The Forest

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The Woods Indian never kills waste-fully. The mere presence of game
does not breed in him a lust to slaughter something. Moderation you
learn of him first of all. Later, provided you are with him long enough
and your mind is open to mystic influence, you will feel the strong
impress of his idea--that the animals of the forest are not lower than
man, but only different. Man is an animal living the life of the
forest; the beasts are also a body politic speaking a different
language and with different view-points. Amik, the beaver, has certain
ideas as to the conduct of life, certain habits of body, and certain
bias of thought. His scheme of things is totally at variance with that
held by Me-en-gan, the wolf, but even to us whites the two are on a
parity. Man has still another system. One is no better than another.
They are merely different. And just as Me-en-gan preys on Amik, so does
Man kill for his own uses.

Thence are curious customs. A Rupert River Cree will not kill a bear
unless he, the hunter, is in gala attire, and then not until he has
made a short speech in which he assures his victim that the affair is
not one of personal enmity, but of expedience, and that anyway he, the
bear, will be better off in the Hereafter. And then the skull is
cleaned and set on a pole near running water, there to remain during
twelve moons. Also at the tail-root of a newly-deceased beaver is tied
a thong braided of red wool and deerskin. And many other curious
habitudes which would be of slight interest here. Likewise do they
conjure up by means of racket and fasting the familiar spirits of
distant friends or enemies, and on these spirits fasten a blessing or a
curse.

From this it may be deduced that missionary work has not been as
thorough as might be hoped. That is true. The Woods Indian loves to
sing, and possesses quaint melodies, or rather intonations, of his own.
But especially does he delight in the long-drawn wail of some of our
old-fashioned hymns. The church oftenest reaches him through them. I
know nothing stranger than the sight of a little half-lit church filled
with Indians swaying unctuously to and fro in the rhythm of a cadence
old Watts would have recognized with difficulty. The religious feeling
of the performance is not remarkable, but perhaps it does as a
starting-point.

Exactly how valuable the average missionary work is I have been puzzled
to decide. Perhaps the church needs more intelligence in the men it
sends out. The evangelist is usually filled with narrow, preconceived
notions as to the proper physical life. He squeezes his savage into log
houses, boiled shirts, and boots. When he has succeeded in getting his
tuberculosis crop well started, he offers as compensation a doctrinal
religion admirably adapted to us, who have within reach of
century-trained perceptions a thousand of the subtler associations a
savage can know nothing about. If there is enough glitter and tin
steeple and high-sounding office and gilt good-behaviour card to it,
the red man's pagan heart is tickled in its vanity, and he dies in the
odour of sanctity--and of a filth his out-of-door life has never taught
him how to avoid. The Indian is like a raccoon: in his proper
surroundings he is clean morally and physically because he knows how to
be so; but in a cage he is filthy because he does not know how to be
otherwise.

I must not be understood as condemning missionary work; only the stupid
missionary work one most often sees in the North. Surely Christianity
should be adaptable enough in its little things to fit any people with
its great. It seems hard for some men to believe that it is not
essential for a real Christian to wear a plug-hat. One God, love,
kindness, charity, honesty, right living, may thrive as well in the
wigwam as in a foursquare house--provided you let them wear moccasins
and a _capote_ wherewith to keep themselves warm and vital.

Tawabinisáy must have had his religious training at the hands of a good
man. He had lost none of his aboriginal virtue and skill, as may be
gathered from what I have before said of him, and had gained in
addition certain of the gentle qualities. I have never been able to
gauge exactly the extent of his religious _understanding_, for
Tawabinisáy is a silent individual, and possesses very little English;
but I do know that his religious _feeling_ was deep and reverent.
He never swore in English; he did not drink; he never travelled or
hunted or fished on Sunday when he could possibly help it. These
virtues he wore modestly and unassumingly as an accustomed garment. Yet
he was the most gloriously natural man I have ever met.

The main reliance of his formalism when he was off in the woods seemed
to be a little tattered volume, which he perused diligently all Sunday,
and wrapped carefully in a strip of oiled paper during the rest of the
week. One day I had a chance to look at this book while its owner was
away after spring water. Every alternate page was in the phonetic
Indian symbols, of which more hereafter. The rest was in French, and
evidently a translation. Although the volume was of Roman Catholic
origin, creed was conspicuously subordinated to the needs of the class
it aimed to reach. A confession of faith, quite simple, in one God, a
Saviour, a Mother of Heaven; a number of Biblical extracts rich in
imagery and applicability to the experience of a woods-dweller; a dozen
simple prayers of the kind the natural man would oftenest find occasion
to express--a prayer for sickness, for bounty, for fair weather, for
ease of travel, for the smiling face of Providence; and then some
hymns. To me the selection seemed most judicious. It answered the needs
of Tawabinisáy's habitual experiences, and so the red man was a good
and consistent convert. Irresistibly I was led to contemplate the idea
of any one trying to get Tawabinisáy to live in a house, to cut
cordwood with an axe, to roost on a hard bench under a tin steeple, to
wear stiff shoes, and to quit forest roaming.

The written language mentioned above you will see often in the
Northland. Whenever an Indian band camps, it blazes a tree and leaves,
as record for those who may follow, a message written in the phonetic
character. I do not understand exactly the philosophy of it, but I
gather that each sound has a symbol of its own, like shorthand, and
that therefore even totally different languages--such as Ojibway, the
Wood Cree, or the Hudson Bay Eskimos--may all be written in the same
character. It was invented nearly a hundred years ago by a priest. So
simple is it, and so needed a method of intercommunication, that its
use is now practically universal. Even the youngsters understand it,
for they are early instructed in its mysteries during the long winter
evenings. On the preceding page is a message I copied from a spruce
tree two hundred miles from anywhere on the Mattágami River.

[Illustration]

Besides this are numberless formal symbols in constant use. Forerunners
on a trail stick a twig in the ground whose point indicates exactly the
position of the sun. Those who follow are able to estimate, by noting
how far beyond the spot the twig points to the sun has travelled, how
long a period of time has elapsed. A stick pointed in any given
direction tells the route, of course. Another planted upright across
the first shows by its position how long a journey is contemplated. A
little sack suspended at the end of the pointer conveys information as
to the state of the larder, lean or fat according as the little sack
contains more or less gravel or sand. A shred of rabbit-skin means
starvation. And so on in variety useless in any but an ethnological
work.

[Illustration 1: A short journey.]

[Illustration 2: A medium journey.]

[Illustration 3: A long journey.]

The Ojibways' tongue is soft, and full of decided lisping and sustained
hissing sounds. It is spoken with somewhat of a sing-song drawl. We
always had a fancy that somehow it was of forest growth, and that its
syllables were intended in the scheme of things to blend with the woods
noises, just as the feathers of the mother partridge blend with the
woods colours. In general it is polysyllabic. That applies especially
to concepts borrowed of the white men. On the other hand, the Ojibways
describe in monosyllables many ideas we could express only in phrase.
They have a single word for the notion, Place-where-an-animal-slept-
last-night. Our "lair," "form," etc., do not mean exactly that. Its
genius, moreover, inclines to a flexible verb-form, by which adjectives
and substantives are often absorbed into the verb itself, so that one
beautiful singing word will convey a whole paragraph of information. My
little knowledge of it is so entirely empirical that it can possess small
value.

In concluding these desultory remarks, I want to tell you of a very
curious survival among the Ojibways and Ottawas of the Georgian Bay. It
seems that some hundreds of years ago these ordinarily peaceful folk
descended on the Iroquois in what is now New York, and massacred a
village or so. Then, like small boys who have thrown only too
accurately at the delivery wagon, they scuttled back home again.

Since that time they have lived in deadly fear of retribution. The
Iroquois have long since disappeared from the face of the earth, but
even to-day the Georgian Bay Indians are subject to periodical spasms
of terror. Some wild-eyed and imaginative youth sees at sunset a canoe
far down the horizon. Immediately the villages are abandoned in haste,
and the entire community moves up to the head-waters of streams, there
to lurk until convinced that all danger is past. It does no good to
tell these benighted savages that they are safe from vengeance, at
least in this world. The dreaded name of Iroquois is potent, even
across the centuries.

XVII.

THE CATCHING OF A CERTAIN FISH.

We settled down peacefully on the River, and the weather, after so much
enmity, was kind to us. Likewise did the flies disappear from the woods
utterly.

Each morning we arose as the Red Gods willed; generally early, when the
sun was just gilding the peaks to the westward; but not too early,
before the white veil had left the River. Billy, with woodsman's
contempt for economy, hewed great logs and burned them nobly in the
cooking of trout, oatmeal, pancakes, and the like. We had constructed
ourselves tables and benches between green trees, and there we ate. And
great was the eating beyond the official capacity of the human stomach.
There offered little things to do, delicious little things just on the
hither side of idleness. A rod wrapping needed more waxed silk; a
favourite fly required attention to prevent dissolution; the pistol was
to be cleaned; a flag-pole seemed desirable; a trifle more of balsam
could do no harm; clothes might stand drying, blankets airing. We
accomplished these things leisurely, pausing for the telling of
stories, for the puffing of pipes, for the sheer joy of contemplations.
Deerskin slipper moccasins and flapping trousers attested our
deshabille. And then somehow it was noon, and Billy again at the Dutch
oven and the broiler.

Trout we ate, and always more trout. Big fellows broiled with strips of
bacon craftily sewn in and out of the pink flesh; medium fellows cut
into steaks; little fellows fried crisp in corn-meal; big, medium, and
little fellows mingled in component of the famous North Country
_bouillon_, whose other ingredients are partridges, and tomatoes,
and potatoes, and onions, and salt pork, and flour in combination
delicious beyond belief. Nor ever did we tire of them, three times a
day, printed statement to the contrary notwithstanding. And besides
were many crafty dishes over whose construction the major portion of
morning idleness was spent.

Now at two o'clock we groaned temporary little groans; and crawled
shrinking into our river clothes, which we dared not hang too near the
fire for fear of the disintegrating scorch, and drew on soggy hobnailed
shoes with holes cut in the bottom and plunged with howls of disgust
into the upper riffles. Then the cautious leg-straddled passage of the
swift current, during which we forgot for ever--which eternity alone
circles the bliss of an afternoon on the River--the chill of the water,
and so came to the trail.

Now, at the Idiot's Delight Dick and I parted company. By three o'clock
I came again to the River, far up, halfway to the Big Falls. Deuce
watched me gravely. With the first click of the reel he retired to the
brush away from the back cast, there to remain until the pool was
fished and we could continue our journey.

In the swift leaping water, at the smooth back of the eddy, in the
white foam, under the dark cliff shadow, here, there, everywhere the
bright flies drop softly like strange snowflakes. The game is as
interesting as pistol-shooting. To hit the mark, that is enough. And
then a swirl of water and a broad lazy tail wake you to the fact that
other matters are yours. Verily the fish of the North Country are
mighty beyond all others.

Over the River rests the sheen of light; over the hills rests the sheen
of romance. The land is enchanted. Birds dip and sway, advance and
retreat; leaves toss their hands in greeting, or bend and whisper one
to the other; splashes of sun fall heavy as metal through the yielding
screens of branches; little breezes wander hesitatingly here and there
to sink like spent kites on the nearest bar of sun-warmed shingle; the
stream shouts and gurgles, murmurs, hushes, lies still and secret as
though to warn you to discretion, breaks away with a shriek of hilarity
when your discretion has been assured. There is in you a great leisure,
as though the day would never end. There is in you a great keenness.
One part of you is vibrantly alive. Your wrist muscles contract almost
automatically at the swirl of a rise, and the hum of life along the
gossamer of your line gains its communication with every nerve in your
body. The question of gear and method you attack clear-minded. What
fly? Montreal, Parmachenee Belle, Royal Coachman, Silver Doctor,
Professor, Brown Hackle, Cow-dung--these grand lures for the North
Country trout receive each its due test and attention. And on the tail
snell what fisherman has not the Gamble--the unusual, obscure,
multinamed fly which may, in the occultism of his taste, attract the
Big Fellows? Besides, there remains always the handling. Does your
trout to-day fancy the skittering of his food, or the withdrawal in
three jerks, or the inch-deep sinking of the fly? Does he want it
across current or up current; will he rise with a snap, or is he going
to come slowly, or is he going to play? These be problems interesting,
insistent to be solved, with the ready test within the reach of your
skill.

But that alertness is only one side of your mood. No matter how
difficult the selection, how strenuous the fight, there is in you a
large feeling that might almost be described as Buddhistic. Time has
nothing to do with your problems. The world has quietly run down, and
has been embalmed with all its sweetness of light and colour and sound
in a warm Lethe bath of sun. This afternoon is going to last for ever.
You note and enjoy and savour the little pleasures unhurried by the
thought that anything else, whether of pleasure or duty, is to follow.

And so for long delicious eons. The River flows on, ever on; the hills
watch, watch always; the birds sing, the sun shines grateful across
your shoulders; the big trout and the little rise in predestined order,
and make their predestined fight, and go their predestined way either
to liberty or the creel; the pools and the rapids and the riffles slip
by upstream as though they had been withdrawn rather than as though you
had advanced.

Then suddenly the day has dropped its wings. The earth moves forward
with a jar. Things are to be accomplished; things are being
accomplished. The River is hurrying down to the Lake; the birds have
business of their own to attend to, an it please you; the hills are
waiting for something that has not yet happened, but they are ready.
Startled, you look up. The afternoon has finished. Your last step has
taken you over the edge of the shadow cast by the setting sun across
the range of hills.

For the first time you look about you to see where you are. It has not
mattered before. Now you know that shortly it will be dark. Still
remain below you four pools. A great haste seizes you.

"If I take my rod apart and strike through the woods," you argue, "I
can make the Narrows, and I am sure there is a big trout there."

Why the Narrows should be any more likely to contain a big trout than
any of the other three pools you would not be able to explain. In half
an hour it will be dark. You hurry. In the forest it is already
twilight, but by now you know the forest well. Preoccupied, feverish
with your great idea, you hasten on. The birds, silent all in the
brooding of night, rise ghostly to right and left. Shadows steal away
like hostile spies among the treetrunks. The silver of last daylight
gleams ahead of you through the brush. You know it for the Narrows,
whither the instinct of your eagerness has led you as accurately as a
compass through the forest.

Fervently, as though this were of world's affairs the most important,
you congratulate yourself on being in time. Your rod seems to join
itself. In a moment the cast drops like a breath on the molten silver.
Nothing. Another try a trifle lower down. Nothing. A little wandering
breeze spoils your fourth attempt, carrying the leader far to the left.
Curses, deep and fervent. The daylight is fading, draining away. A
fifth cast falls forty feet out. Slowly you drag the flies across the
current, reluctant to recover until the latest possible moment. And so,
when your rod is foolishly upright, your line slack, and your flies
motionless, there rolls slowly up and over the trout of trouts. You see
a broad side, the whirl of a fantail that looks to you to be at least
six inches across; and the current slides on, silver-like, smooth,
indifferent to the wild leap of your heart.

[Illustration: THEN IN THE TWILIGHT THEY BATHE.]

Like a crazy man you shorten your line. Six seconds later your flies
fall skilfully just upstream from where last you saw that wonderful
tail.

But six seconds may be a long, long period of time. You have feared and
hoped and speculated and realized; feared that the leviathan has
pricked himself, and so will not rise again; hoped that his appearance
merely indicated curiosity which he will desire further to satisfy;
speculated on whether your skill can drop the fly exactly on that spot,
as it must be dropped; and realized that, whatever be the truth as to
all those fears and hopes and speculations, this is irrevocably your
last chance.

For an instant you allow the flies to drift downstream, to be floated
here and there by idle little eddies, to be sucked down and spat out of
tiny suction-holes. Then cautiously you draw them across the surface of
the waters. _Thump--thump--thump_--your heart slows up with
disappointment. Then mysteriously, like the stirring of the waters by
some invisible hand, the molten silver is broken in its smoothness. The
Royal Coachman quietly disappears. With all the brakes shrieking on
your desire to shut your eyes and heave a mighty heave, you depress
your butt and strike.

Then in the twilight the battle. No leisure is here, only quivering,
intense, agonized anxiety. The affair transcends the moment. Purposes
and necessities of untold ages have concentrated, so that somehow back
of your consciousness rest hosts of disembodied hopes, tendencies,
evolutionary progressions, all breathless lest you prove unequal to the
struggle for which they have been so long preparing.

Responsibility--vast, vague, formless--is yours. Only the fact that you
are wholly occupied with the exigence of the moment prevents your
understanding of what it is, but it hovers dark and depressing behind
your possible failure. You must win. This is no fish; it is opportunity
itself, and once gone it will never return. The mysticism of lower dusk
in the forest, of upper afterglow on the hills, of the chill of evening
waters and winds, of the glint of strange phantoms under the darkness
of cliffs, of the whisperings and shoutings of Things you are too busy
to identify out in the gray of North Country awe--all these menace you
with indeterminate dread. Knee-deep, waist-deep, swift water, slack
water, downstream, upstream, with red eyes straining into the dimness,
with every muscle taut and every nerve quivering, you follow the
ripping of your line. You have consecrated yourself to the uttermost.
The minutes stalk by you gigantic. You are a stable pin-point in
whirling phantasms. And you are very little, very small, very
inadequate among these Titans of circumstance.

Thrice he breaks water, a white and ghostly apparition from the deep.
Your heart stops with your reel, and only resumes its office when again
the line sings safely. The darkness falls, and with it, like the
mysterious strength of Sir Gareth's opponent, falls the power of your
adversary. His rushes shorten. The blown world of your uncertainty
shrinks to the normal. From the haze of your consciousness, as through
a fog, loom the old familiar forest, and the hills, and the River.
Slowly you creep from that strange enchanted land. The sullen trout
yields. In all gentleness you float him within reach of your net.
Quietly, breathlessly you walk ashore, and over the beach, and yet an
unnecessary hundred feet from the water lest he retain still a flop.
Then you lay him upon the stones and lift up your heart in rejoicing.

How you get to camp you never clearly know. Exultation lifts your feet.
Wings, wings, O ye Red Gods, wings to carry the body whither the spirit
hath already soared, and stooped, and circled back in impatience to see
why still the body lingers! Ordinarily you can cross the riffles above
the Halfway Pool only with caution and prayer and a stout staff
craftily employed. This night you can--and do--splash across hand-free,
as recklessly as you would wade a little brook. There is no stumble in
you, for you have done a great deed, and the Red Gods are smiling.

Through the trees glows a light, and in the centre of that light are
leaping flames, and in the circle of that light stand, rough-hewn in
orange, the tent and the table and the waiting figures of your
companions. You stop short, and swallow hard, and saunter into camp as
one indifferent.

Carelessly you toss aside your creel--into the darkest corner, as
though it were unimportant--nonchalantly you lean your rod against the
slant of your tent, wearily you seat yourself and begin to draw off
your drenched garments. Billy bends toward the fire. Dick gets you your
dry clothes. Nobody says anything, for everybody is hungry. No one asks
you any questions, for on the River you get in almost any time of
night.

Finally, as you are hanging your wet things near the fire, you inquire
casually over your shoulder,--

"Dick, have any luck?"

Dick tells you. You listen with apparent interest. He has caught a
three-pounder. He describes the spot and the method and the struggle.
He is very much pleased. You pity him.

The three of you eat supper, lots of supper. Billy arises first,
filling his pipe. He hangs water over the fire for the dish-washing.
You and Dick sit hunched on a log, blissfully happy in the moments of
digestion, ruminative, watching the blaze. The tobacco smoke eddies and
sucks upward to join the wood smoke. Billy moves here and there in the
fulfilment of his simple tasks, casting his shadow wavering and
gigantic against the fire-lit trees. By-and-by he has finished. He
gathers up the straps of Dick's creel, and turns to the shadow for your
own. He is going to clean the fish. It is the moment you have watched
for. You shroud yourself in profound indifference.

"_Sacré!_" shrieks Billy.

You do not even turn your head.

"Jumping giraffes! why, it's a whale!" cries Dick.

You roll a _blasé_ eye in their direction, as though such puerile
enthusiasm wearies you.

"Yes, it's quite a little fish," you concede.

They swarm down upon you, demanding particulars. These you accord
laconically, a word at a time, in answer to direct question, between
puffs of smoke.

"At the Narrows. Royal Coachman. Just before I came in. Pretty fair
fight. Just at the edge of the eddy." And so on. But your soul glories.

The tape-line is brought out. Twenty-nine inches it records. Holy
smoke, what a fish! Your air implies that you will probably catch three
more just like him on the morrow. Dick and Billy make tracings of him
on the birch bark. You retain your lofty calm: but inside you are
little quivers of rapture. And when you awake, late in the night, you
are conscious, first of all, that you are happy, happy, happy, all
through; and only when the drowse drains away do you remember why.

XVIII.

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