The Backwoodsmen

At this stage of affairs the Boss, axe in hand, picked his way across the monstrous tangle of the face of the jam between the great white jets, till he gained the centre of the structure. Here his practised eye, with the aid of a perilous axe-stroke here and there,–strokes which might possibly bring the whole looming mass down upon him in a moment,–presently located the timbers which held the structure firm, “the key-logs,” as the men call them. These he marked with his axe. Then, returning to the shore, he called for two volunteers to dare the task of cutting these key-logs away.

Such a task is the most perilous that a lumberman, in all his daring career, can be called upon to perform. So perilous is it that it is always left to volunteers. Dave Logan had some brilliant feats of jam-breaking to his credit, from the days before he was made a Boss; and now, when he called for volunteers, every unmarried man in camp responded, with the exception, of course, of Walley Johnson, whose limited vision unfitted him for such a venture. The Boss chose Bird Pigeon and Andy White, because they were not only “smart” axemen, but also adepts in the river-men’s games of “running logs.”

With a jaunty air the two young men spat on their hands, gripped their axes, and sprang out along the base of the jam. Every eye in camp was fixed upon them with a fearful interest as they plied their heavy blades. It was heroic, of a magnificence of valour seldom equalled on any field, the work of these two, chopping coolly out there in the daunting tumult, under that colossal front of death. Their duty was nothing less than to bring the toppling brow of the jam down upon them, yet cheat Fate at the last instant, if possible, by leaping to shore before the chaos quite overwhelmed them.

Suddenly, while the two key-logs were not yet half cut through, the trained eye of the Boss detected a settling near the top of the jam. His yell of warning tore through the clamour of the waters. At the instant came a vast grumbling, like underground thunder, not loud apparently, yet dulling all other sounds. The two choppers sprang wildly for shore, as the whole face of the jam seemed to crumble in a breath.

At this moment a scream of terror was heard–and every heart stopped. Some thirty yards or so upstream, and a dozen, perhaps, from shore, stood Rosy-Lilly, on a log. While none were observing her she had gleefully clambered out over the solid mass, looking for spruce-gums. But now, when the logs moved, she was so terror-stricken that she could not even try to get ashore. She just fell down upon her log, and clung to it, screaming.

A groan of horror went up. The awful grinding of the break-up was already under way. To every trained eye it was evident that there was no human possibility of reaching the child, much less of saving her. To attempt it would be such a madness as to jump into the hopper of a mill. The crowd surged to the edge–and sprang back as the nearest logs bounded up at them. Except Walley Johnson. He leaped wildly out upon the nearest logs, fell headforemost, and was dragged back, fighting furiously, by a dozen inexorable hands.

Just as Johnson went down, there arose a great bellowing cry of rage and anguish; then Red McWha’s big form shot past, leaping far out upon the logs. Over the sickening upheaval he bounded this way and that, with miraculous sure-footedness. He reached the pitching log whereon Rosy-Lilly still clung. He clutched her by the frock. He tucked her under one arm like a rag-baby. Then he turned, balancing himself for an instant, and came leaping back towards shore.

A great shout of wonder and joy went up–to be hushed in a second as a log reared high in McWha’s path and hurled him backwards. Right down into the whirl of the dreadful grist he sank. But with a strength that seemed more than human he recovered himself, climbed forth dripping, and came on again with those great, unerring leaps. This time there was no shout. The men waited with dry throats. They saw that his ruddy face had gone white as chalk. Within two feet of shore a log toward which he had jumped was jerked aside just before he reached it, and, turning in the air as he fell, so as to save the child, he came down across it on his side with stunning violence. As he fell the Boss and Brackett and two of the others sprang out to meet him. They reached him somehow, and covered with bruises which they did not feel, succeeded in dragging him, with his precious burden, up from the grinding hell to safety. When his feet touched solid ground he sank unconscious, but with his arm so securely gripped about the child that they had difficulty in loosing his hold.

Rosy-Lilly, when they picked her up, was quivering with terror, but unharmed. When she saw McWha stretched out upon the bank motionless, with his eyes shut and his white lips half open, she fought savagely to be put down. She ran and flung herself down beside her rescuer, caught his big white face between her tiny hands, and fell to kissing him. Presently McWha opened his eyes, and with a mighty effort rose upon one elbow. A look of embarrassment passed over his face as he glanced at the men standing about him. Then he looked down at Rosy-Lilly, grinned with a shamefaced tenderness, and pulled her gently towards him.

“I’m right–glad–ye–” he began with painful effort. But before he could complete the sentence his eyes changed, and he fell back with a clicking gasp.

Jimmy Brackett, heedless of her wailing protests, snatched up Rosy-Lilly, and carried her back to the camp.

Melindy and the Lynxes

The deep, slow-gathering snows of mid-February had buried away every stump in the pasture lot and muffled from sight all the zigzag fences of the little lonely clearing. The Settlement road was simply smoothed out of existence. The log cabin, with its low roof and one chimney, seemed half sunken in the snow which piled itself over the lower panes of its three tiny windows.

The log barn, and the lean-to, which served as wood-shed and wagon-house, showed little more than the black edges of their snow-covered roofs over the glittering and gently billowing white expanse.

In the middle of the yard the little well-house, shaped like the top of a “grandfather’s clock,” carried a thick, white, crusted cap, and was encircled with a streaky, irregular mass of ice, which had gradually accumulated almost up to the brim of the watering-trough. From the cabin door to the door of the barn, and over most of the yard space, but particularly in front of the sunward-facing lean-to, the snow was trodden down and littered with chips and straw.

Here in the mocking sunshine huddled four white sheep, while half a dozen hens and a red Shanghai cock scratched in the litter beside them. The low door of the barn was tightly closed to protect the cow and horse from the bitter cold–which the sheep, with their great fleeces, did not seem to mind.

Inside the cabin, where an old-fashioned, high-ovened kitchen stove, heated to the point where a dull red glow began to show itself in spots, kept the close air at summer temperature, a slim girl with fluffy, light hair and pale complexion stood by the table, vigorously mixing a batter of buckwheat flour for pancakes. Her slender young arms were streaked with flour, as was her forehead also, from her frequent efforts to brush her hair out of her eyes by quick upward dashes of her forearm.

On the other side of the stove, so close to it that her rugged face was reddened by the heat, sat a massive old woman in a heavy rocking-chair, knitting. She knitted impetuously, impatiently, as if resenting the employment of her vigorous old fingers upon so mild a task.

Through a clear space in one pane of the window beside her–a space where the heat within had triumphed over the frost without–she cast restless, keen eyes out across the yard to the place where the road, the one link between the cabin and the settlement, lay smothered from sight.

“It’s one week to-day, Melindy,” she announced in a voice of accusing indignation, “since there’s been a team got through; and it’s going to be another before they’ll get the road broke out!”

“Like as not, Granny,” responded the girl, beating the batter with an impatience that belied the cheerfulness of her tone. “But what does it matter, anyway? We’re all right here for a month!”

As she spoke, however, her eyes, too, gazed out wistfully over the buried road. She was wearying for the sound of bells and for a drive into the Settlement.

Meanwhile, from the edge of the woods on the other side of the cabin, hidden from the keen eyes within by the roofs of the barn and the shed, came two great, grey, catlike beasts, creeping belly to the snow.

Their broad, soft-padded paws were like snow shoes, bearing them up on the wind-packed surface. Their tufted ears stood straight up, alert for any unwonted sound. Their absurd stub tails, not four inches long, and looking as if they had been bitten off, twitched with eagerness. Their big round eyes, of a pale greenish yellow, and with the pupils narrowed to upright, threadlike black slits by the blinding glare, glanced warily from side to side with every step they took.

The lynxes had the keenest dislike to crossing the open pasture in this broad daylight, but they had been driven by hunger to the point where the customs and cautions of their wary kind are recklessly thrown aside. Hunger had driven the pair to hunt together, in the hope of together pulling down game too powerful for one to master alone. Hunger had overcome their savage aversion to the neighbourhood of man, and brought them out in the dark of night to prowl about the barn and sniff longingly the warm smell of the sheep, steaming through the cracks of the clumsy door.

Watching from under the snow-draped branches, they had observed that only in the daytime were the sheep let out from their safe shelter behind the clumsy door. And now, forgetting everything but the fierce pangs that urged them, the two savage beasts came straight down the rolling slope of the pasture towards the barn.

A few minutes later there came from the yard a wild screeching and cackling of the hens, followed by a trampling rush and agonized bleating. The old woman half rose from her chair, but sank back instantly, her face creased with a spasm of pain, for she was crippled by rheumatism. The girl dropped her big wooden spoon on the floor and rushed to the window that looked out upon the yard. Her pale face went paler with horror, then flushed with wrath and pity; and a fierce light flashed into her wide blue eyes.

“It’s lynxes!” she cried, snatching up the wooden spoon and darting for the door. “And they’ve got one of the sheep! Oh, oh, they’re tearing it!”

“Melindy!” shouted the old woman, in a voice of strident command–such a compelling voice that the girl stopped short in spite of herself. “Drop that fool spoon and get the gun!”

The girl dropped the spoon as if it had burned her fingers, and looked irresolutely at the big duck-gun hanging on the log wall. “I can’t fire it!” she exclaimed, shaking her head. “I’d be scared to death of it!”

But even as the words left her mouth, there came another outburst of trampling and frantic clamour from the yard. She snatched up the little, long-handled axe which leaned beside the door-post, threw the door wide open, and with a pitying cry of “Oh! oh!” flew forth to the rescue of her beloved sheep.

“Did you ever see the like of that?” muttered the old woman, her harsh face working with excitement and high approbation. “Scairt to death of a gun–and goes out to fight lynxes all by herself!”

And with painful effort she began hitching herself and the big chair across the floor, seeking a position where she could both reach the gun and command a view through the wide-open door.

When Melindy, her heart aflame with pity for the helpless ewes, rushed out into the yard, she saw one woolly victim down, kicking silently on the bloodstained snow, while a big lynx, crouched upon its body, turned upon her a pair of pale eyes that blazed with fury at the interruption to his feast.

The other sheep were foundered helplessly in the deep snow back of the well–except one. This one, which had evidently been headed off from the flock, and driven round to the near side of the watering-trough before its savage enemy overtook it, was not half a dozen paces from the cabin door. It was just stumbling forward upon its nose, with a despairing baa-a-a! while the second and larger lynx, clinging upon its back, clutched hungrily for its throat through the thick, protecting wool.

On ordinary occasions the girl was as timid as her small, pale face and gentle blue eyes made her look. At this crisis, however, a sort of fury of compassion swept all fear from her heart.

Like the swoop of some strange bird, her skirts streaming behind her, she flung herself upon the great cat, and aimed a lightning blow at his head with her axe. In her frail grip the axe turned, so that the brute caught the flat of it instead of the edge.

Half-stunned, he lost his hold and fell with a startled pfiff on the snow, while his victim, bleeding, but not mortally hurt, ran bleating towards the rest of the flock, where they floundered, stupidly helpless, in three feet of soft snow.

The next moment the baffled lynx recovered himself, and faced the girl with so menacing a snarl that she hesitated to follow up her advantage, but paused, holding the axe in readiness to repel attack.

For a few seconds they faced each other so, the girl and the beast. Then the pale, beast eyes shifted under the steady, dominating gaze of the blue human ones; and at last, with a spitting growl, which ended in a hoarse screech of rage, the big cat bounded aside and whisked behind the well-house. The next moment it was again among the sheep, where they huddled incapable of a struggle.

Again the girl sprang to the rescue; and now, because of that one flash of fear which had deprived her of her first advantage, her avenging wrath was fiercer and more resolute than before. This time, as she darted upon the enemy, she gave an involuntary cry of rage, piercing and unnatural. At this unexpected sound the lynx, desperate though he was with rage and hunger, lost his courage.

Seeing the girl towering almost over him, he doubled back with a mighty leap, just avoiding the vengeful sweep of the axe, and darted back to the front of the shed, where his mate was now ravenously feasting on her easy prey.

Although the first victim was now past all suffering, being no more a motive for heroism than so much mutton, the girl’s blood was too hot with triumphant indignation to let her think of such an unimportant point as that. She was victor. She had outfaced and routed the foe. She had saved one victim. She would avenge the other.

With the high audacity of those who have overcome fear, she now, with a hysterical cry of menace, ran at the two lynxes, to drive them from their prey.

The situation which she now confronted, however, was altogether changed from what had gone before. The two lynxes were together, strong in that alliance which they had formed for purpose of battle. They were fairly mad with famine–or, indeed, they would never have ventured on the perilous domains of man.

Moreover, they were in possession of what they held to be their lawful prey–a position in defence of which all the hunting tribes of the wild will fight against almost any odds. As they saw their strange adversary approaching, the hair stood straight up along their backs, their little tails puffed to bottle brushes, their ears lay flat back on their heads, and they screeched defiance in harsh unison. Then, as if by one impulse, they turned from their prey and crept stealthily towards her.

They did not like that steady light in her blue eyes, but they felt by some instinct that she was young and unstable of nerve. At this unexpected move on their part the girl stopped short, suddenly undecided whether to fight or flee.

At once the lynxes stopped also, and crouched flat, tensely watching, their claws dug deep into the hard-trodden snow so as to give them purchase for an instant, powerful spring in any direction.

In the meantime, however, the crippled old woman within doors had not been idle. Great of spirit, and still mighty of sinew for all her ailment, she had managed to work the weight of the heavy chair and her own solid bulk all the way across the cabin floor. Being straight in front of the door, she had seen almost all that happened; and her brave old berserk heart was bursting with pride in the courage of this frail child, whom she had hitherto regarded with a kind of affectionate scorn.

The Griffises of Nackawick and Little River had always been sizable men, men of sinew and bulk, and women tall and ruddy; and this small, blue-eyed girl had seemed to her, in a way, to wrong the stock. But she was quick to understand that the stature of the spirit is what counts most of all.

Now, in this moment of breathless suspense, when she saw Melindy and the two great beasts thus holding each other eye to eye in a life and death struggle of wills, her heart was convulsed with a wild fear. In the spasm of it she succeeded in lifting herself almost erect, and so gained possession of the big duck-gun, which her son Jake, now away in the lumber woods, always kept loaded and ready for use. As she cocked it and settled back into her chair, she called in a piercing voice–

“Don’t stir one step, Melindy! I’m going to shoot!”

The girl never stirred a muscle, although she turned pale with terror of the loud noise which was about to shock her ears. The two lynxes, however, turned their heads, and fixed the pale glare of their eyes upon the figure seated in the doorway.

The next moment came a spurt of red flame, a belch of smoke, a tremendous report that seemed as if it must have shattered every pane of glass in the cabin windows. The bigger of the two lynxes turned straight over backward and lay without a quiver, smashed by the heavy charge of buckshot with which Jake had loaded the gun. The other, grazed by a scattering pellet, sprang into the air with a screech, then turned and ran for her life across the snow, stretching out like a terrified cat.

With a proud smile the old woman stood the smoking gun against the wall and straightened her cap. For perhaps half a minute Melindy stood rigid, staring at the dead lynx. Then, dropping her axe, she fled to the cabin, flung herself down with her face in her grandmother’s lap, and broke into a storm of sobs.

The old woman gazed down upon her with some surprise, and stroked the fair, fluffy head lovingly as she murmured: “There, there! There’s nothing to take on about! Though you be such a little mite of a towhead, you’ve got the grit, you’ve got the grit, Melindy Griffis. It’s proud of you I am, and it’s proud your father’ll be when I tell him about it.”

Then, as the girl’s weeping continued, and her slender shoulders continued to twist with her sobs, the rugged old face that bent above her grew tenderly solicitous.

“There, there!” she murmured again. “’Tain’t good for you to take on so, deary. Hadn’t you better finish beating up the pancakes before the batter spiles?”

Thus potently adjured, although she knew as well as her grandmother that there was no immediate danger of the batter spoiling, the girl got up, dashed the back of her hand across her eyes with a little laugh, closed the door, got out another spoon from the table drawer, and cheerfully resumed her interrupted task of mixing pancakes. And the sheep, having slowly extricated themselves from the deep snow behind the well-house, huddled together, with heads down, in the middle of the yard, fearfully eyeing the limp body which lay before the shed.

Mrs. Gammit’s Pig

“I’ve come to borry yer gun!” said Mrs. Gammit, appearing suddenly, a self-reliant figure, at the open door of the barn where Joe Barron sat mending his harness. She wore a short cotton homespun petticoat and a dingy waist; while a limp pink cotton sunbonnet, pushed far back from her perspiring forehead, released unmanageable tufts of her stiff, iron-grey hair.

“What be you awantin’ of a gun, Mrs. Gammit?” inquired the backwoodsman, looking up without surprise. He had not seen Mrs. Gammit, to be sure, for three months; but he had known all the time that she was there, on the other side of the ridge, one of his nearest neighbours, and not more than seven or eight miles away as the crow flies.

“It’s the bears!” she explained. “They do be gittin’ jest a leetle mite too sassy, down to my place. There ain’t no livin’ with ’em. They come rootin’ round in the garden, nights. An’ they’ve et up the white top-knot hen, with the whole settin’ of eggs, that was to hev’ hatched out next Monday. An’ they’ve took the duck. An’ last night they come after the pig.”

“They didn’t git him, did they?” inquired Joe Barron sympathetically.

“No, siree!” responded Mrs. Gammit with decision. “An’ they ain’t agoin’ to! They scairt him though, snuffin’ round outside the pen, trying to find the way in.–I’ve hearn tell they was powerful fond of pork.–He set up sich a squealin’ it woke me; an’ I yelled at ’em out of the winder. I seen one big black chap lopin’ off behind the barn. I hadn’t nothin’ but the broom fer a weapon, so he got away from me. I’ll git him to-night, though, I reckon, if I kin have the loan of your gun.”

“Sartain,” assented the woodsman, laying down the breech-strap he was mending. “Did you ever fire a gun?” he inquired suddenly, as he was starting across the yard to fetch the weapon from his cabin.

“I can’t rightly say I hev’,” answered Mrs. Gammit, with a slight note of scorn in her voice. “But from the kind of men I’ve seen as kin, I reckon it ain’t no great trick to larn.”

Joe Barron laughed, and went for the weapon. He had plenty of confidence in his visitor’s ability to look out for herself, and felt reasonably sure that the bears would be sorry for having presumed upon her unprotected state. When he returned with the gun–an old, muzzle-loading duck-gun, with a huge bore–she accepted it with careless ease and held it as if it were a broom. But when he offered her the powder-horn and a little bag of buckshot, she hesitated.

“What be them for?” she inquired.

Joe Barren looked serious.

“Mrs. Gammit,” said he, “I know you kin do most anything a man kin do–an’ do it better, maybe! A woman like you don’t have to apologize for nothin’. But you was not brung up in the woods, an’ you can’t expect to know all about a gun jest by heftin’ it. Folks that’s been brung up in town, like you, have to be told how to handle a gun. This here gun ain’t loaded. And them ’ere’s the powder an’ buckshot to load her with. An’ here’s caps,” he added, producing a small, brown tin box of percussion caps from his trousers pocket.

Mrs. Gammit felt abashed at her ignorance, but gratified, at the same time, by the reproach of metropolitanism. This implication of town-bred incompetency was most flattering to the seven frame houses and one corner store of Burd Settlement, whence she hailed.

“I reckon you’d better show me how to load the thing, Mr. Barron,” she agreed quite humbly. And her keen grey eyes took in every detail, as the woodsman rammed home the powder hard, wadded down the charge of buckshot lightly, and pointed out where she must put the percussion cap when she should be ready to call upon the weapon for its services.

“Then,” said he in conclusion, as he lifted the gun to his shoulder and squinted along the barrel, “of course you know all the rest. Jest shet one eye, an’ git the bead on him fair, an’ let him have it–a leetle back of the fore-shoulder, fer choice! An’ that b’ar ain’t agoin’ to worry about no more pork, nor garden sass. An’ recollect, Mrs. Gammit, at this time of year, when he’s fat on blueberries, he’ll make right prime pork himself, ef he ain’t too old and rank.”

As Mrs. Gammit strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun–still carrying it as if it were a broom–she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself–and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time to indulge in the luxury of a husband; but the honorary title of “Mrs.” had early been conferred upon her, in recognition of her abundant and confident personality and her all-round capacity for taking care of herself. To have called her “Miss” would have been an insult to the fitness of things. When, at the age of sixty, she inherited from an only, and strictly bachelor, brother a little farm in the heart of the wilderness, some forty miles in from the Settlement, no one doubted her ability to fill the rôle of backwoodsman and pioneer. It was vaguely felt that if the backwoods and Mrs. Gammit should fail to agree on any important point, so much the worse for the backwoods.