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<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2> We are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I.  We have come through a blizzard.  For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons, bobcats, and bears.  We have melted snow for drinking water, because the drifts cut us off from the lake and buried the waterhole.  We have dug our firewood out from under a pile of wet whiteness.  The mouse came through safely too, although the snow sifted in through the window screen, and covered him, house and all. The storm began on the second of February, in the evening.  All night long the wind howled with a violence that threatened to lift the house bodily and deposit it out on the lake.  It searched out every crack and crevice, chilling me to the bone.  It wrenched and tore at the heavy wooden shutters, it tossed and twisted the trees, every now and again throwing one to the ground with a grinding crash.  It whistled, it moaned; and, with it came the snow, in blinding, whirling gray clouds that blotted out everything.  The lake was obscured, the outlines of the neighboring islands were lost.  I could see only a smother of drifting, dancing flakes. The day passed fairly well, for the mere necessity of keeping up the fire was an occupation in itself. “This,” said I to Peter, “is the beginning of the true Canadian winter.  I hope it does not stay too long.” Peter, having been born last summer, has had no experience of any other winter.  No memories of former blizzards troubled him.  He hoped that the bread would hold out. At about three o’clock in the afternoon Satan inspired me to go out on the porch, to survey the prospect.  Immediately I smelled smoke. Now, there is but one thing of which I have been afraid, and that is fire.  A blaze started here would inevitably sweep the island and no one could stop it.  I smelled tar paper burning. “What a pleasant thing it would be to borrow the cherished summer camp of a friend and burn it down for her!  What a safe thing for oneself it would be to go to sleep in a smoldering house and have it break into flames in the night.” I sniffed and sniffed despairingly.  I scrambled out into the snow to examine the chimneys; I burrowed under the porch floor to look at the foundations; I climbed the ladder to make sure of the roof, and still that smell of burning tar persisted.  I had a horrible misgiving that there was fire smoldering between the outer and the inner walls. There was nothing for it but to get to the Blakes and tell them of my fears.  If Henry could assure me that there was no way of a fire’s starting, I would believe him and go to bed content.  If I had not that assurance, I should be forced to sit up all night waiting to escape into the snow.  Whatever the weather I had to get to the farm; that was all I could think of. I dressed as warmly as I could and set forth, through the drifts, to the edge of the island.  I made fair progress until I stepped off the land on to the lake.  Then I began to have some idea of what I, in my ignorance, had undertaken. The lake was like the ocean done in snow.  The wind had piled great breakers of snow one behind another, their crests curled over at the top, exactly like the waves on a beach.  Only these breakers were curled over the opposite way.  They turned over toward the wind, not away from it.  One long ridge followed another with a deep, scooped out furrow to windward.  Looking down on the lake from the level of the porch, these waves did not look very high.  When I stepped off into them they came up to my armpits. Even then I had not sense to turn back; even then I had no idea of any real danger.  The wind was at my back.  I could feel it behind me like a wall, as I climbed through each succeeding hillock of snow and out across the intervening three or four yards of level ice.  Wave followed wave, each higher, deeper, more suffocating than the last.  Sometimes I could walk for a few feet on the top of a drift before sinking into its depths.  I scrambled, fell, rolled, crawled, climbed, and thought that I should never reach the shore.  Counting helped me, as I pulled each foot up out of the clinging mass and set it down a few inches nearer the land. “One, two, three, four,” I said aloud, timing my steps to the pounding of my laboring heart.  My breath was coming in gasps, a pulse beat in my temples, my head swam, there was a ringing in my ears as I plodded on, now with eyes shut. A thin, washed out moon came out and looked through wisps of ragged clouds.  Its light served only to make the scene more desolate, the distance from the shore more terrifying.  The only idea that remained in my stupified brain was that I must somehow find strength to go on lifting heavy feet one after the other; that I must struggle up from each fall, must breathe deep and keep a quiet mind. At last I reached the deeper drifts that fringed the shore, skirted the hidden waterhole, found traces of the cattle tracks, dragged myself along the path and finally stepped, with the very last remnant of strength, up on the porch and into the warm bright kitchen.  When Mary Blake caught sight of me, she sat down suddenly and said: “My God!” They had not attempted to get to the water hole that day, but had given the cattle melted snow.  They had gone only as far as the barn and henhouses.  Even the house dog had stayed indoors. I gasped out my fears and Henry Blake laughed at them.  There was no way, he said, for a fire to have started and if one had caught, the house would have been flat to the ground long before I had crossed the lake. I heard him with disgust.  If that was the way my panic looked, it was high time for me to return to my home on the island.  I rose with much dignity and walked off to the shore, before the Blakes had adjusted their minds to the move. This time the wind was in my face, making the going ten times harder than before.  About forty yards out from shore I stopped and turned my back to the blast to catch my breath, and there was Henry, dressed in his great fur coat, striding out after me and looking for all the world like a bear on its hind legs. When I saw his thickset figure struggling against the gale it seemed suddenly a hatefully inconsiderate thing to have brought him away from his warm fire and out into the storm and I called: “Go back, Mr. Blake.  There is no fire.  Don’t attempt to come after me.” But Henry only stumped on. “I know there’s nothing burning,” he p. 123retorted.  “We’re a long way more worried about you than we are about the camp.  You might get confused and lose your life in this storm.” On he went ahead of me and I was thankful to follow humbly in his footsteps. We reached the house, and, as we stood in the warm room fighting for breath, I said: “Mr. Blake, there is some Scotch here.  Will you drink some?” And Henry said he would. After that I was content to stay indoors until he came with the horses and broke the tracks through the island. Such heaps of snow lay piled on the lake and in the woods that it should have taken months for it to disappear; but in three days there came a thaw and melted it all away. The thaw came not a day too soon, for the sixteenth was the time set for the long anticipated sawing bee at the farm.  During January Henry Blake and Jimmie had been felling trees and dragging them to the house in preparation for the arrival of the perambulating sawmill, that goes from farm to farm as soon as the ice will hold.  There was a pile of logs, ten feet high by thirty feet long piled butt end to in the dooryard.  When a farmer announces a bee his neighbors gather from far and near, leaving their own work to help him put through the particular job in hand.  He is expected to attend their bees in return.  The farmer’s wife, who earns a high seat in heaven if ever woman did, works for days beforehand, cooking for the ten or a dozen hungry men who will come down on her for dinner, supper and, perhaps, breakfast, with a night’s lodging thrown in. Mary Blake had made bread of the lightest and finest, had killed chickens, taken fish out of brine, and pork from the barrel; had made cakes and pies; had brought out pickles and preserves, and when I arrived she was creaming carrots and onions and boiling the inevitable potatoes. It was a cold, gray day, with the surface of the lake awash.  As I splashed my way through the water, ankle-deep on the ice, I heard the saw, clear and high, like the note of a violin.  There were ten men working at the bee.  The little gasoline engine was drawn up on a bobsled at the kitchen door, and even as early as ten o’clock it had eaten out a big hole in the side of the stack of logs.  William Foret and Jock McDougal were at the machine shoveling snow into the boiler, William in a bright blue jersey and with a squirrel skin cap set at an angle over his dark, eager face.  Henry Blake was at the wheel, to take the sawed-off chunks from the feeders and throw them to the pile.  The rhythm of his movements was exact.  A reach toward the wheel, a heave, a toss over his shoulder to the ever-increasing pile of chunks and a return to the wheel—all this at the rate of a chunk every three seconds.  This position, being the hardest work, is always taken by the host at a bee. Little John Beaulac, Tom Jackson and Uncle Dan Cassidy lifted the logs and carried them to the saw, where Black Jack held them against the blade.  There were two or three extra men standing ready to take up the work when one or more should be exhausted. In the midst of the fray a sleigh was sighted, far out on the ice.  It was bringing Jim McNally from far back of the mica mine.  He had heard of the bee and had come, at a venture, for fear that Henry might be “shorthanded.”  He brought a pail of fresh eggs for Mary Blake and a great sack of turnips.  p. 126There was a mighty skurry and mystery about slipping a bag of salt fish under the seat of the sleigh, for him to find when he reached home. At half past eleven the men trooped in to dinner, with many facetious remarks about the strength of their appetites and the advisability of letting the dirtiest man wash first. After a very short smoke time they were at work again and I sat at the kitchen window, watching the saw bite through the big logs.  The men’s rhythmic movements, the swift interplay of the bright colors of their jerseys, the long scream of the toothed blade, all lulled me to vacuity of mind.  Long after dark, when I was back at home, I could hear the sound of the wheel coming across the lake.  That song of the saw tells me just where the mill is working for the day.  Going out on the porch I can tell whether the bee is at Blake’s, Drapeau’s, Foret’s or the mines. The Blakes are very up to date in their use of the gasoline engine.  Many of the farmers still use the old treadmill, where four teams of horses walk round and round all day, turning the wheel.  Invited to a bee at the Jacksons’, the other day, I took a camera along, for a picture of the old tread will soon be a treasured possession.  The men had paused in their work in the kindest way to allow themselves to be “took.”  I was walking, with great dignity, down the slippery hillside, when a treacherous bit of ice was my undoing.  I fell and my demoralization was complete. Camera flew one way, walking staff another, arms and legs spread out to the four points of the compass, as I went shooting down that hill.  When I had gathered my scattered members and my wits together, and was scrambling up with the foolish grin of the newly fallen, I looked appealingly at the sawing gang, expecting to hear the inevitable laugh.  Not a face did I see.  Every man’s back was turned.  The picture was taken amid a sounding silence. Commenting on that display of good manners to Uncle Dan, I said fervently: “Never in my life did I see such perfect breeding.  It is almost impossible to help laughing when anyone falls, but not one of those men smiled.  I never expected such politeness.” Uncle Dan’s Irish eyes twinkled. “You’d ought to have heard what the b’ys said when you left,” he observed. p. 128Pondering that cryptic remark, I am inclined to think that it is just as well that I do not know all that is being said of me in the work gangs and around the kitchen fires of Many Islands. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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