The Trapper's Daughter at Saint Irène

WHERE the Chenowaitaisi and Saint Irène rivers empty themselves together, in that wild country of Saints’ and Indians’ names, Pierre first saw Alcée.

He was at Lysterton’s Dam for the river-drives. Lysterton, the boss of the camp, was an Englishman, pale of lip and of eye, but stout of heart. He was bleached and tanned to one indiscriminate hue, thrust his neck forward and licked the corners of his mouth when he spoke, and smiled when bad luck befell him. His smile cut a swath in his cheeks so sharp and so long that one feared the cheeks suffered, and that one day he would smile too far. He was as different from his blustering jolly fellow countrymen as Pierre from his nimble-witted, voluble Canadian confrères. For that reason, perchance, the attraction between them. Lysterton had been trying for nobody knew how many years to build up a sufficient fortune to take him back to his Dorsetshire home, and justify him for his long absence. Ill luck followed him, hence the pale lips and lustreless eyes, signs of abated buoyancy. He courted hardship, shunned cities, hated chatter, had a taste for botany, loved Gillyflower, his roan pony, and was afraid of women. He smiled in calamity, never for jollity. The smile was one of self-ridicule, cruel, a lash to his laggard ambition, a gag to swelling emotion.

When the mill at Three Pines burned, and hundreds of thousands of feet of timber went up in smoke, Lysterton smiled and remarked to Pierre through shut lips: “ Gad, what a ripping blaze! To your bunk, Pierre. We ’ll be off at daybreak for Mount Shawgois and fell another bonfire.”

“Mon Dieu, quel brave garcon ! ” said poor, staring Pierre, and determined to follow him to the ends of the earth.

Meagre, yellow, with the turtle posture of the head and the yellow-lashed eyes, Lysterton had not the graces that appeal to women, nor those that arouse men to enthusiasm. Pierre, with glassblue staring look, lanky hair, and small pursed mouth as scarlet as a wild hip, lacked that fine swagger which charms the fair habitants of the valleys. Perhaps it was just as well they were not in the world of women, for such men are foreordained to useless passions. Yet a strangely assorted pair they were, in their differing uncouthness, to sit for hours, the two of them, alone by the roaring fire in the Shawgois Mountains, the French and Montagnais Indians snoring on their shakedowns, they two, silent, moody, seldom exchanging a look, words far outside the pale of probability, — yet comrades. Perhaps their thoughts walked side by side communing. When Lysterton went out to say good - night to his pony Gillyflower, Pierre covered the fire with ashes. This happened every night. When Lysterton came back, Pierre lay beneath his blanket, the distraught eyes watching red lights dance about the shanty. When Lysterton had bunked, Pierre sang, crooned rather: —

This also happened every night. The French Canadians feared Pierre. They said his life was charmed, and called him the “Little Christ.” To the Montagnais he was known as the “ManitouSinger - under - his - Breath, ” and they trod delicately and offered him tobacco.

The first time that Lysterton broke the silence of these nights was on a night in May, moonless, when the logs were locked by the islets, some miles above the driving-camp at Lysterton’s Dam.

“There ’s an old trapper down the Saint Irène,” said the Englishman.

“Laviolette, by the Chute à l’Ours. No good he,” returned Pierre dryly.

Lysterton was frustrated at having his news not only forestalled but added to.

“Got a daughter,” he announced with stony glance at the fire. So long a pause ensued that he turned to see if Pierre had fallen asleep.

“Bah, I know,” returned Pierre, at his good pleasure.

“Seen her? ” Lysterton pursued sharply.

“I lizzen to old man Laviolette heem beat her.”

An interminable pause, then Lysterton came out with: —

“Gad, it’s a hundred centuries since I ’ve talked with a woman.”

“Day affer nex’ day,” returned Pierre succinctly, which evidently implied in a nutshell that at that time the drive would float past the trapper’s hut by the Chute it l’Ours.

“ Gad ! ” exclaimed the self-contained Englishman, after another longer silence.

“You no can parlay wit’ Laviolette. Heem ver’ croz ol’ Indian man an’ she plentee sauvage, don’ know not’ings,” rumbled Pierre with ominous officiousness.

Or was it a streak of unaccountable jealousy? Lysterton went out to Gillyflower’s shed. The night was a sea of mist, through which distant patches of forest thrust like islands. Frogs boomed from the Saint Irène marshes. Pierre, within, went under his blanket:

Next morning the logs were propelled again on their way to the mill on the Saint Maurice. Lysterton had started the drive too late, or had miscalculated on the time required, and now the water was getting low and floated the larger and heavier logs with difficulty. There were constant rocks, narrows, sand-bars, and snags to obstruct and lodge them on the shores. The van crew kept the logs running ahead, and the rear men brought up the laggards on a tributary of the Saint Irène. Thousands of logs were piled up in a jam at Passe Pichau, with the water sinking daily. He had blown to pieces hundreds of dollars’ worth of timber already, and now his last fuse was gone.

“ L’diable! ” said Pierre. “ W’at fo’ you don’ oppenne t’ose dam on de Ogasunk an’ one beeg planks ov Saint Irène ? Beeg wataire coming t’en, her tek you logs, l’diable ! queek laike dat! Daz de bose driver, beeg wataire.”

Lysterton licked the corners of his mouth and dispatched two Indians, fleet runners, one to open a six-foot sluice on the Ogasunk, and the other, four feet on the Chenowaitaisi. He did not much enjoy juggling with frail mountain dams. The uncalculated strength of an inlet of water had taken him by surprise five years before when he had opened a dam in Ontario, and in consequence a large tract of timber had been “flowed.”

“Six! Four!” he spread out his square meagre hand in dumb show as the French Indians loped off down the carry.

Jean-Long-Legs conferred darkly with Elzéar Eel-Man on Lysterton’s policy. They agreed that a few feet was not sufficient to force the logs downstream. They exchanged brief similes, hinting that Yellow-He-Cat walked on eggs, also that the cat who never springs misses his bird. Yellow-He-Cat was the epithet, not derisively meant, which had fixed itself on Lysterton. The Indian is highly susceptible to physical impressions. The two messengers decided to exceed orders and vent the sluices. A few extra planks in the Chenowaitaisi made the difference that brought about the meeting of Pierre and Alcée.

Hours might elapse before the men could reach their destination, but after, Lysterton would count the minutes on his watch as he saw the water-line on the opposite shore rising, rising. Pierre swung a kettle on his crotched tripod, and pitched in the potatoes for the dinner. The good rooty smell of the cooking skins and the fragrance of spitting twigs reached the van crew working in mid-stream, and set some of them to singing.

Pierre crooned as he chopped some dried moose-meat for a stew. He was prone to gloomy musical resolutions of this sort when his humor was most uplifted. The sun was deliciously warm in the clearing. Lysterton, on a log, poked a white feather of a flower under the lens of his pocket microscope, and Pierre rejoiced that, through his advice, good fortune was to hurry to the Saint Maurice mills. Small wonder he was bien content and tuned forth again and again: —

Lysterton made notes in a little red leather book he had carried ever since Dorset days: —

“Tiarella cordifolia. False mitrewort. Saint Irène, May 14. A fine, sunny day.”

The potato skins began to rip off as Pierre prodded them with the birch stick that was his trying-fork. A tiny black and yellow bird, with a crest, perched on a pine sapling and whistled three times. Somewhere in the forest his mate responded. A Montagnais leaned on his setting-pole in the river-bateau, and gave voice to a singular gurgling laugh. A smile traveled from the rivercrew to Pierre over his fire. He wound a ribbon of dough about a screechinghot sassafras stick. Lysterton gave himself over to luxurious meditation. He heard already the thud of the jackladder, the whiz of flying belts and whir of water-wheels, the scream of the circular and band saws, the zip-zip of the pulp machines, and then felt the swoop of the great wings of success uplifting him — where ? Bubbles of dreams that go out at a breath, glistening cobwebs diminished to tatters by a child’s footstep ! Even while Lysterton dreamed was seed sown, out of which should blossom that pinched, cruel smile. JeanLong-Legs up at Ogasuuk tripped the sluice-plank to let through a dangerous body of water from that roaring mountain stream.

“The lord Harry!” exclaimed the boss, raising his head to listen. “What ’s that? ”

Down the gorge of the Saint Irène came a faint mutter. Pierre recognized it on the instant. Logs driven against their will, smashing together, hurled on top of one another, ground along over rocks and rapids. He had seen a threefoot butt log snapped in two like a reed in the seethe of a loosened jam. Lysterton whipped out his watch and observed the water rise on the pole he thrust into the river. It was already above driving-pitch.

“ What have those hounds of Indians done ? ”

He never knew what silent grudge the race might be wreaking, in spurts of unlooked-for treachery. The painful smile leaped to his mouth and set it in a permanent ellipse. You have seen people nervously moved to mirthless smiles in relating terrible calamity. This was the quality of Lysterton’s grimace. He purred through his lips:

“The lower dams will be swept away, and the mill, the mill! ”

He hallooed to his men on the river to pass the word to the foremost of the van. They were strung along for a mile or so downstream, almost to the Chute à l’Ours where the Little Chenowaitaisi fell into the Saint Irène; they must return to shore and higher ground before the avalanche of logs and water overtook them. Lysterton glanced at the weather, A wrack of mackerel clouds raced across the sky, and the purple south lowered where, a half hour ago, the blue had shone undimmed. The growl of the loosened torrent came louder, —even a swish and seethe of tides hurtling against banks and snarling over rapids. There was probably high backwater in the swamps and marshes on the upper slopes of the Shawgois. How the torrents scuttled down those steep grades, for all the world as if they hurled themselves down a flight of stairs, head over heels and white curls streaming! You have seen the water rise in a lock. Imagine the same relentless rapidity possessing a moving torrent, and that torrent tearing downstairs at appalling speed, with never-ceasing reinforcements behind, and you will see the Saint Irène at its junction with the Chenowaitaisi, when its tributary sluices above were opened at once.

“L’diable ofe dat rivaire! ” cried Pierre; “but m’sieu, she bring you logs ver’ queek indeed, das sure.”

“Damnation! ” said the Englishman softly.

It was not his habit to swear. Whatever the glistening bubble contained that had hovered before his eyes a few minutes ago, all was dissipated. The men had returned from their tasks, heelers and bateau-men, alarmed by the warning and the thunder of the threatening gorge. Lysterton bad already sent four of them by a short cut to inspect the upper dams and shut off the outlets, if it were not already too late. He thought of it now. The mill-people should be warned. It was a hard ride down the Saint Maurice valley, but a man might reach them by nightfall. Unless he and his crew were Titans at dam-building, they could do little more than temporarily check the loosened flood, for with all of Lake Chenowaitaisi and the Ogasunk creeks pouring down the Saint Irène ravine, what could one expect ? Pierre, the intrepid, the reckless, and Gillyflower, the sure-footed, should be his messengers. He instructed Pierre in a few terse words. Pierre overflowed: —

“Bah, I understand, moi! I run. I am dere already, moi! ” he sang, throwing back his long black locks and mounting the pony.

He was soon out of sight, flying down the portage that led to the settlements below. He smelled the rank odor of potatoes burned to a crisp, and knew that his kettle had gone dry.

When he had ridden a mile he pulled Gillyflower to a sudden halt. He remembered the trapper and the trapper’s daughter in their cabin by the river edge. The trail he rode debouched a mile from the Saint Irène, a long mile from the good for nothing old Indian. Only a mile to save the girl, Alcée! That mile alternately shrank and expanded as he went in his thought from Laviolette to Alcée. What was a mile’s delay compared to human lives! the reader may well ask. What was the mill with all its machinery, what was all the thousands of dollars’ worth of lumber compared to a single human life?

But, as every lumberman knows, the value of life is largely a racial matter, decreasing in rapid ratio from the lordly Englishman to the inferior Canuck, the pitiful half-breed, and the wholly insignificant Indian. The North Woods lumberman will tell you that a Frenchman when he dies becomes a white horse. It, is likely that a dead Indian is not accorded even such equine respectability of transformation.

Why, then, should Pierre halt at the crossways? It was only the lives of a drunken Indian trapper and his halfwitted daughter that hung in the balance. Laviolette, as gossip had it, was morose, suspicious, solitary, to an extraordinary degree, and the daughter, half-child, half-woman, was wild, singular, and therefore, the raconteurs concluded, an innocent. Rather a pretty epithet this, the French euphemism for idiot.

Nevertheless, Pierre, curbing the impatient Gillyflower, could not shake himself free of the thought. He turned the pony into the trapper’s path. The scud of clouds darkened ominously, and a large blob splashed on his face. The birds stopped singing, and omens of harm shook from the whitened leaves. The forest bristled in that lull before the storm. But Pierre hummed, stooping to the horse’s neck as she footed it gingerly along the obscure trail. Sometimes she picked up her heels for flying jumps over fallen trunks. Gillyflower was as expert as Lysterton or Pierre in following blind trails and half-obliterated waymarks. Nose to the ground and sharp eyes ahead, she sensed the road unfalteringly. All this while Pierre pictured the Saint Irène and the Chenowaitaisi, loose mane and foaming jaws, and their murderous burden. Far above his head the rain beat on the evergreens, becoming a furious pelt before it penetrated this canopy. He emerged before Laviolette’s cabin in a sheet of rain, but above the voice of the rain he heard the voice of the floods and the logs smashing on the Saint Irène Rapids, above Lysterton’s Dam. Below the cabin tossed the tormented river, spurting upward, drop by drop, till the rain and the river seemed one. Through a smother of mist Pierre could see the gleam of the Little Chenowaitaisi churning in its narrow chasm.

“ Run, run, you people! ” called Pierre ineffectually, because of the din. “Save yourselves! ”

Then he saw that Alcée stood at the door, — hair to her waist in length, blown about her, slight like a young boy, in her doe-skin jacket and tasseled leggings. Her slightness and her youth, and the curve of her hand to her eyes as she peered through the mists and swirl, lost Pierre his seat on Gillyflower. He jumped to the ground and had to touch her shoulder before she heard him, such was the clamor. Her great startled eyes took in the wonderful apparition, the Storm-Manitou, with blue in his look and the voice of a bird. His words came to her blown and misty.

“I cannot save myself, ” said Alcée’s piercing tone, “My father is dead within. It is not good to leave him.”

Pierre was aghast. The girl would die for a father’s sake, a dead father’s, a dead Indian’s. She turned upon him her great wild look. He would not have left her, then, if ten thousand perditions had battled down the gorge.

“Come within,” she said.

The old trapper sat in his birchen chair, gnarled in the posture of life, copper-colored, leathery, shriveled. His face was like a withered baked apple.

“Dead,” said Alcée, answering the unbelief of Pierre’s face, “jusque comme ça.”

The half-bent withes of a beaver-trap had fallen from his hand in the moment of death. He had beaten her yesterday. He was dead to-day, and Alcée remained faithful. A crash of timber, pines bitten in two like grass, split their ears. A cataract from the sky fell as if in response.

“Ah, but I fear! ” cried the girl, putting her hands to her ears. It was then that Pierre became inspired. To her, he was a wild young male thing, without doubt a messenger from the sun or a ghost from the Hunting-Grounds of some alien race. She would obey him. To him, she was the new-born sense of sex, a wing-darling, an inrooted possession.

His glance, traveling about the hut, saw the bateau and the bark cheemaun on their supports. He did not speak, but Alcée, following him, seemed to divine and forestall his purposes. Laviolette’s body was bound strongly into the bateau, and then they carried him to the landing place. Alcée hurriedly thrust a pipe into his cold fingers and stuck the pouch between his knees. He still sat, grim, supported by the curved stern. Quicker than it can be told, Alcée and Pierre prepared for the launching. They two in the cheemaun, the dead man alone for his final voyage.

“Baste! Better to die, so, in the open, than shut like a rat in a trap,” said Pierre.

Alcée answered nothing, drawing breath as they were caught up by the current and carried down. Pierre had the bateau in tow, and she watched the face of the dead with fascination.

“He like it good,” she said, reading the dead face. “ He very well content. ”

“ Do you like it, you ? ” hissed Pierre. “Tell me, tell!”

“I do not know,” replied she. “I have never known this manner of dying.”

“It is not dying. It is living,” Pierre made solemn reply. “ We should have ridden away — together — on Jilifleur, if it had not been for — him. But this, this will do.”

Below Lysterton’s the Saint Irène, with the exception of a single portage at the Falls-Where-You-Hear-the-Water-Talking, is fairly navigable for the native-born voyageur. This is not saying that there are no rapids which the Indian shoots, holding his breath, no Remous à Jim, where the dead reach up hands to draw under the living, no Pointe aux Outardes, where the bustards crouch on the rocks in their funeral blacks, and wait for the wrecks of bodies. The voyage which Pierre and Alcée started upon, from the Chute à l’Ours to the Décharge, is one which would whiten the hair of the ordinary canoeist, if indeed he survived the first rapids.

Now, with the storm and the flood, the stray logs rushing past them and that vast threat behind, Pierre, cool voyageur that he was, felt the blood mount to his head. It was a race for life between them and the running jam behind. They had the start, but the logs, drawing more water, had the greater impetus, and the same tide that hurried their course precipitated the enemy.

“You fear not, no?” asked Alcée, letting her eyes rest for a moment on Pierre’s anguished face, a web of drawn lines.

“But why? ” he lilted. “To fear, that is to die.

Hot and cold streams went up and down behind his ears, but Alcde, under the spell of his voice, feared no more. Then they both heard the roar of Lysterton’s Dam, rent asunder, disemboweled. With a swift motion he stretched Alcée along the bottom of the boat.

“You will lie there, still.”

He could not see for the gusts of rain, but his breath came in gasps of exultation. Aleée lay with shut eyes, and under her sweep of hair her bosom rose and fell tenderly. He had known a wild furred thing lie thus in a trap, as if to coax off calamity by perfect patience. He leaned to her as they went spinning out on a wider reach, and there was a moment’s lull of storm.

“You are mine, mine entirely.”

She looked at him through chinked lids. She knew that she was his, his entirely. What did he want with her ? His eyes were the color of pale storm, and his wet hair made a sealskin hood for his cheeks. They would speed on and on, — always speed on, out of the forest, where? What was the world when it was not forest ?

She knew the waterways as well as Pierre, and lying there in the bottom of the cheemaun, only a thin strip of bark between her and the river, she could feel the currents whirl and eddy an inch below her. The whirlpool where her grandfather, Jim of the Remous, lost his life was a spot that only an inspired canotier might pass alive. Where the river seems to shine and thicken, and is fleeced with creamy brou, there is the approach; but over the mouth of the Remous is sinister calm.

“The Remous! Wait!” breathed Alcée, in a whisper that tightened Pierre’s heart.

His hand, seized with a spasm, let go the rope of the bateau, and Laviolette shot forward in dreadful circles.

“Au revoir, mon père! ” shrieked the girl, raising herself, while Pierre steadied the light skiff with agonized paddle.

The dead man seemed to respond, nodding, as he fell face forward into his boat. Then the Remous sucked him in with a gurgling noise. The Kettle is unfathomably deep, and there is just one moment, when it is filled to the brim, that a canoe may go by. To attempt a passage while the vortex fills is certain death.

“He has gone to his father,” said Alcée peacefully. “Now is Jim not hungry any more.”

Pierre released the boat, obeying her gesture. It swerved to the right, speeding past the fatal spot like a bird unleashed.

Out into the centre, they swung above the Pointe aux Outardes, grim rocks under the water and sand-bars by the shore, death, for the unwary. They whittled their way in safety. The storm abated, a patch of brilliant blue shone in the west. Distant hilltops chased the fleeting sun. But that threat still followed behind, gaining on them, and below were the Falls-Where-You-Hearthe-Water-Talking. The Saint Irène ran swifter to its wild descent.

“There is no landing,” said Pierre. “We come to the Falls. One may fear a little now.”

“No,” replied Alcée savagely, “not to fear. Jim, he that was my father’s father, though he was caught by the Devil of the Remous, very wise man of the water. One time him went over the Chute in his canot. He young as me that time, seventy suns, much long time ago. Once in seventy suns, medicineman of the Montagnais say. ”

Alcée’s words came quick and passionate, interrupted by the quavers of the leaping cheemaun as they neared the Falls.

“Eh bien?” said Pierre sharply, keeping the bow straight down the first rapids.

“Seventy suns ago. Once in seventy suns,” chanted Alcée. “It is the time again.” Her voice pierced like prophecy.

The shatter and whiteness of splintered water made a rim across their horizon. The air was full of commotion.

“On arrive,” sobbed Pierre, in a glory of doom. Alcée raised hersell to meet his look as the paddle slid from his hand. He choked for joy at braving death with such eyes to drink to.

Gillyflower returned to Lysterton riderless. There was a new camp now on a hardwood bench a half mile from the flowed lands. The mill was saved, so Lysterton’s smile no longer did duty, though it had left deep circular lines round his mouth.

Besides Pierre, the two Indians Elzéar and Jean-Long-Legs were missing from the crew. Their remorse over their blunder would not suffer them to return to Lysterton, though they left a goodly arrearage of “time” behind them.

At night, around the camp-fire, the men rehearsed the dare-devil deeds of Pierre, a tale destined to pass down to posterity in those forests. His miraculous escapes from death were dwelt upon in tones of awe, now that he had taken his last chance and would return to them no more, smiling, wet-eyed, and singing. Only Eustache-le-Croyant remained sanguine.

“ Heem no killed dead um, ” he averred. (There are degrees of deadness, as even the raccoon knows.) “ Heem walk back some days, plemtee live, song in mouth, das sure.”

On the sixth day Pierre returned, with a companion, stealthily at nightfall. He smelled the odor of frying brochet, and opined that Eustache had been fishing in the lakes of Shawgois. Beneath the hemlock roof of a lean-to he stood before the boss, wringing his sheepish fingers, and told his story. Lysterton listened with the attention of a wooden image, not the flicker of an eyelash nor the twitch of a muscle showing which way his emotions were stirred.

“I remember me ove ol’ man Laviolette, his girl, ” Pierre had reached this point, “zo Jilifleur, she stoppin nice wiles Pierre he t’ink.”

In his lowest, lippiest tone, Lysterton interrupted: —

“ The lord Harry! Did you go after her ? ”

Eustache, at the turning-point with his brochet, listened and looked skillfully, without looking.

“You disobeyed me, like those other fools? ” jerked out Lysterton, still with the wooden eyes.

“Dame-oui,” sang Pierre.

“I thought of — the woman,” said Lysterton, musing. “I knew you would. I am proud of you, Pierre.”

Eustache dropped his brochet into the fire.

“Dame-oui,” repeated Pierre lyrically. “ She out dere, là-bas, ” he pointed to the neighboring shadows. “She ver’ hongree. ”

Florence Wilkinson.