor man, and have any predilection for being legally married, you must stay with the wife with whom you started. Divorce and remarriage are not for you.
In a little book of instructions for immigrants and settlers, published by one of the newspapers, the matter is made very plain:
“In Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan there is no divorce court. Application must be made to the Dominion Parliament, by means of a private bill, praying for relief by reason of adultery, or adultery and cruelty, if it is the wife who is seeking a divorce from her husband. The charges made are investigated by a special committee of the Senate, and, if a favorable report is presented to the House, the bill usually passes.” But the little book goes on to state, very simply,that “The expense of obtaining the bill is very great, exceeding in any event five hundred dollars.”
So for men like Harry Spriggins, whose wife deserted him, or for Black Jack’s woman, whose husband beat her, there is no way out. They simply take another mate, and stand by the arrangement as faithfully as may be.
Winterhas thrown a veil of lace over the islands, a wet, clinging snow that covers every tree-trunk, rock, and stump, and turns the cedars to mounds of fluffy whiteness. The paths lie under archways of bending, snow-laden branches, and all the underbrush is hidden. The island wears many jewels, for every ice-incrusted twig flashes a cluster of diamonds, the orange berries of the bittersweet, each encased in clear ice, are like topaz, and the small frozen pools between the stones reflect the sky and shine like sapphires.
There have been snows since the first week in November, but this is the first that has remained, and how it shows the midnight activities of all the wild folk! The porch floor is a white page on which they have left their signatures. Here, by the storeroom door, are innumerable little stitch-like strokes. They were made by the deer mouse’s wee paws. There are the prints of the squirrel’s little hands and a long swathe, where his brush swept the snow. The chickadees and nuthatchescame very early. Their three-fingered prints are all over the woodpile, and on the paths are the blurred, ragged tracks left by the grouse’s snowshoes. Over the hill runs a row of deep, round holes, showing that a fox has passed that way, and the rabbit’s tracks are everywhere.
Every day the water freezes farther and farther out from the shores, and it is increasingly difficult to force a channel through it to the open lake. The bay in front of the Blake’s house is frozen straight across, and I land far away on the point and scramble through the bushes to the house when I must go over for the mail. Frozen cascades hang down over the rocks, pale-blue, jade and softest cream color. The rocks themselves are capped with frozen spray and the driftwood wears long beards of ice.
Walking along the beach to-day I heard a great chirping and twittering, like the sound made by innumerable very small birds. Could a late flock of migrants be stopping in the treetops? I wondered. But when I searched for the birds there were none. The chirping noises came from the thin shore ice, whose crystals, rubbed together by the gently movingwater, were making the birdlike sounds. Now and then would come a sudden “ping” like the stroke on the wire string of a banjo, and sometimes a clear, sustained tone, like the note of a violin.
As the ice grew thicker these sounds all stopped and over all the land broods a profound silence. The winds are still, no bird voices come out of the woods; even the waves seem hardly to rise and fall against the shores. It is as though all nature were holding her breath to wait the coming of the ice.
“When the lake freezes over, when the ice holds,” we have a habit of saying, and, looking across the uncertainties of the shut-in time, when I shall not be able to use the boat and when no one can cross over to me, I too am longing for the ice.
The boat can no longer be left in the water. Any cold morning would find it frozen in until spring. It must also be turned every evening, lest it fill with snow in the night, so I haul that heavy skiff out on the sand; and, sure enough, the accident, so confidently predicted by my friends, came to pass, for in the turning the boat slipped, and down it came, full weight across my foot.
I am somewhat a judge of pain. I know quite a good deal about suffering of one kind and another, but this hurt was something special in the way of an agony. It turned me sick and dizzy, and for several minutes I could only stand and gasp, while the trees turned round and round against the sky. When their whirling had slowed down a bit, and I had caught my breath, I hobbled down to the edge of the lake, kicked a hole in the thin ice with my good foot, and thrust the hurt one into the icy water. Then I spoke aloud! I did not in the least mean to say the words that came to my lips, no one could have been more surprised than I when I heard them, but with my horrified face turned up to the evening sky, and the consciousness that there was no way in the world of getting help if I were badly hurt, I said, “Great God Almighty!”
Thinking it over, I am inclined to believe that the ejaculation was, after all, a prayer.
Knowing that I should probably not be able to walk for days, I then hobbled to and fro from the house to the lake, filling every pail and tub. Then I carried in as much wood as I could, and at last took off my shoe.
It was a wicked-looking injury, a foot swollen, bruised, and crushed. I blessed my little medicine chest, with its bichloride and morphia tablets, its cotton and gauze, that made the long hours of that night endurable. For more than a week I did my housework with a knee on the seat of a chair that I pushed along before me round the cabin and the porch. No one came to the island, nor could I get far enough from the house to call a passing boat.
One afternoon there was a great sound of chopping in the narrows between this island and Blake’s Point. I called, but no one answered. Later I learned that Henry Blake had left a herring net there and that it had frozen in. But at that time I felt only the faintest interest in whatever was going forward. They might have chopped a way through to China and I would not have cared.
The long days dragged on, while my hurt foot slowly healed. I may say here that it was never fully healed until the following spring. I had always to keep it bandaged even after it had ceased to pain and it was not until May that I could forget that it had been injured.
On the eighth the calm weather broke in a day of wild winds and flying clouds, when the waves rolled in on the shores, and the driftwood pounded on the beaches. At evening, when the storm had lulled, the lake looked like a wide expanse of crinkled lead foil.
Next morning I waked to a bright blue day and dazzling sunshine. At first I feared that I had been suddenly deafened, the stillness so stopped my ears. Then I realized what had happened. There was no sound of the moving water. The ice had come!
The lake was a silver mirror that reflected every tree, every bowlder, every floating cloud. The islands hung between two skies, were lighted by two suns. An eagle, soaring over the lake, saw his double far below, even to his white back, that flashed in the sunlight when he wheeled.
In the glancing beauty of that morning my heart flung open all her doors, my breath came quickly, and my spirit sang. For the first time in my life I understood how frost and cold, how ice and snow, can praise and magnify the Lord.
That evening the snow came, turning thelake into a vast white plain “white as no fuller on earth could white it,” that lay without spot or wrinkle under the Indian’s Moon of the Snowshoes.
This was the ninth of the month. Then followed long, silent days, when I read and sewed and dreamed, and forgot what day of the week it was, or what time of the day, and wondered how long it would be before someone could come over from the mainland to tell me that the ice was safe to walk on.
Each afternoon I hobbled to the beach and paraded there, according to agreement with Mary Blake, to let her see that I was still alive. The rabbit came in and sat by the fire—a queer, silent little companion. The red squirrel scampered all over the outside of the house, peeping at me through the windows, and whisking in at the open door to steal a potato or a nut, when he thought my back was turned. Funny little Rufus! He spent a long, hard-working day, stealing the contents of a basket of frozen potatoes put out for his amusement. For months afterward I found those potatoes, hard as bullets, stuck in the crotches of the cedars all over the island.
From the ninth to the nineteenth I saw noone and heard no voice. Then I descried two men walking across the lake. They carried long poles, with which they struck the ice ahead to test its thickness. Each stroke ran along the ice to the shore, with the sound of iron ringing against stone. I saw the stick fall some seconds before I heard the noise.
I had never seen men walking across a lake before. I had never realized that this lake would become a solid floor on which men could walk. I shall never forget the excitement with which I watched them do it.
The House
Half an hour later Jimmie Dodd burst in, with red cheeks and shining eyes, to tell me that the ice would hold.
The way to the farm being once more open, I made my Christmas cake, mixing it here in the cabin and carrying it three quarters of a mile across to the Blakes’ big oven. The finished loaf came back over the ice, an excellent cake, as all my Christmas visitors testified.
For let no one assume that because the inhabitants of this island are few there has been no Christmas here. On the contrary, the feast began on Christmas Eve and lasted for a week. The tree, a young white pine, was cut on the island, the trimmings came from Toronto, and great was the anxiety lest the ice should not be strong enough to bear the wagon that brought them over from Loon Lake Station. But the final freeze came just in time, and we, the rabbit and I, spent happy days tying on all the glittering trifles that go to the making of that prettiest thing in the world—a Christmas tree. There was a big gold star on the topmost twig. There were oranges and boxes of candy for all invited and uninvited children round the lake, and when all was finished, ourfirst visitor was a storm-driven chickadee, that wandered in and stayed with us, perched on a glittering branch.
On Christmas Eve the Blakes came and had cake and coffee and viewed the tree. On Christmas day, came the little Beaulacs, from Loon Bay, some walking, some in arms, some dragged in a big wooden box over the ice, and were refreshed with tea and bread and butter and cake, after which they sat round the tree, regarding it with great eyes of wonder. Next day the Forets came to help me eat the Christmas duck and tinned plum pudding, and after them the Big John Beaulacs, from far back of Sark.
So it went, with a party every day, while the brave little tree stood glowing and twinkling at us all. It was interesting to note how many errands the men found to bring them to the island while the Christmas tree was standing, and how their heavy faces lightened at sight of it. Surely it fulfilled its purpose, sending out messages of good will and friendliness and the love of God from the feather tip of each tiniest twig.
At midnight on Christmas Eve I went out on the porch and walked to and fro there inthe biting cold. The rabbit, that had been sleeping, a bunch of snow-white fur, on the woodpile, hopped down and followed at my heels. The lake was a shield of frosted silver. The moon shone bright as day. One great star blazed over the shoulder of the opposite island—it might have been the very star of Bethlehem. So diamond clear was the air, so near leaned the sky, that I might almost have reached and touched that star. The night was so white, so still that I fancied I could almost hear the angels’ song, and in the rainbow glory of the moonlight could catch swift glimpses of the flashing of their wings.
We walked there, the rabbit and I, until the cold drove me in, to sleep beside the tree and dream of a procession of little Beaulacs, creeping over the ice, each one with a star in his hand.
TheBeaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half the countryside. They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, Marie John, and so on. The Little Jack Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the point and three miles away. The road to Loon Lake Station starts at their landing. They live in a barn, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot log structure, banked with earth to keep out the cold. In its one room, along with a double bed, a cooking stove, table, sideboard, sewing machine, rocking chair, boxes, pots and pans, and a clutter of harness and old junk of all kinds, live John and Rose and the six young Beaulacs, beginning with sixteen-year-old Louis and ending with the baby. There is one door and a small window, that, so far as I know, has never been opened. In summer, when the door is left ajar, the room is apt to be further inhabited by hens, ducks, cats, and even a lamb or two.
The house stands in a clearing on aperfectly bare hill, but in summer, the whole slope is golden with sheets of tansy, and the small dug-out milk house is shaded by a giant lilac bush, sole remnant of some long-forgotten garden. At the foot of the hill, rotting, flat-bottomed boats wallow in the mud, and there the little Beaulacs spend happy days fishing for mudcats, wading for frogs, screaming, wrangling, and throwing stones into the water.
They have not always lived in a barn. They have had two other houses, each burned to the ground, with all the pitiful furnishings it contained—crushing blows to people as poor as the Beaulacs. After the last fire they moved into the barn, the only shelter left standing, intending to build again in the spring. But log-hauling is work, building materials cost money, and time went on. Now they have settled down contentedly in the barn, and will stay there, I doubt not, until this roof falls down about their heads. They have no fear of another fire. That would be impossible, for, as one of the children tells me, the last one happened on the full of the moon—sure sign that they can never be burned out again.
Like other men of the settlement, John Beaulac works at the mica mine, hunts, fishes, and farms a bit. Rose walks barefoot over the fields, after the plow, digs the small garden, raises chickens, picks wild berries, and sells frogs to the summer campers, contriving thus to supply the few clothes and groceries needed. For the rest, they live a happy, carefree life in the open, and the young Beaulacs scramble up somehow.
Rose handles the boxes of supplies that come from Toronto for the island, driving them in from Loon Lake and bringing them across the lake by wagon or boat, as the time of the year permits. Last time she refused, very firmly, to allow me to pay for that hauling.
“We ain’t agoin’ to tax you nothin’,” she declared.
When I expostulated, she only shook her frowsy head more violently.
“No,” she said, “we do it fer you fer nothin’. It ain’t like you had a man here to do fer you,” she reasoned.
Then she looked at her own man with pride and at me with a vast pity, because I had no man to work myself to death for.
In a pioneer neighborhood, where every woman must have some man, however worthless, to hew the wood and care for the stock, and where every man must have some woman, to cook and to keep the house, however lazy a slattern she may be, I, who live alone, pay for my wood and draw the water, must be a creature not to be understood.
Yesterday the Beaulacs invited me to go with them to the races in Henderson’s Bay—a trying out of the neighborhood horses before the yearly races to be held at Queensport next week. Scrambling and falling down the slippery trail, in answer to their halloo, I found a straw-filled wagon body set on runners and drawn by Beaulac’s old mare. She, not having been “sharp shod,” slipped and slid, threatening to break a leg at every step, while the wagon slewed from side to side over the ice. It was the first time that I had driven over a lake. My heart was in my mouth all the way.
Henderson’s Bay, a long arm of Many Islands, stretches for a mile into the land. It is a beautiful horseshoe, with the farm house at the toe. The course was laid out on the dull green ice, little cedar bushes set up to markthe quarter miles. An old reaper, frozen in near the shore, served as the judges’ stand.
We drew up at the side of the track, in the lee of a high rock that somewhat sheltered us from the piercing wind. It was a friendly scene. The encircling arms of the shore stretched round and seemed to gather us close. The smoke from the house chimneys curled up to the low-leaning gray sky, and Henderson’s herd, led by a dignified old bull, strolled down over the hill as though to see the race. Far away on the ice, black spots appeared, later discerned to be fast-moving buggies, sleighs, and wagons coming to the meet. When they were all assembled there must have been as many as seven vehicles. There were four horses to be tried. They were harnessed in turn to a little two-wheeled affair called a bike. There is only one “bike” here, so no two horses could run at a time, and there had to be a great unhitching and harnessing again after every trial of speed. Joe Boggs, the neighborhood jockey, drove with arms and legs all spraddled out, like a spider, and urged on his poor steeds with wild cries of: “Hi-hi-hi-hi”—enough to frighten a sensible horse to death.
I have never beheld a more professional looking horseman than Mr. Boggs. His disreputable old squirrel-skin cap, that hung off the back of his head, his high boots, the bow of his legs, the squint of his eye, even the way he chewed a straw between races, bespoke the true jockey. One felt that if Joe Boggs could not put a horse over the track, no one could.
Rose Beaulac too was a keen judge of a horse. She criticized the entries unsparingly—Rose, with her long, dry-looking coon skin coat, and her dirty red “tuque” cocked over one eye.
“That old mare,” she would say, cuttingly, “I knowed her in her best days, and then she wasn’t much.”
That settled the mare for us. Our money was not on her.
There was, however, one horse that she did consider worth praise. She told me with awe that his owner had refused four hundred dollars for him—a staggering sum. So valued was this animal that he was not to be allowed to run any more until the Queensport races, but when it was learned that I wished to admire him, his owner consented to put him once round the course, for my pleasure.
After the contestants had each done his best—or worst—the meet broke up, with many “Good-days” and “Come-overs,” and we drove back over the ice, the old mare plunging and sliding along seemingly quite accustomed to being driven, at a gallop, over a sheet of glass.
The eye swept the outline of the shore on which stand the seven homesteads of this arm of the lake. Each roof shelters a family of a different race and creed. Many Islands is a type of the whole of this strong, young country, that takes in men of all lands and minds, gives them her fertile prairies almost for the asking, and makes them over into good Canadians.
There are the Blakes, from “The States,” and aggressively American; the Jacksons, Canadian born and Methodist; the Hendersons, English and Church of England; the McDougals, Scotch and Presbyterian; the Cassidys, Irish and Catholic; Harry Sprig-gins, a sharp-faced little London cockney; and the Beaulacs, true French Canadian. Once in a while a Swede wanders in and hires out for the wood-cutting, or an Indian comes along through the lakes in his canoe, and camps for awhile on one of the islands. Amidall the differences of belief and the clash of temperament, the people manage to be friendly and neighborly; the children play together; the young folk marry, and the next generation is all Canadian.
They all speak English, but when one stops to listen, literal translations of idioms and queer turns of phrase stand out. Foret always speaks of a “little, small” bird or tree or what not, and for him things are always “perfectly all right.”
“Do yer moind thot pig, I sold Black Jack?” asks Uncle Dan Cassidy.
“’Ow har you to-d’y?” inquires Harry Spriggins.
“Oh, not too bad,” answers John Beaulac. “Pas trop mal,” he is saying, of course.
When John has finished a job he stands off, hands in pockets, and observes: “That iss now ahl bunkum sah.” After a moment’s pondering one knows that “Bon comme ça” is what he means.
They speak of coming home through the “Brooly.” That is the scrub wood through which a forest fire once swept. It is the land “brulé”—burned over. While they live in Canada their talk is of far away lands, and itis to the “Old Country” that they mean to return some day.
And from the house on the island I see the life go by—the stern, bare life of the country—with its never-ending toil, its uncounted sacrifices, its feuds, its ready charities and the piteous, unnecessary sufferings of the sick. Blessed be the rural telephone, lately come to Many Islands, that has made it possible for Dr. LeBaron to reach a patient the day he is called. Thrice blessed the tinkle of those little bells that bring the voices of the world to the farms, shut in behind the snowdrifts. To the women, dulled with labor and shaken with loneliness, they are the little bells of courage.
I stopped at a farm the other day—a very lonely place. Scarce were the first greetings over when the young mistress of the house said, proudly: “We have the telephone here. Would you care to talk to any of your friends?”
Something in her tone, the eager shining of her eyes, brought a rush of tears to my own. It was the supreme effort of hospitality. She was offering me the thing that had meant life itself to her, the dear privilege of speaking with a friend.
Weare at the very heart of winter now. It is “le grand frête,” that I have been secretly dreading, and all my ideas of it are changing as the quiet days go on. Winter in the woods has always seemed to me the dead time—the season of darkness and loneliness and loss. I find it only the pause before the birth of a new year. If I break off a twig, it is green at the heart, when I brush away the snow, the moss springs green beneath it. Close against the breast of the meadow lie the steadfast, evergreen rosettes of the plantain, sorrel, moth mullen, and evening primrose, waiting in patience for the melting of the snow. I never dip a pail into the hole in the ice without bringing up a long trailer of green waterweed, or a darting, flitting little whirligig beetle—the gyrinus—somewhat less lively than in summer, to be sure, but still active and alert. There is a big, fresh-water clam lying at the bottom of the waterhole. He breathes and palpitates, lolling out a soft pink body from the lips of a half-open shell.
Yes, winter here is only a slumber, and everything is stirring in its sleep. They all proclaim again the old, old covenant, made with the perpetual generations, that promise of the sure return of seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night, that shall not cease while the earth remains.
The colors of winter are slate-blue and gray, laid on a background of black and white. The chickadees and nuthatches wear them—black velvet caps, gray coats, white waistcoats. In the mornings long, slate-blue shadows stretch away from the points of all the islands, and every smallest standing weed casts its tiny blue shadow across the snow. The ice is darkly iridescent, like the blue pigeon’s neck and head.
The dawns come late, the sunsets early, and in the twilight the mice steal out from the woods and climb up and down on the window screens, little misty, gray blurs moving swiftly against the soft, gray dusk.
Through the long evenings, when supper is over, the curtains drawn and the long sides of the big box stove glowing red, I read and think and dream. All the while the timbers of thehouse crack and snap with the cold, the trees twist and creak in the wind, and the ice groans and mutters. Now and again it gives a long sigh, as though some heavy animal were imprisoned under it and were struggling to escape. I imagine him heaving at it with a great shoulder, grunting as he pushes, and sinking back to rest before pushing again. Late in the night comes a long roar, as though the beast had broken forth and were calling to his mate.
A point of one of the IslandsMost people undress to go to bed. Here I undress and dress again, putting on heaviest woolen underwear, long knit stockings, flannel gown and sweater over all. I creep intobed and lie between flannel sheets and under piled blankets, and throw a fur coat across the foot, in preparation for that first hurried dash across the room at dawn.
There is only one anguished moment in the twenty-four hours. It is when the fire has burned out, and the cold wakes me. My movements then are reduced to the least possible number. Almost with one motion I spring out of bed, fling the window shut, tear back the whole top of the stove, throw in fresh logs, put on the coffeepot, then skurry back to bed to doze until the cabin is warm.
There is not the least trouble about keeping my stores cool. The problem is to prevent their freezing. The potatoes and eggs freeze in the very room with me, a pot of soup, set in the outer vestibule, is a hard block from which I crack a piece with the ax when I wish a hot supper. The condensed milk is hard frozen, the canned plum puddings rattle about in their tins like so many paving stones, and it takes all day to heat them. Early in December, I laid a jagged bit of ice on the corner of the porch, and there it lies, its shape quite unchanged through weeks of bitter weather.
There is an inch or two of ice over the waterhole every morning. When I go to fill the pails, I take the little ax along to chop my cistern open, but gradually the walls of ice close in and about once a week someone must cut me a fresh waterhole in another spot on the lake.
The drying of the weekly wash is a most perplexing thing. Clothes hung outside the house freeze immediately of course. If they are hung inside, the room is filled with their steam. My only plan is to heat the cabin red-hot, hang them indoors, bank the fire for safety and take to the lake or go a-visiting, for a certain number of clean clothes one must have, if only to keep up one’s self-respect.
This morning I woke so stiff with cold that I was almost afraid to move in bed, lest a frozen finger or toe should drop off. There was no more sleep, so, cowering over the stove, I watched the sunrise, more augustly beautiful than I have ever seen it. The bright crescent of last month’s moon hung, point downward, on a sky of mouse-gray velvet. Over it stood the morning star. Along the eastern horizon lay a line of soft brightness, that glowed through a veil of gray gauze.Very slowly this bright line widened while the snow field grew slate-blue, then purple, and the jagged tree line of the forest stood out in silhouette, black pines, cedars, and hemlocks against a yellow sky. Trees and bushes near at hand stole out from the shadows, patterns of black lace against the white ground, and sharply visible. The horizon line was now tinged with red, the sky was changing to a tender yellow-gray, shading to pale green as it neared the zenith. The paling moon hung now against a background of rose and saffron. The star still blazed above it like a lamp, until, suddenly, a fiery streak appeared on the horizon, and star and moon faded away before the red disk of the sun.
Toward noon the cold was less intense, and I ventured out to get some long-delayed mail at the farm. Not a bird was abroad, not a rabbit track lay on the paths. In fur coat, fur hood, and high rubber boots I plowed a way across the lake, where the level snow, knee-high, drifted in over the tops of the boots and formed an icy crust around my stockinged feet. At the farm I learned that the thermometer at Loon Lake Station had registered thirty-five degrees below zero at seven o’clockthat morning. Even then, in the sun, on the Blakes’ south porch it stood at twenty below.
At home in the afternoon all my little pensioners were out to greet me. The white-breasted nuthatch was clinging, head down, on a birch pillar, his head, twisted back at a neck-dislocating angle, showed his black cap perched over one eye, and gave him an indescribably rakish, disreputable appearance.
“Yank, yank,” he observed, irritably, as though to chide me for keeping him waiting so long for food. The air was full of the plaintive winter notes of the chickadees. Peter, the rabbit, was sitting hunched against the kitchen door, a forlorn little figure.
The feeding of my live stock has become quite a large part of the duty of each day. The rabbit waits at the door for his slice of bread, and, if that door is left ajar, he is quite apt to hop inside and help himself to anything he finds standing on the hearth. The squirrel has his toast and cold potato on the woodpile, the birds their crumbs. The bushes present a very odd appearance, hung with bits of bacon rind for the chickadees.
The other night there came another little boarder, in the person of a very small deermouse, that slipped into the cabin and fell down between the wire screen and the lower casement of the north window. Between the netting and the window frame there is space enough to make a very satisfactory runway for a very tiny mouse, and there he cowered, peering at me, with terrified, bright eyes. The window panes open in on hinges, like a French casement, so my first impulse was to shut the upper half and keep him prisoner, knowing that if he once ran at large in the house I could never catch him, and that he would make havoc among the stores. He looked so hungry, trembling there, with his tiny, pink hands clasped on his breast, that I dropped him down a bit of bacon. Then he shivered so piteously that I dropped also a fluff of absorbent cotton, which he seized and instantly made into a little Esquimeau hut. This he placed in the corner best sheltered from the wind, turned its door in toward the glass, and retired, closing that opening with a bit of cotton, and I saw him no more by day.
A deer mouse is the prettiest little beast imaginable, somewhat smaller than the house mouse, and with very large eyes. His fur is dark brown, very soft and thick and with adarker streak along the spine. His breast is white, his legs white too, ending in tiny pink paws with wee fingernails, the exact size of the eye of a number five needle. His ears are long and fringed with black, his head very much like the head of a doe. He is nocturnal in habit, staying up in the morning until after his breakfast and mine, then retiring for the day, to come out at twilight and run up and down the window screen for exercise. So long as I keep this window closed he can’t get out, and I can study him through the glass at my leisure.
Who ever sees a deer mouse at home? Walking through the stubble field one sometimes starts one, and away he goes like a flash. Here I have this little wild thing living in my house, apparently quite content. He shall stay as long as he seems well and happy. When I think he is pining he shall go free, but he is quite as well off in his little hut as he would be in the cast-off vireo’s nest that is, in all probability, his winter home. Snow drifts in and covers it, to be sure, but he seems snug and warm and is growing sleek and fat on a diet of bacon and apple.
Since the coming of the ice I find that Imust keep more cooked stores on hand, not only for myself and for the birds and beasts, but for the frequent visitors that come driving up the lake to the door. They race along the ice in sleighs and buggies and stop at the island. When they come they stay to the next meal, so there must be materials for a party always ready. It is only fair to state that the rule works quite as well the other way round, for I am always welcome to drop in at any house near which I happen to be at meal time. Any passing guest may draw his chair to the table and partake of what is set thereon. No apologies are offered for the food. It may be only a pot of tea and a biscuit, but whatever it is you are welcome, and that, by your leave, is hospitality.
Oh, Many Islands, place of the good neighbors! I close my eyes to see picture after picture passing across the screen of memory. There is Henry Blake giving his time and labor that my house may be warm and weather proof; there is Mary Blake with daily gifts of good things to eat and counsel for my inexperience. I see the little fishing boats bobbing against the rocks as the men stop at the island to throw me off a bass and some silver herringas they pass with the day’s catch. There are John Beaulac’s two little girls scrambling through the bushes to bring me some venison when father has killed a deer, and I see Anna Jackson putting a big jug of maple syrup in the sleigh that brings me home on a Sunday.
I see too Granny Drapeau’s earnest old face, as I hear her say:
“Eh, but I was feared for you last night, when the wind blowed so strong. I couldn’t sleep fer thinkin’ of you, all alone on that island. Come daylight I says to Andy, ‘Look over an’ tell if you kin see her smoke.’ For if ever that smoke is not a’risin’ I’ll send one of the men over to see what’s wrong.”
Daily kindnesses, daily acts of friendliness for the stranger woman, who came from nowhere, to stay awhile and will go away, they know not where.
Januarythe twenty-second was a great day in the county. It was the date of the “Tea Meeting,” given under the auspices of the English Church, for the benefit of the destitute Belgians. It was also a great day for me, being the first and the last time that I shall appear in Many Islands’ society, when society meets at night. To drive seven miles in the bitter cold, to return to a stone cold house in the middle of the night, requires a love of foregathering with one’s fellows that I do not possess. So not until I have trained the rabbit to keep up the fire shall I venture out at night again. I had been invited to the festivity by Mrs. Jackson weeks before. Having very little notion of the proper dress for such an occasion, I ventured to ask counsel of a young visitor who dropped in opportunely.
“What do the women wear to the Tea Meetings here?” I inquired.
She surveyed me with an appraising eye. “Well now,” she said, kindly, “haven’t you a nice, dark waist here with you? A lady ofyour age would naturally wear something dark and plain.”
At once I cast away all idea of a serviceably plain attire and determined to array myself in all the finery I had with me here; chiffon gown, long gloves and velvet hat with plumes. “Lady of my age, indeed!”
And when I arrived at the entertainment every soul was in her best, and my attire entirely appropriate. I waited with some pleasant anticipation for the moment when my little friend should spy me and was not disappointed in the expression that swept across her pretty face. As a plain dresser I was evidently not a success.
The start was to be an early one. In the middle of the afternoon I raked out the fire, fed the animals, hid the key under the woodpile and started down the lake to the Jackson farm, following a fresh-cut sleigh track that glittered like a silver ribbon flung down on the blue ice. Now and again the solid floor under me would give a groan and a heave and I would spring aside, my heart in my throat despite my knowledge of the two feet of solid ice beneath me. Then I would assure my quaking spirit that where the woodsleds coulddrive I could surely walk, and would travel on.
At Jackson’s there was a pot of bean soup on the stove, and, as a comforting repast on a cold day, I know of nothing that approaches hot bean soup—it stays by one. We drove off in the big farm sleigh, seven miles to the town of Fallen Timber, passing through Sark with its five houses and the Cheese Factory, and by farms each of which contributed its heavily laden sleigh to the long line of vehicles bound for the meeting.
The town hall of Fallen Timber stands on a bleak hillside. It is a room, about thirty by forty feet in size, with a six-foot wide stage at the end and a box stove in the middle. The stovepipe goes straight to the ceiling, across, and out by a hole in the wall at the back of the stage. The walls are of a dirty, leprous-looking plaster, with here and there a small bunch of ground pine tacked on by way of decoration. At the back of the stage a strip of once white muslin bore the inscription: “Welcome To All” in letters a foot high.
The seats are planks laid on the stumps of trees, the stage curtain is of red and green calico.
Now and again this curtain was pushed aside, disclosing the preparations for supper, and such piles of cookies, cakes, and sandwiches I never expect to see again. In the phrase of this neighborhood there were certainly “plenty of cookings.”
The great folk of the evening were late—the rector and his wife, the member of Parliament, who was to preside for us, and the orator, who was to address us. But we did not mind the delay. We had come to meet each other, and the time passed pleasantly enough. I was seated almost exactly on the stove, ventilation there was none, and the hall was packed, but what of that? It was good to feel thoroughly warm, at no expense to oneself, and there’s too much fuss made about fresh air anyway—at least in the opinion of many of my neighbors.
The orator was the typical political speaker—portly, bland, slightly humorous and very approachable. He made an excellent speech, outlining the causes that led to the Great War, and telling of Germany’s policy and her hopes. He explained the part that Belgium had played, in holding back the tide of invasion until France had had time to mobilize,and it was all very clear and convincing. He laid stress on the spontaneous outpouring of loyalty in the colonies, and quoted one of the first messages received from India—the telegram from a Rajah that read: “My Emperor, what work has he forMEand for my-people?”
As he went on to enumerate them—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and all the islands of the seas—I forgot the little hall, the crowd, the heat, and caught something of Isaiah’s vision of the Great House of God, that shall be exalted high above the hills, and of the time when all nations shall flow unto it.
After the speech came supper, huge plates of sandwiches and many kinds of cake, with pitchers of steaming tea. The men ate three and four of these platefuls with as careless an air as who should say: “What are five pounds or so of food washed down with quarts of strong, boiled tea? A mere nothing.”
What was worse, the children ate quite as much as their elders, but I have long since ceased to forebode anything for the youth of this favored land. Apparently, they cannot be harmed.
After supper, at about eleven-thirty, camethe real object of the meeting—the entertainment by “local talent.” It began with the chorus: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.” Followed then a recitation, “My Aunt Somebody’s Custard Pie.”
This was delivered in a coquettish, not to say soubrettish manner by a little miss in a short white frock, and with a coral ribbon wound round her curly, dark hair. Her assured manner struck me and not pleasantly. Later I understood it. She was “Teacher” in charge of Number Six, better known as the Woodchuck School. I am told that the Boards of Education cannot keep these rural schools supplied, the girls marry off so fast; and I can well believe it, judging by this one. She was evidently the belle of the neighborhood. In the comments that the boys were making all round me the other girls were all very well, but “Teacher” was easily the favorite.
“She’s a good teacher,” I heard one declare, hoarsely fervent. “She’s did well by Number Six. I could make out every word them children spoke”—a fact that really seemed to give him cause for satisfaction.
The night wore on with drill after drill, song after song, recitation after recitation.Despite my fatigue, I was interested. As I watched the audience something took me by the throat. It was somehow so pathetic. Those heavy men, those work-worn women were not interested because their children were being shown off. No indeed. They liked the performance because it was just at their level, and that fact threw a searchlight on the bare monotony of their lives. We finished at about two o’clock with “Tipperary,” and “God Save the King,” and, as every national anthem is an assault on the feelings and makes me cry, I sang and wiped my eyes with the rest.
The night skies here are seldom black, like the skies of the south, they are more often a soft, misty gray. The stars, instead of being sharp little points of light, are big and indistinct and furry. It is always light enough to see the road, even at the dark of the moon. We drove along through the bitter cold, Big John Beaulac’s hired boy, Reginald, standing in the back of the sleigh, by way of getting a lift home. He was regretting, all the way, that some people had not eaten all their “cookings” and that so much good food had been wasted on the floor. I fancied that ReginaldBean would fain have eaten even more than he did.
At the shore we dropped Mrs. Jackson and the three little sleeping Jacksons, and drove on down the lake. At the narrows I, being almost frozen to the seat of the sleigh, insisted on being set down to walk, and took my way along the side of the island, treading in the footprints that I had left in the snow when I had set out—was it the day or the week before?
I groped my way among the trees and along the trail to the house, lighted a fire and looked at the clock. I had been walking through the woods at four o’clock in the morning, and with as little concern as though it had been that hour of a summer afternoon.
Then, as though to rebuke my temerity, I was frightened on the lake the very next day.
I was walking briskly along on the ice, singing at the top of my lungs, because just to be alive on a day when the air was so cold and clean, the sky so blue and the snow crystals so brilliant, was happiness, when I came full on a figure that robbed the morning of its joy.
It was Ishmael Beaulac, the imbecile, shambling heavily along. He spoke, thenturned and followed me some distance, his air half menacing, half cringing, and I was frightened, for I realized that for miles around there was no one to come to my aid, if Ishmael should take it into his poor, crazed brain to do me harm. But he wandered off again, and, as I watched his bent figure shuffling away in the snow, I was shaken with a great compassion. I have never seen a face so marked with evil. Lined, swollen, and inflamed with some loathsome eruption, the low, receding forehead, with coarse, black hair growing almost to the line of the eyebrows, a wide, loose-lipped mouth, and cunning shifty eyes—it is a face that has haunted my dreams.
I asked Rose Beaulac about him.
“John and I was a sayin’ that we’d ought to tell you about Ish,” she said. “Now that the ice is come, likely he’ll walk over to the island. But don’t you be afeared of him. Just make out like you’re goin’ to throw hot water on him an’ he’ll run.”
“Oh, poor creature!” I cried. “I couldn’t hurt him.”
“It ain’t needful to scald him,” said Rose, with an air of great cunning. “I always holdsmy finger in the water to see if it’s cool enough afore I throws it. He’s awful ’fraid of water, Ish is,” she observed, and remembering Ishmael’s appearance I could well believe it.
“But don’t you ever make over him,” Rose went on, “and don’t you ever feed him or you’ll have him there all the time. Don’t leave any knives or old boots around where he can git them. Ish don’t know nothin’ about money; he’ll walk right past your purse to steal a pair of old boots. But he won’t hurt you—at least we don’t think he will.”
“I have heard that his father, Old John, was cruel to him,” I ventured, with some diffidence, for Old John or Devil Beaulac was Little John’s own Uncle.
A look of distress flitted across Rose’s face.
“Old John was a very severe man, very severe,” she said. “He treated Ishmael awful bad. He must have hurted him very hard, for now when the men is teasin’ him if one of them lifts an ax or a spade, and makes to run at him, Ish goes perfectly wild. They say Old John used to hit him on the head. That would make him so crazy-like, wouldn’t it? Yes, poor Ish has had it awful hard, there’s none but will tell you that,” she sighed.
The neighbors are less reticent about old John. By their account he was a man outside all law, a giant in strength and of a fiendish cruelty. Finally his tyrannies grew intolerable, and his sons set on him, beating him until he died. Then they threw his body into an old mica pit, filled the pit with stones and went their way. No one interfered. The old man was thought to have earned his doom and the sons were never brought to trial. But even now, when poor Ishmael’s fits of madness come upon him they say he goes to that pit and throws great rocks into it, cursing the memory of his father.
Much of this may be untrue, but the story haunts me. In the figure of this poor maniac, hurling his stones and shouting impotent curses to the unheeding sky, I see a time when the earth was young, when men dragged the offender out from the great congregation and stoned him to death before the face of an angry God. I marvel that in this place so near to civilization such stories can still be told.
Weare no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I. We have come through a blizzard. For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons, bobcats, and bears. We have melted snow for drinking water, because the drifts cut us off from the lake and buried the waterhole. We have dug our firewood out from under a pile of wet whiteness. The mouse came through safely too, although the snow sifted in through the window screen, and covered him, house and all.
The storm began on the second of February, in the evening. All night long the wind howled with a violence that threatened to lift the house bodily and deposit it out on the lake. It searched out every crack and crevice, chilling me to the bone. It wrenched and tore at the heavy wooden shutters, it tossed and twisted the trees, every now and again throwing one to the ground with a grinding crash. It whistled, it moaned; and, with it came the snow, in blinding, whirling gray clouds thatblotted out everything. The lake was obscured, the outlines of the neighboring islands were lost. I could see only a smother of drifting, dancing flakes.
The day passed fairly well, for the mere necessity of keeping up the fire was an occupation in itself.
“This,” said I to Peter, “is the beginning of the true Canadian winter. I hope it does not stay too long.”
Peter, having been born last summer, has had no experience of any other winter. No memories of former blizzards troubled him. He hoped that the bread would hold out.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon Satan inspired me to go out on the porch, to survey the prospect. Immediately I smelled smoke.
Now, there is but one thing of which I have been afraid, and that is fire. A blaze started here would inevitably sweep the island and no one could stop it. I smelled tar paper burning.
“What a pleasant thing it would be to borrow the cherished summer camp of a friend and burn it down for her! What a safe thing for oneself it would be to go to sleep in asmoldering house and have it break into flames in the night.”
I sniffed and sniffed despairingly. I scrambled out into the snow to examine the chimneys; I burrowed under the porch floor to look at the foundations; I climbed the ladder to make sure of the roof, and still that smell of burning tar persisted. I had a horrible misgiving that there was fire smoldering between the outer and the inner walls.
There was nothing for it but to get to the Blakes and tell them of my fears. If Henry could assure me that there was no way of a fire’s starting, I would believe him and go to bed content. If I had not that assurance, I should be forced to sit up all night waiting to escape into the snow. Whatever the weather I had to get to the farm; that was all I could think of.
I dressed as warmly as I could and set forth, through the drifts, to the edge of the island. I made fair progress until I stepped off the land on to the lake. Then I began to have some idea of what I, in my ignorance, had undertaken.
The lake was like the ocean done in snow. The wind had piled great breakers of snowone behind another, their crests curled over at the top, exactly like the waves on a beach. Only these breakers were curled over the opposite way. They turned over toward the wind, not away from it. One long ridge followed another with a deep, scooped out furrow to windward. Looking down on the lake from the level of the porch, these waves did not look very high. When I stepped off into them they came up to my armpits.
Even then I had not sense to turn back; even then I had no idea of any real danger. The wind was at my back. I could feel it behind me like a wall, as I climbed through each succeeding hillock of snow and out across the intervening three or four yards of level ice. Wave followed wave, each higher, deeper, more suffocating than the last. Sometimes I could walk for a few feet on the top of a drift before sinking into its depths. I scrambled, fell, rolled, crawled, climbed, and thought that I should never reach the shore. Counting helped me, as I pulled each foot up out of the clinging mass and set it down a few inches nearer the land.
“One, two, three, four,” I said aloud, timing my steps to the pounding of my laboringheart. My breath was coming in gasps, a pulse beat in my temples, my head swam, there was a ringing in my ears as I plodded on, now with eyes shut.
A thin, washed out moon came out and looked through wisps of ragged clouds. Its light served only to make the scene more desolate, the distance from the shore more terrifying. The only idea that remained in my stupified brain was that I must somehow find strength to go on lifting heavy feet one after the other; that I must struggle up from each fall, must breathe deep and keep a quiet mind.
At last I reached the deeper drifts that fringed the shore, skirted the hidden waterhole, found traces of the cattle tracks, dragged myself along the path and finally stepped, with the very last remnant of strength, up on the porch and into the warm bright kitchen. When Mary Blake caught sight of me, she sat down suddenly and said: “My God!”
They had not attempted to get to the water hole that day, but had given the cattle melted snow. They had gone only as far as the barn and henhouses. Even the house dog had stayed indoors.
I gasped out my fears and Henry Blakelaughed at them. There was no way, he said, for a fire to have started and if one had caught, the house would have been flat to the ground long before I had crossed the lake.
I heard him with disgust. If that was the way my panic looked, it was high time for me to return to my home on the island. I rose with much dignity and walked off to the shore, before the Blakes had adjusted their minds to the move.
This time the wind was in my face, making the going ten times harder than before. About forty yards out from shore I stopped and turned my back to the blast to catch my breath, and there was Henry, dressed in his great fur coat, striding out after me and looking for all the world like a bear on its hind legs.
When I saw his thickset figure struggling against the gale it seemed suddenly a hatefully inconsiderate thing to have brought him away from his warm fire and out into the storm and I called:
“Go back, Mr. Blake. There is no fire. Don’t attempt to come after me.”
But Henry only stumped on.
“I know there’s nothing burning,” heretorted. “We’re a long way more worried about you than we are about the camp. You might get confused and lose your life in this storm.”
On he went ahead of me and I was thankful to follow humbly in his footsteps.
We reached the house, and, as we stood in the warm room fighting for breath, I said:
“Mr. Blake, there is some Scotch here. Will you drink some?” And Henry said he would.
After that I was content to stay indoors until he came with the horses and broke the tracks through the island.
Such heaps of snow lay piled on the lake and in the woods that it should have taken months for it to disappear; but in three days there came a thaw and melted it all away.
The thaw came not a day too soon, for the sixteenth was the time set for the long anticipated sawing bee at the farm. During January Henry Blake and Jimmie had been felling trees and dragging them to the house in preparation for the arrival of the perambulating sawmill, that goes from farm to farm as soon as the ice will hold. There was a pile of logs, ten feet high by thirty feet long piled butt endto in the dooryard. When a farmer announces a bee his neighbors gather from far and near, leaving their own work to help him put through the particular job in hand. He is expected to attend their bees in return. The farmer’s wife, who earns a high seat in heaven if ever woman did, works for days beforehand, cooking for the ten or a dozen hungry men who will come down on her for dinner, supper and, perhaps, breakfast, with a night’s lodging thrown in.
Mary Blake had made bread of the lightest and finest, had killed chickens, taken fish out of brine, and pork from the barrel; had made cakes and pies; had brought out pickles and preserves, and when I arrived she was creaming carrots and onions and boiling the inevitable potatoes.