The Forest

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X.

CLOCHE.

Imagine a many-armed lake, like a starfish, nested among rugged
Laurentian hills, whose brows are bare and forbidding, but whose
concealed ravines harbour each its cool screen of forest growth.
Imagine a brawling stream escaping at one of the arms, to tumble,
intermittently visible among the trees, down a series of cascades and
rapids, to the broad, island-dotted calm of the big lake. Imagine a
meadow at the mouth of this stream, and on the meadow a single white
dot. Thus you will see Cloche, a trading-post of the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, as Deuce and I saw it from the summit of the
hills.

We had accomplished a very hard scramble, which started well enough in
a ravine so leafy and green and impenetrable that we might well have
imagined ourselves in a boundless forest. Deuce had scented sundry
partridges, which he had pointed with entire deference to the good form
of a sporting dog's conventions. As usual, to Deuce's never-failing
surprise and disgust, the birds had proved themselves most uncultivated
and rude persons by hopping promptly into trees instead of lying to
point and then flushing as a well-taught partridge should. I had
refused to pull pistol on them. Deuce's heart was broken. Then,
finally, we came to cliffs up which we had to scale, and boulders which
we had to climb, and fissures which we had to jump or cross on fallen
trees, and wide, bare sweeps of rock and blueberry bushes which we had
to cover, until at last we stood where we could look all ways at once.

The starfish thrust his insinuating arms in among the distant hills to
the north. League after league, rising and falling and rising again
into ever bluer distance, forest-covered, mysterious, other ranges and
systems lifted, until at last, far out, nearly at the horizon-height of
my eye, flashed again the gleam of water. And so the starfish arms of
the little lake at my feet seemed to have plunged into this wilderness
tangle only to reappear at greater distance. Like swamp-fire, it lured
the imagination always on and on and on through the secret waterways of
the uninhabited North. It was as though I stood on the dividing ridge
between the old and the new. Through the southern haze, hull down, I
thought to make out the smoke of a Great Lake freighter; from the
shelter of a distant cove I was not surprised a moment later to see
emerge a tiny speck whose movements betrayed it as a birch canoe. The
great North was at this, the most southern of the Hudson's Bay posts,
striking a pin-point of contact with the world of men.

Deuce and I angled down the mountain toward the stream. Our arrival
coincided with that of the canoe. It was of the Ojibway three-fathom
pattern, and contained a half-dozen packs, a sledge-dog, with whom
Deuce at once opened guarded negotiations, an old Indian, a squaw, and
a child of six or eight. We exchanged brief greetings. Then I sat on a
stump and watched the portage.

These were evidently "Woods Indians," an entirely different article
from the "Post Indians." They wore their hair long, and bound by a
narrow strip or fillet; their faces were hard and deeply lined, with a
fine, bold, far-seeing look to the eyes which comes only from long
woods dwelling. They walked, even under heavy loads, with a sagging,
springy gait, at once sure-footed and swift. Instead of tump-lines the
man used his sash, and the woman a blanket knotted loosely together at
the ends. The details of their costumes were interesting in combination
of jeans and buckskin, broadcloth and blanket, stroud and a material
evidently made from the strong white sacking in which flour intended
for frontier consumption is always packed. After the first
double-barrelled "bo' jou', bo' jou'," they paid no further attention
to me. In a few moments the portage was completed. The woman thrust her
paddle against the stream's bottom and the canoe, and so embarked. The
man stepped smoothly to his place like a cat leaping from a chair. They
shot away with the current, leaving behind them a strange and
mysterious impression of silence.

I followed down a narrow but well-beaten trail, and so at the end of a
half-mile came to the meadow and the post of Cloche.

The building itself was accurately of the Hudson Bay type--a steep,
sloping roof greater in front than behind, a deep recessed veranda,
squared logs sheathed with whitewashed boards. About it was a little
garden, which, besides the usual flowers and vegetables, contained such
exotics as a deer confined to a pen and a bear chained to a stake. As I
approached, the door opened and the Trader came out.

Now, often along the southern fringe your Hudson's Bay Trader will
prove to be a distinct disappointment. In fact, one of the historic old
posts is now kept by a pert little cockney Englishman, cringing or
impudent as the main chance seems to advise. When you have penetrated
further into the wilderness, however, where the hardships of winter and
summer travel, the loneliness of winter posts, the necessity of dealing
directly with savage men and savage nature, develops the quality of a
man or wrecks him early in the game, you will be certain of meeting
your type. But here, within fifty miles of the railroad!

The man who now stepped into view, however, preserved in his appearance
all the old traditions. He was, briefly, a short black-and-white man
built very square. Immense power lurked in the broad, heavy shoulders,
the massive chest, the thick arms, the sturdy, column-like legs. As for
his face, it was almost entirely concealed behind a curly square black
beard that grew above his cheek-bones nearly to his eyes. Only a thick
hawk nose, an inscrutable pair of black eyes under phenomenally heavy
eyebrows, and a short black pipe showed plainly from the hirsute
tangle. He was lock, stock, and barrel of the Far North, one of the old
_régime_. I was rejoiced to see him there, but did not betray a
glimmer of interest. I knew my type too well for that.

"How are you?" he said grudgingly.

"Good-day," said I.

We leaned against the fence and smoked, each contemplating carefully
the end of his pipe. I knew better than to say anything. The Trader was
looking me over, making up his mind about me. Speech on my part would
argue lightness of disposition, for it would seem to indicate that I
was not also making up my mind about him.

In this pause there was not the least unfriendliness. Only, in the
woods you prefer to know first the business and character of a chance
acquaintance. Afterwards you may ingratiate to his good will. All of
which possesses a beautiful simplicity, for it proves that good or bad
opinion need not depend on how gracefully you can chatter assurances.
At the end of a long period the Trader inquired, "Which way you
headed?"

"Out in a canoe for pleasure. Headed almost anywhere."

Again we smoked.

"Dog any good?" asked the Trader, removing his pipe and pointing to the
observant Deuce.

"He'll hunt shade on a hot day," said I tentatively. "How's the fur in
this district?"

We were off. He invited me in and showed me his bear. In ten minutes we
were seated chair-tilted on the veranda, and slowly, very cautiously,
in abbreviated syncopation, were feeling our way toward an intimacy.

Now came the Indians I had seen at the lake to barter for some flour
and pork. I was glad of the chance to follow them all into the
trading-room. A low wooden counter backed by a grill divided the main
body of the room from the entrance. It was deliciously dim. All the
charm of the Aromatic Shop was in the place, and an additional flavour
of the wilds. Everything here was meant for the Indian trade: bolts of
bright-patterned ginghams, blankets of red or blue, articles of
clothing, boxes of beads for decoration, skeins of brilliant silk, lead
bars for bullet-making, stacks of long brass-bound "trade guns" in the
corner, small mirrors, red and parti-coloured worsted sashes with
tassels on the ends, steel traps of various sizes, and a dozen other
articles to be desired by the forest people. And here, unlike the
Aromatic Shop, were none of the products of the Far North. All that, I
knew, was to be found elsewhere, in another apartment, equally dim, but
delightful in the orderly disorder of a storeroom.

Afterwards I made the excuse of a pair of moccasins to see this other
room. We climbed a steep, rough flight of stairs to emerge through a
sort of trap-door into a space directly under the roof. It was lit only
by a single little square at one end. Deep under the eaves I could make
out row after row of boxes and chests. From the rafters hung a dozen
pair of snow-shoes. In the centre of the floor, half overturned, lay an
open box from which tumbled dozens of pairs of moose-hide snow-shoe
moccasins.

Shades of childhood, what a place! No one of us can fail to recall with
a thrill the delights of a rummage in the attic--the joy of pulling
from some half-forgotten trunk a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which
nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed
years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the
dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol
redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they
are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such
unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here
would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes
would be to rummage, not in the fictions of imagination, but the facts
of the most real picturesque. In yonder square box are the smoke-tanned
shoes of silence; that velvet dimness would prove to be the fur of a
bear; this birch-bark package contains maple sugar savoured of the
wilds. Buckskin, both white and buff, bears' claws in strings, bundles
of medicinal herbs, sweet-grass baskets fragrant as an Eastern tale,
birch-bark boxes embroidered with stained quills of the porcupines,
bows of hickory and arrows of maple, queer half-boots of stiff sealskin
from the very shores of the Hudson Bay, belts of beadwork, yellow and
green, for the Corn Dance, even a costume or so of buckskin complete
for ceremonial--all these the fortunate child would find were he to
take the rainy-day privilege in this, the most wonderful attic in all
the world. And then, after he had stroked the soft fur, and smelled the
buckskin and sweet grasses, and tasted the crumbling maple sugar, and
dressed himself in the barbaric splendours of the North, he could
flatten his little nose against the dim square of light and look out
over the glistening yellow backs of a dozen birchbark canoes to the
distant, rain-blurred hills, beyond which lay the country whence all
these things had come. Do you wonder that in after years that child
hits the Long Trail? Do you still wonder at finding these strange,
taciturn, formidable, tender-hearted men dwelling lonely in the Silent
Places?

The Trader yanked several of the boxes to the centre and prosaically
tumbled about their contents. He brought to light heavy moose-hide
moccasins with high linen tops for the snow; lighter buckskin
moccasins, again with the high tops, but this time of white tanned
doeskin; slipper-like deer-skin moccasins with rolled edges, for the
summer; oil-tanned shoepacs, with and without the flexible leather
sole; "cruisers" of varying degree of height--each and every sort of
footgear in use in the Far North, excepting and saving always the
beautiful soft doeskin slippers finished with white fawnskin and
ornamented with the Ojibway flower pattern for which I sought. Finally
he gave it up.

"I had a few pair. They must have been sent out," said he.

We rummaged a little further for luck's sake, then descended to the
outer air. I left him to fetch my canoe, but returned in the afternoon.
We became friends. That evening we sat in the little sitting-room and
talked far into the night.

He was a true Hudson's Bay man, steadfastly loyal to the Company. I
mentioned the legend of _La Longue Traverse_; he stoutly asserted
he had never heard of it. I tried to buy a mink-skin or so to hang on
the wall as souvenir of my visit; he was genuinely distressed, but had
to refuse because the Company had not authorized him to sell, and he
had nothing of his own to give. I mentioned the River of the Moose, the
Land of Little Sticks; his deep eyes sparkled with excitement, and he
asked eagerly a multitude of details concerning late news from the
northern posts.

And as the evening dwindled, after the manner of Traders everywhere, he
began to tell me the "ghost stories" of this station of Cloche. Every
post has gathered a mass of legendary lore in the slow years, but this
had been on the route of the _voyageurs_ from Montreal and Quebec
at the time when the lords of the North journeyed to the scenes of
their annual revels at Fort Williams. The Trader had much to say of the
magnificence and luxury of these men--their cooks, their silken tents,
their strange and costly foods, their rare wines, their hordes of
French and Indian canoemen and packers. Then Cloche was a halting-place
for the night. Its meadows had blossomed many times with the gay tents
and banners of a great company. He told me, as vividly as though he had
been an eye-witness, of how the canoes must have loomed up suddenly
from between the islands. By-and-by he seized the lamp and conducted me
outside, where hung ponderous ornamental steelyards, on which in the
old days the peltries were weighed.

"It is not so now," said he. "We buy by count, and modern scales weigh
the provisions. And the beaver are all gone."

We re-entered the house in silence. After a while he began briefly to
sketch his own career. Then, indeed, the flavour of the Far North
breathed its crisp, bracing ozone through the atmosphere of the room.

He had started life at one of the posts of the Far North-West. At the
age of twelve he enlisted in the Company. Throughout forty years he had
served her. He had travelled to all the strange places of the North,
and claimed to have stood on the shores of that half-mythical lake of
Yamba Tooh.

"It was snowing at the time," he said prosaically; "and I couldn't see
anything, except that I'd have to bear to the east to get away from
open water. Maybe she wasn't the lake. The Injins said she was, but I
was too almighty shy of grub to bother with lakes."

Other names fell from him in the course of talk, some of which I had
heard and some not, but all of which rang sweet and clear with no
uncertain note of adventure. Especially haunts my memory an impression
of desolate burned trees standing stick-like in death on the shores of
Lost River.

He told me he had been four years at Cloche, but expected shortly to be
transferred, as the fur was getting scarce, and another post one
hundred miles to the west could care for the dwindling trade. He hoped
to be sent into the North-West, but shrugged his shoulders as he said
so, as though that were in the hands of the gods. At the last he fished
out a concertina and played for me. Have you ever heard, after dark, in
the North, where the hills grow big at sunset, _à la Claire
Fontaine_ crooned to such an accompaniment, and by a man of
impassive bulk and countenance, but with glowing eyes?

I said good-night, and stumbled, sight-dazed, through the cool dark to
my tent near the beach. The weird minor strains breathed after me as I
went.

"A la claire fontaine
M'en allant promener,
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je m'y suis baigné,
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime
Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

The next day, with the combers of a howling north-westerly gale
clutching at the stern of the canoe, I rode in a glory of spray and
copper-tasting excitement back to Dick and his half-breed settlement.

But the incident had its sequel. The following season, as I was sitting
writing at my desk, a strange package was brought me. It was wrapped in
linen sewn strongly with waxed cord. Its contents lie before me now--a
pair of moccasins fashioned of the finest doeskin, tanned so
beautifully that the delicious smoke fragrance fills the room, and so
effectively that they could be washed with soap and water without
destroying their softness. The tongue-shaped piece over the instep is
of white fawnskin heavily ornamented in five colours of silk. Where it
joins the foot of the slipper it is worked over and over into a narrow
cord of red and blue silk. The edge about the ankle is turned over,
deeply scalloped, and bound at the top with a broad band of blue silk
stitched with pink. Two tiny blue bows at either side the ankle
ornament the front. Altogether a most magnificent foot-gear. No word
accompanied them, apparently, but after some search I drew a bit of
paper from the toe of one of them. It was inscribed simply--"Fort la
Cloche."

XI.

THE HABITANTS.

During my absence Dick had made many friends. Wherein lies his secret I
do not know, but he has a peculiar power of ingratiation with people
whose lives are quite outside his experience or sympathies. In the
short space of four days he had earned joyous greetings from every one
in town. The children grinned at him cheerfully; the old women cackled
good-natured little teasing jests to him as he passed; the pretty,
dusky half-breed girls dropped their eyelashes fascinatingly across
their cheeks, tempering their coyness with a smile; the men painfully
demanded information as to artistic achievement which was evidently as
well meant as it was foreign to any real thirst for knowledge they
might possess; even the lumber-jacks addressed him as "Bub." And withal
Dick's methods of approach were radically wrong, for he blundered upon
new acquaintance with a beaming smile, which is ordinarily a sure
repellent to the cautious, taciturn men of the woods. Perhaps their
keenness penetrated to the fact that he was absolutely without guile,
and that his kindness was an essential part of himself. I should be
curious to know whether Billy Knapp of the Black Hills would surrender
his gun to Dick for inspection.

"I want you to go out this afternoon to see some friends of mine," said
Dick. "They're on a farm about two miles back in the brush. They're
ancestors."

"They're what?" I inquired.

"Ancestors. You can go down to Grosse Point near Detroit, and find
people living in beautiful country places next the water, and after
dinner they'll show you an old silhouette or a daguerreotype or
something like that, and will say to you proudly, 'This is old Jules,
my ancestor, who was a pioneer in this country. The Place has been in
the family ever since his time.'"

"Well?"

"Well, this is a French family, and they are pioneers, and the family
has a place that slopes down to the water through white birch trees,
and it is of the kind very tenacious of its own land. In two hundred
years this will be a great resort; bound to be--beautiful, salubrious,
good sport, fine scenery, accessible--"

"Railroad fifty miles away; boat every once in a while," said I
sarcastically.

"Accessible in two hundred years, all right," insisted Dick serenely.
"Even Canada can build a quarter of a mile of railway a year.
Accessible," he went on; "good shipping-point for country now
undeveloped."

"You ought to be a real estate agent," I advised.

"Lived two hundred years too soon," disclaimed Dick. "What more
obvious? These are certainly ancestors."

"Family may die out," I suggested.

"It has a good start," said Dick sweetly. "There are eighty-seven in it
now."

"What!" I gasped.

"One great-grandfather, twelve grandparents, thirty-seven parents, and
thirty-seven children," tabulated Dick.

"I should like to see the great-grandfather," said I; "he must be very
old and feeble."

"He is eighty-five years old," said Dick, "and the last time I saw him
he was engaged with an axe in clearing trees off his farm."

All of these astonishing statements I found to be absolutely true.

We started out afoot soon after dinner, through a scattering growth of
popples that alternately drew the veil of coyness over the blue hills
and caught our breath with the delight of a momentary prospect. Deuce,
remembering autumn days, concluded partridges, and scurried away on the
expert diagonal, his hind legs tucked well under his flanks. The road
itself was a mere cutting through the miniature woods, winding to right
or left for the purpose of avoiding a log-end or a boulder, surmounting
little knolls with an idle disregard for the straight line, knobby with
big, round stones, and interestingly diversified by circular mud holes
a foot or so in diameter. After a mile and a half we came to the corner
of a snake fence. This, Dick informed me, marked the limits of the
"farm."

We burst through the screen of popples definitely into the clear. A
two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle
distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land,
and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and
gained the house. Dick was at once among friends.

The mother had no English, so smiled expansively, her bony arms folded
across her stomach. Her oldest daughter, a frail-looking girl in the
twenties, but with a sad and spiritual beauty of the Madonna in her big
eyes and straight black hair, gave us a shy good-day. Three boys, just
alike in their slender, stolid Indian good looks, except that they
differed in size, nodded with the awkwardness of the male. Two babies
stared solemnly. A little girl with a beautiful, oval face, large
mischievous gray eyes behind long black lashes, a mischievously quirked
mouth to match the eyes, and black hair banged straight, both front and
behind, in almost mediaeval fashion, twirked a pair of brown bare legs
all about us. Another light-haired, curly little girl, surmounted by an
old yachting-cap, spread apart sturdy shoes in an attitude at once
critical and expectant.

Dick rose to the occasion by sorting out from some concealed recess of
his garments a huge paper parcel of candy.

With infinite tact, he presented this bag to Madame rather than the
children. Madame instituted judicious distribution and appropriate
reservation for the future. We entered the cabin.

Never have I seen a place more exquisitely neat. The floor had not only
been washed clean; it had been scrubbed white. The walls of logs were
freshly whitewashed. The chairs were polished. The few ornaments were
new, and not at all dusty or dingy or tawdry. Several religious
pictures, a portrait of royalty, a lithographed advertisement of some
buggy, a photograph or so--and then just the fresh, wholesome
cleanliness of scrubbed pine. Madame made us welcome with smiles--a
faded, lean woman with a remnant of beauty peeping from her soft eyes,
but worn down to the first principles of pioneer bone and gristle by
toil, care, and the bearing of children. I spoke to her in French,
complimenting her on the appearance of the place. She was genuinely
pleased, saying in reply that one did one's possible, but that
children!--with an expressive pause.

Next we called for volunteers to show us to the great-grandfather. Our
elfish little girls at once offered, and went dancing off down the
trail like autumn leaves in a wind. Whether it was the Indian in them,
or the effects of environment, or merely our own imaginations, we both
had the same thought--that in these strange, taciturn, friendly,
smiling, pirouetting little creatures was some eerie, wild strain akin
to the woods and birds and animals. As they danced on ahead of us,
turning to throw us a delicious smile or a half-veiled roguish glance
of nascent coquetry, we seemed to swing into an orbit of experience
foreign to our own. These bright-eyed woods people were in the last
analysis as inscrutable to us as the squirrels.

We followed our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another
clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they
stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a
startlingly sudden repose.

"V'la le gran'père," said they in unison.

At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and
confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened
and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a
Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide,
clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His
movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand
across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the
quality of his work--a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause,
a painful recovery--labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but
wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without
haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the
toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent
hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the
end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly
along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes,
like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame,
gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of
Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble
seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of
another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to
exchange slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the fact that his
seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his
audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body
politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the
impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the
park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water,
the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to
substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.

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