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<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2> Appropriately enough, on this first day of the calendar spring, I am warned that the ice is unsafe and that I must stay on the island until the lake is open water.  The natives still venture out, but they know the look of the thin spots and even they are very cautious.  Two men started over from mainland this morning, axes on shoulder, hounds at heel, but they turned back at the shore, and the dogs, after stepping daintily on the dark, spongy crust, turned back also.  The middle of the lake is still hard, but there are ditches of water round the edges of the land.  The ice has heaved up into long fissures stretching away from the points, the clear green water showing between their open sides, and from this island to the Blakes’ point there is a great crevasse. Mary declares that she has known Henry to start off in a sleigh over the lake when the ice was only three inches thick; when he had to drive fast to keep from breaking in and when the water spurted up from the holes made by the horse’s hoofs.  But Henry was going for the mail, and when he has been deprived of news for two or three weeks, the papers become things to risk one’s life for—which is proof that Henry will never be a true Many Islander.  The rest of us are quite willing to wait until spring, if need be. So I am “denned in” once more, and before I am free all sorts of things will have happened.  There will be hundreds of little new calves and lambs lying beside their mothers in the meadows, and scores of thin-legged colts running beside the mares in the pastures.  I shall also be shut in when the sap buckets hang in the “sugar bush” and the great black kettles steam over the fires in the dooryards, and I can only hope that some of my friends will remember to put my name in the pot, and to save me some syrup and some maple sugar. Forced to take my exercise on the island, I find new things everywhere, as I tramp round and round the trails.  The snow under the evergreens is covered with last year’s dry needles; the hemlocks, pines and cedars are putting on their new, bright green fringes.  Under the rotting leaves, innumerable little new plants are pushing up, princess fern, wild strawberry, Canada mayflower, and countless other small weeds and herbs, whose names I do not know.  When the leaves and needles are raked away each stalk is seen standing in a tiny pool of clear ice. The spring peepers are whistling in the lowlands, the hylodes blows his little bagpipe, away in the wood the grouse is “beating his throbbing drum”—no other description fits that thrilling sound—and the first honeybees are buzzing out from a clump of birches and winging away over the lake.  Underneath all the other spring sounds is the measured “tonk-tonk” of the air escaping through the holes in the ice, and the thin, silver sound of trickling streams. The red-headed woodpecker is here, his crown a spot of splendid crimson against the snow.  “Ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck,” he cries as he darts from tree to tree, his white tail coverts flashing in the sunlight. There has been a deer on the island.  Through my dreams one night I heard sounds of a great commotion, the cries of dogs, the crashing of animals through the underbrush.  In the morning, not ten paces from the kitchen door, the snow was all trampled, soiled and covered with bunches of long brown hair.  Evidently, the place was the scene of the poor animal’s agony, for those hairs were soaked with blood. I grieved, for I have liked to think that the island was a place of refuge for all hunted things—at least for this one year.  But if the dogs had dragged down the deer and killed him, what had become of the carcass?  I wondered.  They could not have eaten it so clean that no trace of skin or bones remained.  I pondered this as I followed the deer’s small, shapely hoof-prints from the shore and up over the hill and through the bushes all hung with bunches of tell-tale brown hair.  I traced the dogs’ tracks also, as they crossed and recrossed the trail, and following them came to an old mica pit, hidden far back among the cedars a gash in the hillside, ten or twelve feet deep and four or five yards long, ringed round with bushes and with a young birch growing in its depths.  Indeed, I fell headlong into that hidden pitfall, and had time to hope, as I went down, scrambling over the edge and clutching at branches, that I was not going to land full on a wounded deer. All tracks stopped at this pit, and the mystery remained a mystery until late in the spring, when it leaked out that Andy and George Drapeau had heard the cries of the hounds, had watched their chance, had come over, dragged off the dogs, and skinned and carried away the deer. Now the season for hunting deer lasts from November first to November fifteenth.  Only one deer may be shot by each hunter.  No hounds may be allowed to run at large during the closed season and any dog found running a deer may be shot on sight, and the person shooting this dog may not be prosecuted.  Thus the month of March is not the time for fresh venison.  Venison out of season is “mountain goat,” to be eaten privately and without boastfulness.  Nor is it safe to display a deer’s spring coat.  But if the Drapeaus had left me that hide, would I have informed on their dogs?  I wonder. My own stupidity robbed me of the only other deerskin rug that I might have had.  Little John Beaulac offered me a beautiful—and seasonable—one which I bought and sent to the squaw at Maskinonge for tanning.  Some weeks later I mentioned my good fortune to William Foret. p. 154“Are you having the hair left on?” he asked. “Hair left on!” I echoed.  “Of course.  I never heard of having the hair taken off.  I want the skin for a rug.” “Well, you’d ought to have said so,” said William.  “Mostly they tans them for leather round here.  They makes fine moccasins and mittens.” Sure enough, that Indian woman had patiently scraped off all the hair and I received a superfine piece of buckskin, which was presented to Little John, I having no use in the world for moccasins or mittens when I should return to the city. The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this island and half a mile away.  From this dock I see their barns in silhouette against the sunsets.  Their land rises in fold on fold of meadow, with here and there a clump of cedars or maples, then a soft slope and slanting cornfield.  Their house is the typical Canadian log shack, a building about sixteen by twenty feet, divided by a board partition into a kitchen and a tiny bedroom.  A trap door opens into the cellar; a ladder leads up to the loft where the boys sleep.  There is a shed, built at right angles to the south wall, and here Mrs. Drapeau keeps her washtub, churn, and milk separator.  The place is always crowded with lounging men; the dogs are everywhere under foot, and the air is thick with the smoke from many old pipes. <ANTIMG alt="“The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this Island”" title= "“The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this Island”" src="images/p155.jpg" /> Herring nets hang from the rafters, harness on the walls; drying skins are stretched across the uprights.  In the muskrat season dozens of furry, brown rats are nailed, by their tails, to the outside walls, and inside the house great pails of bloody water, piles of raw skins, and heaps of rats fill the small room. The Drapeaus believe in the division of labor, and the work of the family seems portioned out in a thoroughly satisfactory way.  Andy, the eldest son, is the farmer, Lewis the hunter and George the fisherman. Mrs. Drapeau, though not an old woman, goes back to the early days of the settlement and knows all the hardships of pioneer life. “I mind the time,” she says, “when this land was all wilderness and when the bears and the wildcats come up to the very door.  Once I seen four bear start over across the lake from Blake’s point to your island.  They swum across the narrows, the old he-bear in the lead, the biggest of the young next, then the little cub and the mother behind.  Me an’ the boys was in the boat—we had been a berryin’—and when the boys seen them bear they went wild.  They rowed up along the island after them, but they couldn’t go fast enough with me in the boat, so they landed me and rowed along to head off the bear, an’ blest if they didn’t turn ’em right back along the shore to where I was a sittin’.  I was right in their tracks. “‘You come back here an’ git me,’ I yelled, p. 157‘an’ don’t you do another trick like that agin, the longest day you live.’ “There was I a-hollerin’ an’ the boys a-laughin’ an’ the bear a comin’.  Why, I might ’a’ been kilt.” “What became of them?” I asked. “The bears?  Oh! they got away.  What with me a-screechin’ an’ the boys a shootin’ they was so scared that they climbed off the far side of the island, an’ the last we saw of them they was over to Henderson’s Bay, their heads just out of water.” Mrs. Drapeau tells of the day when she and her husband came over to their farm in a little flat-bottomed punt, a calf, the beginning of their herd, tied foot to foot and bellowing in the stern.  It was a hard fight to clear the land and bring it to some sort of cultivation, and in a few years Drapeau was killed in a lumber camp, leaving her with four young children to feed.  She describes the long winter nights when she spun, carded, and wove the cloth that kept their shivering little bodies covered against the bitter cold, of the backbreaking days in the fields when she hoed the potatoes and planted the corn, that there might be food for the hungry mouths, and of the long months when she worked at the miners’ boarding house, cooking and washing for a score of men. “I never could have done it if it hadn’t been for my neighbors,” she said.  “They was awful good to me.  The men cut my wood every winter as come an’ ketched me my fish until the boys was big enough to work.  Eh! but I did have the hardest time the year my man died.  Scarce was he laid in the ground when the two biggest boys come back from the school at Loon Lake with the smallpox.  George and Andy had it and they had it fearful bad.  I thought sure the other two would have it too.  The health doctor come up all the way from Queensport an’ nailed a notice on my door, tellin’ the neighbors to keep away, and he forbid me to cross the lake, on fifty dollars fine.  So there I was, the ice just breakin’ and me shut in with my children that was a dyin’, as you might say.  I didn’t want to go to no one’s house, nor to have them come to mine, but I had little or nothin’ to eat on the place, and I feared lest my children should starve. “But I done the best I could, and one day, when the ice was all broke, I heard Bill Shelly, the frogger, passin’ in a boat.  I hollered to him the fix I was in and told him to fetch me some goods from the store an’ to tell my father how we was shut in.  Bill brung me the goods and we got along some way, and when all was over an’ the boys was well, here comes Robinson, the health doctor, to ask how we was all gettin’ along.  He stood off, twenty paces from the door with his white handkerchief to his face.  I was minded to set the dogs on him. “‘Why don’t you come in?’  I says, ‘All’s safe now.  You needn’t to be afraid.  You shut me in here, with my dyin’ children, and not you ner no one else come anear me, not even to the shore, to ask did I have so much as a hundred of flour to keep us alive.  How did you know we wasn’t all starved together?  Get you off this land,’ I says, ‘fer you haven’t got the grace of God in yer heart.’  He got off and I ain’t seen him since, but I ain’t never fergot him.” All this she tells me, sitting before the fire, her gray woolen petticoat turned back over her knees, a black three-cornered shawl laid over her head and pinned firmly under her pointed chin, She was a beauty once.  She is a pretty old woman still, with her flashing black eyes and silver hair.  Even now, at sixty odd, she milks seven cows, makes all the butter and cheese, cares for the hens, the turkeys and the pigs, works a small garden, cooks for the boys, nurses them when they fall ill, and finds time to make wonderful patchwork quilts.  Mrs. Drapeau can tell the names of all the quilt patterns known to Canada. I love these patchwork quilts.  They speak of thrift and industry and patience, and of the leisure of a life in which small bits of cloth are of more value than the time it takes to stitch them together.  Who in the cities has time nowadays to sit and make a patchwork quilt?  They bring up pictures of bedfuls of little children, sleeping snug and warm under mother’s handiwork, and of contented women sewing in the firelight. Their names are poetry—woman’s poetry.  The Log Cabin stands for home, the Churn Dasher is food, the Maple Leaf means Canada.  The Road to Dublin, and the Irish Chain speak of the homesick Irish heart, but I like to imagine that the Prairie Rose was named by some happy woman who loved the wide and blossoming fields of this new land. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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