T
he shanty was ere long lined in a comely manner with the planks which had journeyed up the pond in the ice-boat, affording many an evening's work for Arthur. About Christmas all was right and tight.
Now, to those who have any regrets or sadnesses in the background of memory, the painfullest of all times are these anniversaries. One is forced round face to face with the past and the unalterable, to gaze on it, perchance, through blinding tears. The days return—unchanged: but, oh, to what changed hearts!
Were they not thinking of the Canadian exiles to-day, at home, at dear old Dunore? For nothing better than exiles did the young men feel themselves, this snow-white Christmas morning, in the log-hut among the backwoods, without a friendly face to smile a greeting, except poor Andy's; and his was regretful and wistful enough too.
'I say, Bob, what shall we do with ourselves? I'm sure I wish I didn't know 'twas Christmas day at all. It makes a fellow feel queer and nonsensical—homesick,I suppose they call it—and all that sort of thing. I vote we obliterate the fact, by chopping as hard as any other day.'
So, after reading the chapters for the day (how the words brought up a picture of the wee country church in Ireland, with its congregation of a dozen, its whitewashed walls and blindless lancet windows!), they went forth to try that relief for all pains of memory—steady hard work. The ten acres allotted for December were nearly chopped through by this time, opening a considerable space in front of the shanty, and beginning to reveal the fair landscape of lake and wooded slopes that lay beyond. The felled trees lay piled in wind rows and plan heaps so far as was possible without the help of oxen to move the huge logs; snow covered them pretty deeply, smoothing all unsightliness for the present.
'How I long to have something done towards the building of our house!' said Robert, pausing after the fall of a hemlock spruce, while Arthur attacked the upper branches. 'I'd like so much to have it neatly finished before my father and mother and Linda come next summer.'
'Well, haven't you no end of shingles made for the roof?' said the other, balancing his axe for a blow. 'You're working at them perpetually; and Andy isn't a bad hand either at wooden slates, as he calls them.'
'We must have a raising-bee in spring,' concluded Robert, after some rumination—'as soon as the snow melts a little. Really, only for such co-operative working in this thinly peopled country, nothing largecould be ever effected. Bees were a great device, whoever invented them.'
'By the way,' said Arthur presently, returning from chopping apart the trunk into two lengths of fifteen feet, 'did you hear that the Scotchman between us and the "Corner," at Daisy Burn, wants to sell his farm and improvements, and is pushing out into the wild land farther up the pond? Nim told me yesterday. He expects three pounds sterling an acre, including fixtures, and he got the ground for nothing; so that's doubling one's capital, I imagine.'
'How for nothing?'
'It was before a human being had settled in these townships, and the concession lines were only just blazed off by the surveyors. Davidson obtained a grant of land on condition of performing what are called settlement duties, which means chopping out and clearing the concession lines for a certain distance. Of course that was another way of payment, by labour instead of cash. But on swearing that it was done, he obtained what Nim calls a "lift," a crown patent, we should say, and the land was his estate for ever.'
'I wish we could transfer a couple of his fenced fields here,' said Robert, 'and his young orchard. We must have some sort of a garden, Arthur, before Linda comes.'
'Yes, she never could get on without her flower beds. I say, Bob, won't Cedar Creek look awfully wild to them?'
They worked on awhile both thinking of that. Any one accustomed to smooth enclosed countries, with regular roads and houses at short distances,would indeed find the backwoods 'awfully wild.' And that most gentle mother, how would she bear the transplanting?
'I had a very misty idea of what bush-life was, I own, till I found myself in it,' quoth Robert, after a long silence, broken only by the ring of the axes.
'Living like a labourer at home, but without half his comforts,' said Arthur, piling the boughs. 'Tell you what, Bob, we wouldn't be seen doing the things we do here. Suppose Sir Richard Lacy or Lord Scutcheon saw us in our present trim?'
'But you know that's all false pride,' said Robert, with a little glow on his cheek nevertheless. 'We shouldn't be ashamed of anything but wrong.'
'Say what you will, Bob, it strikes me that we aren't of the class which do best in Canada. The men of hard hands, labouring men and women, are those who will conquer the forest and gain wealth here.'
'Well, if that be the rule, you and I must strive to be the exception,' said Robert; 'for I'm determined to have a comfortable homestead for the dear old people from Dunore, and I'm equally determined to set my mark on Canadian soil, and to prosper, if it be God's will.'
He lifted off his cap for a moment, looking at the serene sky. The rising discontent in his brother's heart was stilled by the gesture. Both worked assiduously, till Andy, with an unusual twinkle in his eyes, summoned them to dinner.
'What has the fellow been about, I wonder? I know 'twasn't respect for the holiday kept him indoors all the morning.'
It was presently explained. Andy, ignorant ofcourses, dished up, together with the ham, a very fine dumpling emitting the odour of apples.
'Sure, as ye can't have yer own plum puddin' in this outlandish counthry, ye can have a thing the same shape, anyhow. Mrs. Jackey showed me how to make it iligant, of the string of dried bits I had thrun in the box since we kem here first. Throth an' I'm cur'ous to see did they ever swell out agin, afther the parchin' they got.'
But for a slightly peculiar taste in the sweet, the dumpling was unimpeachable.
'I suppose Mrs. Jackey uses maple sugar in her confectionery,' said Robert; 'asoupçonof trees runs through it.'
Late in the evening, as the pitch-pine logs were flaring abundance of light through the cabin—light upon Robert at his shingles, and upon Arthur at his work-bench, and upon Andy shaving and packing the slips of white pine as fast as his master split them, with a stinging night outside, some twenty-five degrees below zero, and the snow crusted at top hard enough to bear anything—all three raised their heads to listen to some approaching sound through the dead silence of the frozen air. It was a very distant vagrant tinkling, as of sheep-bells on a common in old Europe; they looked at one another, and Andy crossed himself reverently.
'Like chapel bells over the say from poor Ireland,' he muttered, and crept to the door, which Robert had opened. 'Sure there isn't fairies all the ways out here? an' 'tis mighty like it'—
'Hush—h—!' Andy crossed himself again as the tinkling became more plainly audible. A sweetlyplaintive jangling it seemed—a tangled careless music. Nearer, and still nearer it came.
'What a fool I am!' exclaimed Robert; 'it must be sleigh-bells. Travellers, I suppose.'
And before many minutes were past, the sleigh had rounded its way among the stumps, over the smooth snow, to the shanty door, filled with brilliant wood-light.
F
rom the buffalo robes of the sleigh emerged a gentleman so wrapped in lynx-furs and bearskin, that, until his face stood revealed by the firelight, nothing but his voice was recognisable by the Wynns.
'Argent! is it possible?'
'Most possible: didn't you remember that my regiment was quartered out here? But I'm sure it is a very unexpected pleasure to meet you in the bush, old fellow;' and they shook hands warmly again. 'For though I heard from my mother that you had gone to settle in Canada, she didn't mention the locality, and I've been inquiring about you in all directions without success, until, as good fortune would have it, I stopped at the odious Yankee tavern yonder this evening, and overheard a fellow in the bar mention your name. You may imagine I seized him, and ascertained particulars—harnessed the sleigh again, and started off up here, to ask you for a night's lodging, which means a rug before the fire.'
STILL-HUNTING.STILL-HUNTING.Click toENLARGE
His servant had been unloading the sleigh of knapsacks, and rifles, and other hunting gear. CaptainArgent gave him a few directions, and presently the silver-sounding bells tinkled swiftly away along the concession road, and back to the 'Corner' again.
'Och sure,' quoth Andy to himself, as he witnessed from among his shingles the reunion of the old acquaintances, 'what a house for him to come into—not as big as the butler's bedroom at Scutcheon Castle—an' nothin' but pork an' bear's mate to give the likes of a gran' gintleman like him: I wish he'd sted at home, so I do. Oh, Misther Robert asthore, if I ever thought to see the family so reduced; an' sure I was hopin' nobody would know it but ourselves—leastways, none of the quality at home.'
Andy's soliloquy was interrupted by a summons from his master to prepare supper; but the under-current of his thoughts went on as he set about his cooking.
'An' to have to be fryin' mate ondher his very nose, an' the kitchen in the castle is a good quarther of a mile from the dinin' parlour, anyhow; an' all our chaney is made of wood, barrin' the couple of plates; an' our glasses is nothin' but cows' horns. An' sorra a bit of a table-cloth, unless I spread one of the sheets. An' to sit on shtools for want of chairs. An' to sleep on the flure like meself. Arrah, what brought him here at all?'
The subject of these reflections had meanwhile lighted his silver-mounted meerschaum, and was puffing contentedly in the intervals of animated chat, apparently quite satisfied with his position and prospective hardships, not giving a thought to the humble accommodations of his friends' shanty; which, on the first entrance, had contracted in Robert's vision into a merewood-cutter's hut, devoid of every elegance and most of the comforts of civilised life. He imagined that thus it would be seen through Argent's eyes. But if it was so, Argent neither by look nor manner gave token of the least thought of the sort.
He was the youngest son of a poor peer, Lord Scutcheon, living in the neighbourhood of Dunore; and often had the Wynns ridden with him at the same meet, and shouldered fowling-pieces in the same sporting party.
'But picking off pheasants in a preserve is tame work to the noble game one can shoot in these forests,' said he. 'I'm bound at present on a "still-hunting" expedition; which doesn't mean looking out for illegal distilleries, as it might signify in Ireland, ha, ha!'
Captain Argent had very high animal spirits, and a small joke sufficed to wake them into buoyant laughter, which was infectious by its very abundance.
'Deer-stalking is the right word; I've done it in Scotland, but now I mean to try my hand on the moose—grandest of American ruminants. I've engaged an old trapper to come with me for a few days into their haunts. Now, 'twould be a delightful party if you two would join. What do you say, Wynn? Come, lay by your axe, and recreate yourself for a week, man.'
Arthur looked a very decided acceptance of the proposition, but Robert shook his head. 'Couldn't leave the place,' said he, smiling; 'too much to be done.'
'Nonsense; the trees will stand till your return, and you can't plough through four feet of snow.'
'If I was far enough advanced to have land fit forploughing, nothing could be pleasanter than to join you, Argent; but unfortunately no end of trees have to be cut down, and logged in heaps for burning before then. But, Arthur, wouldn't you go?'
His faint opposition, because he did not like to leave his brother, was easily overcome. Captain Argent made another attack upon Robert's resolve. 'People always consider winter the time for amusement in Canada. Nature gives a tolerably good hint to the same effect, by blocking up the rivers so that ships can't sail, and snowing up the farms, so that the ground isn't seen for months; and if that isn't a licence for relaxation'—
'I suspect that in the earlier stages of bush-life there are no holidays,' replied Robert: 'if you just reflect that everything in the way of civilisation has to be done afresh from the beginning pretty much like living on a desert island. Now I've got a house to build by summer time, and here are all the preparations towards it as yet;' and he pointed to the shingles.
'Why, thin, I'd like to know for what Misther Robert is dhrawin' up the poverty of the family, an' makin' little of himself before the captain,' thought Andy angrily, and betraying the feeling by a bang of the frying-pan as he laid it aside. 'Can't he talk to him of sojers, or guns, or wild bastes, or somethin' ginteel of that kind, an' not be makin' a poor mouth, as if he hadn't a single hap'ny.' Andy was relieved when the conversation veered round to a consideration of Canada as military quarters.
'About the pleasantest going,' was the Hon. Captain Argent's opinion. 'Of course I can't exactly makeout why we're sent here, unless to stave off the Yankees, which it seems to me the colonists are sufficiently inclined and sufficiently able to do themselves; neither can I imagine why Joe Hume and his school of economists submit to such expense without gaining anything in return, save the honour and glory of calling Canada our colony. But leaving that matter to wiser heads than mine, I can say for myself that I like the quarters greatly, and am inclined to agree with Canadian eulogists, that it is the finest country in the world—barring our own little islands.'
'I don't feel, though, as if it ever could behome,' observed Robert, who had taken to his shingles again.
'Perhaps not; but we military men have an essentially homeless profession, you know.'
'The red-coats in Montreal and Quebec seemed a visible link with mother country, most welcome to my eyes in the new land; and so, Argent, when you're commander-in-chief, do continue the regiments in Canada, for my sake.'
'But, my dear fellow,' said the officer quite seriously, as he struck the ashes from his pipe, 'it is waste of the most expensive manufactured material on earth, the British soldier. When he's within reach of the States, he deserts by whole pickets, ready armed and accoutred to the Yankees' hands; I've had the pleasant job of pursuing the chaps myself, and being baulked by the frontier. It's the garrison duty they detest; and an unlimited licence beckons them over the border.'
'And you think,' said Robert, 'the colonists are sufficiently loyal, and all that, to be left to themselves?'
'I don't think they would join the States, at all events. What a horrid set those Yankees are! Canadians are too respectable to wish to sail in the same ship with them.' This truly cogent argument was followed by a series of profound whiffs. 'And if they did,' added Captain Argent presently, 'we've been building the strongest fortifications in the world, spending millions at Halifax and Quebec and other places, on fosses and casemates, and bomb-proof towers, just for the Yankees! And I suppose that Barrack Hill in the middle of Bytown will be made into another Acropolis for the same end.'
'Ah,' said Robert, shaving his shingle attentively, 'so long as Canadians look back to England as home, and speak of it as home, there's little fear of annexation or revolt. Mother country has only to keep up the motherly relation, and patiently loosen the leading strings, according as her colonies grow able to run alone.'
'That sentiment might fall from the lips of a Colonial Secretary in his place in the Commons. By the way, did you hear that my brother Percy has been returned member for the county at home?'
'No; we have not seen a newspaper since we left, except a shabby little Canadian print, which gives half a dozen lines to the English mail. Tell us about it, Argent. Was there a contest?'
How intensely interesting were the particulars, and how Robert and Arthur did devour the ill-printed provincial news-sheet issuing from the obscure Irish country town, and burning all through with political partisanship! Luckily Argent had the last received copy in his pocket, which detailed all the gossip ofthe election, with the familiar names, and localities of the struggle.
Looking back half a lifetime seemed to be concentrated in the months since they had left Europe. Things widely different from all past experience had filled their thoughts to overflowing, and drowned out old sympathies, till this evening vivified them afresh. Yet Robert felt, with a sort of little pain, that they must gradually die away, be detached, and fall off from his life. His logs and shingles, his beaver meadow and water privilege, were more to him now than all the political movements which might shake Ireland to its centre.
Long after Argent's short athletic figure, crowned with fair curls, lay fast asleep on his buffalo rugs, enjoying hunters' repose, the brothers sat talking and musing. It was not the first time that Robert had to reason down Arthur's restless spirit, if he could. This rencontre had roused it again. He was not satisfied with the monotonous life of the backwoods. He envied Argent, rather, who could make pleasure his pursuit, if he chose.
They set off for the hunting grounds with sunrise next morning; the experienced Ina Moose, a half-bred trapper, marching in advance of the sledge. First, he had stored in the shanty the jingling strings of bells, without consulting their owner; he had a constitutional antipathy to noise of all sorts, and could see no especial good in warning the game.
'What an erect fellow he is, and as taciturn as a mole!' quoth the lively Argent. 'I hope we shall meet with some of his step-relations, the Indians; I've quite a passion for savage life, that is, to look at.Last winter's leave I made some excursions on Lake Simcoe; the islands there are all savage territory, belonging to the Ojibbeways. Poor fellows, they're dying out—every year becoming fewer; yet one can discern the relics of a magnificent race. Red cunning has been no match for white wisdom, that's certain.'
Arthur was a willing listener to many stories about his friend's excursions; and so the time was wiled away as they drove deeper into the recesses of the forest, even to the extreme end of all concession lines.
Here was Ina's wigwam, on the edge of a small pond, which was closely hedged in with pines. Wasting no words, he merely stepped back to unbuckle the shaggy pony, and at the ensuing noonday meal Arthur for the first time tasted the wilderness preserve called 'pemmican.' It was not unlike what housewives at home denominate 'collar,' he thought, cutting in compact slices of interwoven fat and lean.
'How is it made, Argent?'
'I believe the dried venison is pounded between stones till the fibres separate, and in that powdery state is mixed with hot melted buffalo's fat, and sewed up in bags of skin. They say it is most nutritive—a pound equal to four pounds of ordinary meat. A sort of concentrated nourishment, you see.'
'What are those blackish things hanging up in the smoke, I wonder?'
'Beavers' tails, captured in the creeks off the lake, I suppose; capital food, tasting like bacon, but a little gristly.'
'And does the fellow live here, all alone?' A quick and perhaps unfriendly glance of Ina's blackeyes proved that he was not deaf, though by choice dumb.
'Well, I suppose so, this year; but he's a great rover. Was with me on the Simcoe last year. I never met such a lover of the chase for its own sake. His forefathers' instincts are rampant in him. Ina, have we any chance of a moose?'
The trapper shook his grisly head. 'Only on the hard wood ridges all winter,' he answered; 'they "yard" whar maples grows, for they live on the tops and bark. Bariboos come down here, mostly.'
What these were, Arthur had soon an opportunity of knowing. Ina kindled into a different being when the hunting instinct came over him. Every sense was on the alert.
The hunters had drawn white shirts over their clothes, to disguise their approach through the snow from the far-seeing deer which they were to stalk. They proceeded some distance before meeting with game. What intense and inexpressible stillness through the grand woods! Arthur started, and almost exclaimed, when, from a pine tree close to him, issued a report sharp as a pistol shot. It was only the violent contraction of the wood from the severe frost, as he knew in a moment; and the deer browsing yonder on branch tops never winced, though a whisper or a footfall would have sent them bounding away. Presently the crack of Argent's rifle was followed by the spring of a buck high into the air, all four feet together, poor animal, as the death-pang pierced his heart.
'I thought I never should get fair aim, from the way he was protected by trees,' said the sportsman,reloading with satisfaction. 'And it's cruel to maim a creature, you know;' whence the reader may perceive that Captain Argent was humane.
'Holloa! what's this?' said Arthur, nearly stumbling over a pair of antlers.
'Moose,' replied Ina laconically, as he glanced upwards to see whether the maple twigs had been nipped short.
'He must have been a trifle lighter for the loss of these,' observed Arthur, lifting them. 'Nearly six feet across, and half-a-hundred weight, if an ounce. I'm curious to see the animal that can carry them composedly.'
'The largest beast on the continent,' said Argent. But much as they searched, the shed antlers were all they saw of moose for that day.
S
cene, early morning; the sun pouring clear light over the snowy world, and upon Captain Argent in front of the hut, just emerged from his blankets and rugs.
'Why, Arthur, here's an elk walking up to the very hall door!'
Almost at the same minute Ina appeared among the distant trees, and fired. He had gone off on snow-shoes long before daybreak, to run down the moose he knew to be in the neighbourhood, had wounded a fine bull, and driven him towards his camp.
'Why didn't you finish him off on the spot,' asked Arthur, 'instead of taking all that trouble?'
'No cart to send for the flesh,' replied Ina significantly.
There might be a thousand pounds of that, covered with long coarse hair, and crested with the ponderous antlers. A hunch on the shoulders seemed arranged as a cushion support to these last; and in the living specimens seen afterwards by Arthur, they carried the huge horns laid back horizontally, as they marched ata long trot, nose in the air, and large sharp eyes looking out on all sides.
'It was a sharp idea to make the elk his own butcher's boy,' quoth Argent.
The massive thick lips formed the 'mouffle,' prized in the wilderness as a dainty: Arthur would have been ashamed to state his preference for a civilised mutton chop. Other elks shared the fate of this first; though it seemed a wanton waste of nature's bounties to slay the noble animals merely for their skins, noses, and tongues. Ina was callous, for he knew that thus perished multitudes every year in Canada West, and thousands of buffaloes in the Hudson's Bay territory. Arthur could not help recalling little Jay; and many a time her lesson kept his rifle silent, and spared a wound or a life.
One day, while stalking wild turkeys, creeping cautiously from tree to tree, an unwonted sound dissipated their calculations. Coming out on a ridge whence the wood swept down to one of the endless ponds, they heard distant noises as of men and horses drawing a heavy load.
'Lumberers,' explained Ina, pricking his ears. He would have immediately turned in a contrary direction; but the prospect of seeing a new phase of life was a strong temptation to Captain Argent, so they went forward towards a smoke that curled above a knot of pines.
It proceeded from the lumber shanty; a long, windowless log-hut with a door at one end, a perpetual fire in the centre, on a large open hearth of stones; the chimney, a hole in the roof. Along both sides and the farther end was a sort of dais, or low platformof unhewn trees laid close together, and supporting the 'bunks,' or general bed, of spruce boughs and blankets. Pots slung in the smoke and blaze were bubbling merrily, under presidence of a red night-capped French Canadian, who acted as cook, and was as civil, after the manner of his race, as if the new arrivals were expected guests.
'Ah, bon-jour, Messieurs; vous êtes les bienvenus. Oui, monsieur—sans doute ce sont des gens de chantier. Dey vork in forest,' he added, with a wave of his hand—plunging into English. 'Nous sommes tous les gens de chantier—vat you call hommes de lumbare: mais pour moi, je suis chef de cuisine pour le présent:' and a conversation ensued with Argent, in which Arthur made out little more than an occasional word of the Canadian's—with ease when it was so Anglican as 'le foreman.'
'What a good-looking, merry-faced chap he is!' observed Arthur, when the red nightcap had been pulled off in an obeisance of adieu, as they went to seek for the others, and witness their disforesting operations.
'French Canadians are generally the personifications of good humour and liveliness,' returned Argent; 'the pleasantest possible servants and the best voyagers. Listen to him now, carolling a "chanson" as he manages his smutty cookery. That's the way they sing at everything.'
'So the lumberers have a foreman?'
'Curious how the French can't invent words expressive of such things, but must adopt ours. He tells me "le foreman's" duty is to distribute the work properly, allotting to each gang its portion; and also tomake a report of conduct to the overseer at the end of the season, for which purpose he keeps a journal of events. I had no idea there was so much organization among them; and it seems the gangs have regular duties—one to fell, one to hew, one to draw to the water's edge with oxen; and each gang has a headman directing its labours.'
Nearing the sound of the axes, they came to where a group of lumber-men were cutting down some tall spruce-firs, having first laid across over the snow a series of logs, called 'bedding timbers,' in the line that each tree would fall. One giant pine slowly swayed downwards, and finally crashed its full length on the prepared sleepers, just as the strangers approached. Immediately on its fall, the 'liner' commenced to chop away the bark for a few inches wide all along the trunk, before marking with charcoal where the axes were to hew, in squaring the timber; meantime another man was lopping the top off the tree, and a third cutting a sort of rough mortise-hole at the base, which he afterwards repeated at the upper end.
So busy were the whole party, that the hewer, a genuine Paddy, who stood leaning on his broad axe until the timber was ready for him, was the first to raise his eyes and notice the new-comers. Arthur asked him what the holes were for.
'Why, then, to raft the trees together when we get 'em into the water,' was his reply; and in the same breath he jumped on to the trunk, and commenced to notch with his axe as fast as possible along the sides, about two feet apart. Another of his gang followed, splitting off the blocks between the deep notches into the line mark. And this operation, repeated for thefour sides, squared the pine into such a beam as we see piled in our English timber yards.
What was Arthur's surprise to recognise, in the mass of lumberers gathered round a huge mast, the Milesian countenance of Murty Keefe, a discontented emigrant with whom he had picked up a casual acquaintance on the steamboat which took him to Montreal. He was dressing away the knots near the top with his axe, as though he had been used to the implement all his life. When, after infinite trouble and shouting in all tongues, the half-dozen span of strong patient oxen were set in motion, dragging the seventy-feet length of timber along the snow towards the lake, Arthur contrived to get near enough to his countryman for audible speech. Murty's exaggerated expectations had suffered a grievous eclipse; still, if he became an expert hewer, he might look forward to earning more than a curate's salary by his axe. And they were well fed: he had more meat in a week now than in a twelvemonth in Ireland. He was one of half-a-dozen Irishmen in this lumberers' party of French Canadians, headed by a Scotch foreman; for through Canada, where address and administrative ability are required, it is found that Scotchmen work themselves into the highest posts.
During the rude but abundant dinner which followed, this head of the gang gave Argent some further bits of information about the lumber trade.
'We don't go about at random, and fell trees where we like,' said he. 'We've got a double tax to pay: first, ground rent per acre per annum for a licence, and then a duty of a cent for every cubic foot of timber we bring to market. Then, lest we shouldtake land and not work it, we are compelled to produce a certain quantity of wood from every acre of forest we rent, under pain of forfeiting our licence.'
'And will you not have it all cut down some day? Then what is the country to do for fuel and the world for ships?'
The foreman rubbed his rusty beard with a laugh.
'There's hundreds of years of lumbering in the Bytown district alone,' said he; 'why, sir, it alone comprehends sixty thousand square miles of forest.'
T
here could hardly be a wider contrast than between Captain Argent's usual dinner at his regimental mess, and that of which he now partook in the lumbermen's shanty. Tables and chairs were as unknown as forks and dishes among thegens de chantier; a large pot of tea, dipped into by everybody's pannikin, served for beer and wine; pork was thepièce de résistance, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an occasional remark in Irish or Scottish brogue.
'Your men seem to be temperance folk,' observed Argent to the foreman.
'Weel, they must be,' was the laconic reply. 'We've no stores where they could get brandy-smash in the bush, and it's so much the better for them, or I daursay they wad want prisons and juries next. As it is, they're weel behaved lads eneugh.'
'I'm sure it must be good in a moral point of view; but do you find them equal to as much work as if they had beer or spirits?' asked Captain Argent.'And lumbering seems to me to be particularly laborious.'
'Weel, there's a fact I'll mak a present to the teetotallers,' answered the foreman. 'Our lumberers get nothing in the way of stimulant, and they don't seem to want it. When I came fresh from the auld country, I couldna hardly b'lieve that.'
'Au large, au large!'
At this word of command all hands turned out of the shanty, and went back to work in their several gangs. Again the fellers attacked the hugest pines; the hewers sprang upon the fallen, lining and squaring the living trees into dead beams; and the teamsters yoked afresh their patient oxen, fitting upon each massive throat the heavy wooden collar, and attaching to chains the ponderous log which should be moved towards the water highway.
Argent and Arthur found themselves presently at the foot of a colossal Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre in the neighbourhood might travel easily and safely to the water's edge; and forty yards of bedding timbers lay a ready-made couch, for its great length.
'I daursay now, that stick's standing aboot a thousand years: I've counted fourteen hunder rings in the wood of a pine no much bigger. Ou, 'twillmak a gran' mast for a seventy-four—nigh a hunder feet lang, and as straight as a rod.'
Stripping off the bark and dressing the knots was the next work, which would complete its readiness for Devonport dockyards, or perchance for the Cherbourg shipwrights. During this operation the foreman made an excursion to visit his other gangs, and then took his visitors a little aside into the woods to view what he termed a 'regular take-in.' It was a group of fine-looking pines, wearing all the outward semblance of health, but when examined, proving mere tubes of bark, charred and blackened within, and ragged along the seam where the fire had burst out.
'How extraordinary!' said Argent. 'Why were they not burned equally through?'
'I hae been thinkin' the fire caught them in the spring, when the sap rins strong; so the sap-wood saved thae shells, to misguide the puir axmen. I thought I had a fair couple o' cribs o' lumber a' ready to hand, when I spied the holes, and found my fine pines naething but empty pipes.'
He had been fashioning two saplings into strong handspikes, and now offered one each to the gentlemen. 'Ye'll not be too proud to bear a hand wi' the mast aboon: it'll be a kittle job lugging it to the pond; so just lend us a shove now and then.'
The great mass was at last got into motion, by a difficult concerted starting of all the oxen at the same moment.
Round the brilliant log fire, while pannikins of tea circulated, and some flakes of the falling snow outside came fluttering down into the blaze, the lumberers lay on their bunks, or sat on blocks, talking, sleeping,singing, as the mood moved. French Canadians are native-born songsters; and their simple ballad melodies, full ofréfrainand repetition, sounded very pleasing even to Argent's amateur ears.
'I can imagine that this shanty life must be pleasant enough,' said Argent, rolling himself in his buffalo robe preparatory to sleep by the fire.
'I'll just tell ye what it is,' returned the foreman; 'nane that has gane lumbering can tak' kindly to ony ither calling. They hae caught the wandering instinct, and the free life o' the woods becomes a needcessity, if I might say sae. D'ye ken the greatest trouble I find in towns? Trying to sleep on a civilised bed. I canna do't, that's the fact; nor be sitting to civilised dinners, whar the misguided folk spend thrice the time that's needfu', fiddling with a fork an' spune. I like to eat an' be done wi' it.'
Which little social trait was of a piece with Mr. Foreman's energy and promptness in all the circumstances of life. In a very few minutes from the aforesaid speech he was sound asleep, for he was determined to waste no time in accomplishing that either.
Argent and Arthur left this wood-cutting polity next morning, and worked, or rather hunted their way back to the settled districts. The former stayed for another idle week at Cedar Creek; and then the brothers were again alone, to pursue their strife with the forest.
It went on, with varying success, till 'the moon of the snow crust,' as the Ojibbeways poetically style March. A chaos of fallen trunks and piled logs lay for twenty-five acres about the little shanty; Robertwas beginning to understand why the French Canadians called a cleared patch 'un désert,' for beyond doubt the axe had a desolating result, in its present stage.
'Why, then, Masther Robert, there's one thing I wanted to ax you,' said Andy, resting a moment from his chopping: 'it's goin' on four months now since we see a speck of green, an' will the snow ever be off the ground agin, at all, at all?'
'You see the sun is only just getting power enough to melt,' returned his master, tracing with his axe-head a furrow in the thawing surface.
'But, sure, if it always freezes up tight agin every evenin', that little taste of meltin' won't do much good,' observed Andy. 'Throth, I'm fairly longin' to see that lake turn into wather, instead ov bein' as hard as iron. Sure the fish must all be smothered long ago, the crathurs, in prison down there.'
'Well, Andy, I hope they'll be liberated next month. Meanwhile the ice is a splendid high road. Look there.'
From behind a wooded promontory, stretching far into the lake, at the distance of about half a mile from where they were chopping, emerged the figure of a very tall Indian, wrapped in a dark blanket and carrying a gun. After him, in the stately Indian file, marched two youths, also armed; then appeared a birchen traineau, drawn by the squaw who had the honour of being wife and mother respectively to the preceding copper-coloured men, and who therefore was constituted their beast of burden. A girl and a child—future squaws—shared the toil of pulling along the family chattels, unaided by the stalwart lords of the creation stalking in front.
'Why, thin, never welcome their impidence, an' to lave the poor women to do all the hard work, an' they marchin' out forenenst 'em like three images, so stiff an' so sthraight, an' never spakin' a word. I'm afeard it's here they're comin.' An' I give ye my word she has a child on her back, tied to a boord; no wondher for 'em to be as stiff as a tongs whin they grows up, since the babies is rared in that way.'
Not seeming to heed the white men, the Indians turned into a little cove at a short distance, and stepped ashore. The woman-kind followed, pulling their traineau with difficulty over the roughnesses of the landing place; while husband and sons looked on tranquilly, and smoked 'kinne-kanik' in short stone pipes. The elderly squaw deposited her baby on the snow, and also comforted herself with a whiff; certain vernacular conversation ensued between her and her daughters, apparently about the place of their camp, and the younger ones set to work clearing a patch of ground under some birch trees. Mrs. Squaw now drew forth a hatchet from her loaded sledge, and chopped down a few saplings, which were fixed firmly in the earth again a few yards off, so as to make an oval enclosure by the help of trees already standing.
'Throth an' I'll go an' help her,' quoth good-natured Andy, whose native gallantry would not permit him to witness a woman's toil without trying to lighten it. 'Of all the ould lazy-boots I ever see, ye're the biggest,' apostrophizing the silent stoical Indians as he passed where they lounged; 'ye've a good right to be ashamed of yerselves, so ye have, for a set of idle spalpeens.'
The eldest of the trio removed his pipe for aninstant and uttered the two words—'I savage.' Andy's rhetoric had been totally incomprehensible.
'Why, then, ye needn't tell me ye're a savidge: it's as plain as a pikestaff. What'll I do with this stick, did ye say, ma'am? Oh, surra bit o' me knows a word she's sayin', though it's mighty like the Irish of a Connaught man. I wondher what it is she's tryin' to make; it resimbles the beginnin' of a big basket at present, an' meself standin' in the inside of the bottom. I can't be far asthray if I dhrive down the three where there's a gap. I don't see how they're to make a roof, an' this isn't a counthry where I'd exactly like to do 'athout one. Now she's fastenin' down the branches round, stickin' 'em in the earth, an' tyin' 'em together wid cord. It's the droll cord, never see a rope-walk anyhow.'
Certainly not; for it was the tough bast of the Canadian cedar, manufactured in large quantities by the Indian women, twisted into all dimensions of cord, from thin twine to cables many fathoms long; used for snares, fishing nets, and every species of stitching. Mrs. Squaw, like a provident housekeeper, had whole balls of it in her traineau ready for use; also rolls of birch-bark, which, when the skeleton wigwam was quite ship-shape, and well interlaced with crossbars of supple boughs, she began to wrap round in the fashion of a covering skirt.
Had crinoline been in vogue in the year 1851, Robert would have found a parallel before his eyes, in these birch-bark flounces arranged over a sustaining framework, in four successive falls, narrowing in circumference as they neared the top, where a knot of bast tied the arching timbers together. He wasinterested in the examination of these forest tent cloths, and found each roll composed of six or seven quadrangular bits of bark, about a yard square apiece, sewed into a strip, and having a lath stitched into each end, after the manner in which we civilised people use rollers for a map. The erection was completed by the casting across several strings of bast, weighted at the ends with stones, which kept all steady.
The male Indians now vouchsafed to take possession of the wigwam. Solemnly stalking up to Andy, the chief of the party offered his pipe to him for a puff.
'Musha thin, thank ye kindly, an' I'm glad to see ye've some notions o' civiltude, though ye do work the wife harder than is dacent.' But after a single 'draw,' Andy took the pipe in his fingers and looked curiously into its bowl. 'It's the quarest tobacco I ever tasted,' he observed: 'throth if I don't think it's nothin' but chips o' bark an' dead leaves. Here 'tis back for you, sir; it don't shute my fancy, not bein' an Indjin yet, though I dunno what I mightn't come to.' The pipe was received with the deepest gravity.
No outward sign had testified surprise or any other emotion, at the discovery that white men had settled close to their 'sugar-bush,' and of course become joint proprietors. The inscrutable sphinx-like calm of these countenances, the strangeness of this savage life, detained Robert most of the afternoon as by a sort of fascination. Andy's wrath at the male indolence was renewed by finding that the squaw and her girls had to cut and carry all the firewood needful: even the child of seven years old worked hard at bringing in logs to the wigwam. He was unaware that the Indian women hold labour to be their special prerogative;that this very squaw despised him for the help he rendered her; and that the observation in her own tongue, which was emphasized by an approving grunt from her husband, was a sarcasm levelled at the inferiority and mean-spiritedness of the white man, as exemplified in Andy's person.
One of the young fellows, who had dived into the forest an hour before, returned with spoil in the shape of a skunk, which the ever-industrious squaw set about preparing for the evening meal. The fearful odour of the animal appeared unnoticed by the Indians, but was found so hateful by Robert and his Irish squire, that they left the place immediately.