The Backwoodsmen

Getting out his knife again, he crept stealthily toward the nearest heavy breathing. Before he could detect the beast in that tumultuous gloom, he was upon it. His outstretched left hand fell upon a wildly heaving flank. The frightened animal arose with a gasping snort, and tried to escape; but utterly exhausted, it sank down again almost immediately, resigned to this unknown doom which stole upon it out of the tempest and the dark. Pete’s hand was on it again the moment it was still. He felt it quiver and shrink beneath his touch. Instinctively he began to stroke and rub the stiff hair as he slipped his treacherous hand forward along the heaving flank. The heavings grew quieter, the frightened snortings ceased. The exhausted animal seemed to feel a reassurance in that strong, quiet touch.

When Pete’s hand had reached the unresisting beast’s neck, he began to feel a qualm of misgiving. His knife was in the other hand, ready for use there in the howling dark; but somehow he could not at once bring himself to use it. It would be a betrayal. Yet he had suffered a grievous loss, and here, given into his grasp by fate, was the compensation. He hesitated, arguing with himself impatiently. But even as he did so, he kept stroking that firm, warm, living neck; and through the contact there in the savage darkness, a sympathy passed between the man and the beast. He could not help it. The poor beasts and he were in the same predicament, together holding the battlements of life against the blind and brutal madness of storm. Moreover, the herd had saved him. The debt was on his side. The caress which had been so traitorous grew honest and kind. With a shamefaced grin Pete shut his knife, and slipped it back into his pocket.

With both hands, now, he stroked the tranquil caribou, rubbing it behind the ears and at the base of the antlers, which seemed to give it satisfaction. Once when his hand strayed down the long muzzle, the animal gave a terrified start and snort at the dreaded man smell so violently invading its nostrils. But Pete kept on soothingly and firmly; and again the beast grew calm. At length Pete decided that his best place for the night, or until the storm should lift, would be by the warmth of this imprisoned and peaceable animal. Digging down into the snow beyond the clutches of the wind, he rolled himself in his blankets, crouched close against the caribou’s flank, and went confidently to sleep.

Aware of living companionship, Noël slept soundly through the clamour of the storm. At last a movement against his side disturbed him. He woke to feel that his strange bedfellow had struggled up and withdrawn. The storm was over. The sky above his upturned face was sharp with stars. All about him was laboured movement, with heavy shuffling, coughing, and snorting. Forgetful of their customary noiselessness, the caribou were breaking gladly from their imprisonment. Presently Pete was alone. The cold was still and of snapping intensity; but he, deep in his hollow, and wrapped in his blankets, was warm. Still drowsy, he muffled his face and went to sleep again for another hour.

When he roused himself a second time he was wide awake and refreshed. It was just past the edge of dawn. The cold gripped like a vice. Faint mystic hues seemed frozen for ever into the ineffable crystal of the air. Pete stood up, and looked eastward along the tumbled trail of the herd. Not half a mile away stood the forest, black and vast, the trail leading straight into it. Then, a little farther down toward the right he saw something that made his heart leap exultantly. Rising straight up, a lavender and silver lily against the pallid saffron of the east, soared a slender smoke. That smoke, his trained eyes told him, came from a camp chimney; and he realized that the lumbermen had moved up to him from the far-off head of the Ottanoonsis.

MacPhairrson’s Happy Family

I

It was over a little footbridge one had to pass to visit MacPhairrson and his family, a little, lofty, curiously constructed footbridge, spanning a narrow but very furious torrent. At the middle of the bridge was a gate–or, rather, a door–of close and strong wire mesh; and at this point, door and bridge together were encircled by a chevaux-de-frise of woodwork with sharp, radiating points of heavy telegraph wire. With the gate shut, nothing less than a pair of wings in good working order could carry one over to the steep little island in mid-torrent which was MacPhairrson’s home and citadel.

Carried caressingly in the hollow of his left arm, the Boy held a brown burlap bag, which wriggled violently at times and had to be soothed into quiescence. When the Boy arrived at the door in the bridge, which he found locked, he was met by two strange hosts who peered at him wisely through the meshes of the door. One of these was a large black and tan dog, with the long body, wavy hair, drooping silken ears, and richly feathered tail of a Gordon setter, most grotesquely supported, at a height of not more than eight inches from the ground, by the little bow-legs of a dachshund. This freakish and sinister-looking animal gazed at the visitor with eyes of sagacious welcome, tongue hanging amiably half out, and tail gently waving. He approved of this particular Boy, though boys in general he regarded as nuisances to be tolerated rather than encouraged. The other host, standing close beside the dog as if on guard, and scrutinizing the visitor with little, pale, shrewdly non-committal eyes, was a half-grown black and white pig.

Through the gate the Boy murmured familiar greetings to its warders while he pulled a wooden handle which set an old brown cow-bell above the door jangling hoarsely. The summer air was full to brimming over with sound–with the roar of the furious little torrent beneath, with the thunder of the sheet of cream and amber water falling over the face of the dam some fifty yards above, with the hiss and shriek of the saws in the big sawmill perched beside the dam. Yet through all the interwoven tissue of noise the note of the cow-bell made itself heard in the cabin. From behind the cabin arose a sonorous cry of hong-ka, honk-a-honk, and the snaky black head of a big Canada goose appeared inquiringly around the corner. On one end of the hewn log which served as doorstep a preternaturally large and fat woodchuck sat bolt upright and stared to see who was coming. A red fox, which had been curled up asleep under MacPhairrson’s one rose bush, awoke, and superciliously withdrew to the other side of the island, out of sight, disapproving of all visitors on principle. From the shade of a thick spruce bush near the bridge-end a moose calf lumbered lazily to her feet, and stood staring, her head low down and her big ears waving in sleepy interrogation. From within the cabin came a series of harsh screeches mixed with discordant laughter and cries of “Ebenezer! Ebenezer! Oh, by Gee! Hullo!” Then the cabin door swung wide, and in the doorway appeared MacPhairrson, leaning on his crutches, a green parrot on his shoulder, and beside his crippled feet two big white cats.

MacPhairrson, the parrot, and the cats, all together stared hard at the door on the bridge, striving to make out through the meshes who the visitor might be. The parrot, scrutinizing fiercely with her sinister black and orange eyes, was the first to discover. She proclaimed at once her discovery and her approval by screeching, “Boy! Boy! Oh, by Gee! Hullo!” and clambering head-first down the front of MacPhairrson’s coat. As MacPhairrson hobbled hastily forward to admit the welcome guest, the parrot, reaching out with beak and claw, transferred herself to the moving crutch, whence she made a futile snap at one of the white cats. Foiled in this amiable attempt, she climbed hurriedly up the crutch again and resumed MacPhairrson’s shoulder, in time to greet the Boy’s entrance with a cordial “Oh, by Gee! Hullo!”

MacPhairrson (he spelled his name scrupulously MacPherson, but, like all the other dwellers in the Settlement, pronounced it MacPhairrson, with a punctilious rolling of the r) was an old lumberman. Rheumatism, brought on by years of toiling thigh-deep in the icy waters when the logs were running in the freshets, had gripped him so relentlessly that one of his legs was twisted to almost utter uselessness. With his crutches, however, he could get about after his fashion; and being handy with his fingers and versatile of wit, he managed to make a living well enough at the little odd jobs of mechanical repairing which the Settlement folk, and the mill hands in particular, brought to his cabin. His cabin, which was practically a citadel, stood on a steep cone of rock, upthrust from the bed of the wild little river which worked the mill. On the summit of a rock a few square rods of soil gave room for the cabin, half a dozen bushes, and some sandy, sun-warmed turf. In this retreat, within fifty yards of the busy mill, but fenced about by the foaming torrent and quite inaccessible except by the footbridge, MacPhairrson lived with the motley group of companions which men called his Happy Family.

Happy, no doubt, they were, in spite of the strait confines of their prison, for MacPhairrson ruled them by the joint forces of authority and love. He had, moreover, the mystic understanding which is essential if one would be really intimate with the kindreds we carelessly call dumb. So it was that he achieved a fair degree of concord in his Family. All the creatures were amiable towards him, because they loved him; and because they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as MacPhairrson was wont to explain, because she was so human and he never could quite make her out. Ebenezer, the pig, was still too young to be promoted to permanence; but he had already shown such character, intelligence, and self-respecting individuality that MacPhairrson had vowed he should never deteriorate into pork. Ebenezer should stay, even though he should grow so big as to be inconvenient.

But with Susan, the moose calf, and Carrots, the unsociable young fox, it was different. MacPhairrson realized that when Susan should come to her full heritage of stature, he would hardly have room for her on the island. He would then send to the Game Commissioner at Fredericton for a permit, and sell the good soul to the agent for some Zoölogical Garden, where she would be appreciated and cared for. As for Carrots, his conduct was irreproachable, absolutely without blot or blemish, but MacPhairrson knew that he was quite unregenerate at heart. The astute little beast understood well enough the fundamental law of the Family, “Live and let live,” and he knew that if he should break that law, doom would descend upon him in an eye-wink. But into his narrowed, inscrutable eyes, as he lay with muzzle on dainty, outstretched black paws and watched the movements of James Edward, the gander, or Butters, the fat woodchuck, a savage glint would come, which MacPhairrson unerringly interpreted. Moreover, while his demeanour was impeccable, his reserve was impenetrable, and even the tolerant and kindly MacPhairrson could find nothing in him to love. The decree, therefore, had gone forth; that is, it had been announced by MacPhairrson himself, and apparently approved by the ever attentive Stumpy and Ebenezer, that Carrots should be sold into exile at the very first opportunity.

When the Boy came through the little bridge gate, the greetings between him and MacPhairrson were brief and quiet. They were fellows both in the taciturn brotherhood of the woods. To Stumpy and Ebenezer, who nosed affectionately at his legs, he paid no attention beyond a careless touch of caress. Even to Ananias-and-Sapphira, who had hurriedly clambered from MacPhairrson’s shoulder to his and begun softly nipping at his ear with her dreaded beak, he gave no heed whatever. He knew that the evil-tempered bird loved him as she loved his master and would be scrupulously careful not to pinch too hard.

As the little procession moved gravely and silently up from the bridge to the cabin, their silence was in no way conspicuous, for the whole air throbbed with the rising and falling shriek of the saws, the trampling of the falls, and the obscurely rhythmic rush of the torrent around the island base. They were presently joined by Susan, shambling on her ungainly legs, wagging her big ears, and stretching out her long, ugly, flexible, overhanging nose to sniff inquiringly at the Boy’s jacket. A comparatively new member of MacPhairrson’s family, she was still full of curiosity about every one and everything, and obviously considered it her mission in life to acquire knowledge. It was her firm conviction that the only way to know a thing was to smell it.

A few steps from the door James Edward, the wild gander, came forward with dignity, slightly bowing his long, graceful black neck and narrow snaky head as he moved. Had the Boy been a stranger, he would now have met the first touch of hostility. Not all MacPhairrson’s manifest favour would have prevented the uncompromising and dauntless gander from greeting the visitor with a savage hiss and uplifted wings of defiance. But towards the Boy, whom he knew well, his dark, sagacious eye expressed only tolerance, which from him was no small condescension.

On the doorstep, as austerely ungracious in his welcome as James Edward himself, sat Butters, the woodchuck, nursing some secret grudge against the world in general, or, possibly, against Ananias-and-Sapphira in particular, with whom he was on terms of vigilant neutrality. When the procession approached, he forsook the doorstep, turned his fat, brown back upon the visitor, and became engrossed in gnawing a big cabbage stalk. He was afraid that if he should seem good-natured and friendly, he might be called upon to show off some of the tricks which MacPhairrson, with inexhaustible patience, had taught him. He was not going to turn somersaults, or roll over backward, or walk like a dancing bear, for any Boy alive!

This ill humour of Butters, however, attracted no notice. It was accepted by both MacPhairrson and his visitor as a thing of course. Moreover, there were matters of more moment afoot. That lively, squirming bag which the Boy carried so carefully in the hollow of his left arm was exciting the old woodsman’s curiosity. The lumbermen and mill hands, as well as the farmer-folk of the Settlement for miles about, were given to bringing MacPhairrson all kinds of wild creatures as candidates for admission to his Happy Family. So whenever any one came with something alive in a bag, MacPhairrson would regard the bag with that hopeful and eager anticipation with which a child regards its Christmas stocking.

When the two had entered the cabin and seated themselves, the Boy in the big barrel chair by the window, and MacPhairrson on the edge of his bunk, not three feet away, the rest of the company gathered in a semicircle of expectation in the middle of the floor. That is, Stumpy and Ebenezer and the two white cats did so, their keen noses as well as their inquisitive eyes having been busied about the bundle. Even James Edward came a few steps inside the door, and with a fine assumption of unconcern kept himself in touch with the proceedings. Only Susan was really indifferent, lying down outside the door–Susan, and that big bunch of fluffy brown feathers on the barrel in the corner of the cabin.

The air fairly thrilled with expectation as the boy took the wriggling bag on his knee and started to open it. The moment there was an opening, out came a sharp little black nose pushing and twisting eagerly for freedom. The nose was followed in an instant by a pair of dark, intelligent, mischievous eyes. Then a long-tailed young raccoon squirmed forth, clambered up to the Boy’s shoulder, and turned to eye the assemblage with bright defiance. Never before in his young life had he seen such a remarkable assemblage; which, after all, was not strange, as there was surely not another like it in the world.

The new-comer’s reception, on the whole, was not unfriendly. The two white cats, to be sure, fluffed their tails a little, drew back from the circle, and went off to curl up in the sun and sleep off their aversion to a stranger. James Edward, too, his curiosity satisfied, haughtily withdrew. But Stumpy, as acknowledged dean of the Family, wagged his tail, hung out his pink tongue as far as it would go, and panted a welcome so obvious that a much less intelligent animal than the young raccoon could not have failed to understand it. Ebenezer was less demonstrative, but his little eyes twinkled with unmistakable good-will. Ananias-and-Sapphira was extraordinarily interested. In a tremendous hurry she scrambled down MacPhairrson’s arm, down his leg, across the floor, and up the Boy’s trousers. The Boy was a little anxious.

“Will she bite him?” he asked, preparing to defend his pet.

“I reckon she won’t,” answered MacPhairrson, observing that the capricious bird’s plumage was not ruffled, but pressed down so hard and smooth and close to her body that she looked much less than her usual size. “Generally she ain’t ugly when she looks that way. But she’s powerful interested, I tell you!”

The little raccoon was crouching on the Boy’s right shoulder. Ananias-and-Sapphira, using beak and claws, scrambled nimbly to the other shoulder. Then, reaching far around past the Boy’s face, she fixed the stranger piercingly with her unwinking gaze, and emitted an ear-splitting shriek of laughter. The little coon’s nerves were not prepared for such a strain. In his panic he fairly tumbled from his perch to the floor, and straightway fled for refuge to the broad back of the surprised and flattered pig.

“The little critter’s all right!” declared MacPhairrson, when he and the Boy were done laughing. “Ananias-an’-Sapphira won’t hurt him. She likes all the critters she kin bully an’ skeer. An’ Stumpy an’ that comical cuss of a Ebenezer, they be goin’ to look out fer him.”

II

About a week after this admission of the little raccoon to his Family, MacPhairrson met with an accident. Coming down the long, sloping platform of the mill, the point of one of his crutches caught in a crack, and he plunged headlong, striking his head on a link of heavy “snaking” chain. He was picked up unconscious and carried to the nearest cabin. For several days his stupor was unbroken, and the doctor hardly expected him to pull through. Then he recovered consciousness–but he was no longer MacPhairrson. His mind was a sort of amiable blank. He had to be fed and cared for like a very young child. The doctor decided at last that there was some pressure of bone on the brain, and that operations quite beyond his skill would be required. At his suggestion a purse was made up among the mill hands and the Settlement folk, and MacPhairrson, smiling with infantile enjoyment, was packed off down river on the little tri-weekly steamer to the hospital in the city.

As soon as it was known around the mill–which stood amidst its shanties a little apart from the Settlement–that MacPhairrson was to be laid up for a long time, the question arose: “What’s to become of the Family?” It was morning when the accident happened, and in the afternoon the Boy had come up to look after the animals. After that, when the mill stopped work at sundown, there was a council held, amid the suddenly silent saws.

“What’s to be done about the orphants?” was the way Jimmy Wright put the problem.

Black Angus MacAllister, the Boss–so called to distinguish him from Red Angus, one of the gang of log-drivers–had his ideas already pretty well formed on the subject, and intended that his ideas should go. He did not really care much about any one else’s ideas except the Boy’s, which he respected as second only to those of MacPhairrson where the wild kindreds were concerned. Black Angus was a huge, big-handed, black-bearded, bull-voiced man, whose orders and imprecations made themselves heard above the most piercing crescendos of the saws. When his intolerant eyes fixed a man, what he had to say usually went, no matter what different views on the subject his hearer might secretly cling to. But he had a tender, somewhat sentimental streak in his character, which expressed itself in a fondness for all animals. The horses and oxen working around the mill were all well cared for and showed it in their condition; and the Boss was always ready to beat a man half to death for some very slight ill-usage of an animal.

“A man kin take keer o’ himself,” he would say in explanation, “an’ the dumb critters can’t. It’s our place to take keer of ’em.”

“Boys,” said he, his great voice not yet toned down to the quiet, “I say, let’s divvy up the critters among us, jest us mill hands an’ the Boy here, an’ look out fer ’em the best we know how till MacPhairrson gits well!”

He looked interrogatively at the Boy, and the Boy, proud of the importance thus attached to him, answered modestly–

“That’s just what I was hoping you’d suggest, Mr. MacAllister. You know, of course, they can’t stay on together there alone. They wouldn’t be a Happy Family long. They’d get to fighting in no time, and about half of ’em would get killed quick.”

There was a moment of deliberative silence. No smoking was allowed in the mill, but the hands all chewed. Jimmy Wright, marking the bright face of a freshly sawed deal about eight feet away, spat unerringly upon its exact centre, then giving a hitch to his trousers, he remarked–

“Let the Boss an’ the Boy settle it. They onderstand it the best.”

“That’s right, Jimmy! We’ll fix it!” said Black Angus. “Now, for mine, I’ve got a fancy for the parrot an’ the pig. That there Ananias-and-Sapphira, she’s a bird an’ no mistake. An’ the pig–MacPhairrson calls him Ebenezer–he’s that smart ye’d jest kill yerself laffin’ to see him. An’, moreover, he’s that clean–he’s clean as a lady. I’d like to have them two around my shanty. An’ I’m ready to take one more if necessary.”

“Then I think you’ll have to take the coon too, Mr. MacAllister,” said the Boy. “He and Ebenezer just love each other, an’ they wouldn’t be happy separated.”

“All right. The coon fer me!” responded the Boss. “Which of the critters will you take yerself?”

“I’ll wait and see which the rest of the boys want,” replied the Boy. “I like them all, and they all know me pretty well. I’ll take what’s left.”

“Well, then,” said Jimmy Wright, “me for Susan. That blame moose calf’s the only one of the critters that I could ever git along with. She’s a kind of a fool, an’ seems to like me!” And he decorated the bright deal once more.

“Me an’ my missus, we’ll be proud to take them two white cats!” put in grey old Billy Smith. “She sez, sez she, they be the han’somest cats in two counties. Mebbe they won’t be so lonesome with us as they’d be somewheres else, bein’s as our shanty’s so nigh MacPhairrson’s bridge they kin see for themselves all the time there ain’t no one on to the island any more!”

“Stumpy’s not spoken for!” reminded the Boy. The dog was popular, and half a dozen volunteered for him at once.

“Mike gits the dawg!” decided the Boss, to head off arguments.

“Then I’ll take the big gander,” spoke up Baldy Pallen, one of the disappointed applicants for Stumpy. “He knows as much as any dawg ever lived.”

“Yes, I reckon he kin teach ye a heap, Baldy!” agreed the Boss. A laugh went round at Baldy’s expense. Then for a few seconds there were no more applications.

“No one seems to want poor Butters and Bones!” laughed the Boy. “They’re neither of them what you’d call sociable. But Bones has his good points. He can see in the dark; and he’s a great one for minding his own business. Butters has a heap of sense; but he’s too cross to show it, except for MacPhairrson himself. Guess I’d better take them both, as I understand their infirmities.”

“An’ ain’t there a young fox?” inquired the Boss.

“Oh, Carrots; he can just stay on the island,” answered the Boy. “If some of you’ll throw him a bite to eat every day, he’ll be all right. He can’t get into any mischief. And he can’t get away. He stands on his dignity so, nobody’d get any fun out of having him!”