by Margi Preus
Before I could think of what to do about the holes, the brigade came to a place where the waterway turned into roiling rapids. Roaring and growling and foaming, the river tumbled over rocks and boulders.
“Now what do we do?” Jean Luc asked.
“We must portage,” said Jean Gentille. “That is when we carry the canoe and our cargo over land to where the water, she is calm again.”
The voyageurs paddled to shore, jumped out of their canoes, and began unloading all the gear. It was a scene of such hustle and bustle as to make you want to turn a few somersaults just to fit in. I leapt out of the canoe, executed a few of those, and threw in a few flips for good measure.
But I had to scamper out of the way as Jean Claude dogtrotted by me carrying not one, but two pièces on his back, secured by a strap around his forehead.
After Jean Claude came Jean Jacques, then Jean Luc, and finally Jean Henri, who was carrying two heavy bundles and a keg on top! I trotted after them as they jogged down the portage trail.
But after a while it seemed that two of the loads were getting a little bit lighter. With each step, somebody was losing something.
A little trail of beads.
A little trail of peas.
“Jean Luc, you are so careless. Look what you have done,” Jean Henri said.
“What have I done?” whimpered Jean Luc.
“Look at the ground,” Jean Henri said.
Jean Luc saw the trail of beads. “I did nothing! It wasn’t me! Anyway, your bundle is doing the same thing.”
Jean Henri turned around to see a little trail of peas. He shrugged off his load and inspected the bundles. “Why, there are teeth marks here,” he cried. “Tiny teeth marks! And a tiny hole. It looks as if a mouse or a squir—” He stopped himself mid-sentence, and glared at me.
I turned a darker shade of red.
“That little troublemaker!” Jean Henri shouted.
“After him!” the others cried. Throwing down their loads, they rushed at me.
You can be sure I disappeared up the first tree I saw. Up and up and up, until I reached the top. From there, I flung myself onto another tree and another, all the while proclaiming my innocence down at them. Well, not my innocence, but I tried to explain that I hadn’t intended to cause any harm. But the voyageurs, they paid no attention.
Then here came the canoe, carried by Jean Méchant, Jean Gentille, Jean Louis, and Jean Paul. Only four men to carry that big canoe! Such is the miracle of birch bark. They set it down to take a rest and to see what the commotion was all about.
“Come down, Le Rouge!” Jean Gentille called up the tree. “No harm done. I shall stitch up the holes with my needle and thread.”
I peeked through the branches at the kind Jean Gentille, and thought, Let it never be said that I am a quitter. So, as the voyageurs picked up the canoe and their cargo again, I quietly climbed down the tree and followed at a respectful distance. Then, when no one was looking, I sneaked into Jean Gentille’s vest pocket.
And so I remained for the entire trip up the Ottawa River and its many rapids.
At each new set of rapids, the guide of the lead canoe would decide how it should be negotiated.
Sometimes we paddled up the rapids—a lot of hard paddling (I assume).
Sometimes everybody hopped out except Jean Gentille in the bow and Jean Méchant and one other voyageur in the stern. These three used long poles while the rest of the crew used a rope to pull the canoe and all its cargo—carefully! carefully!—up the churning river. Everybody but me.
My job, as I saw it, was to avoid falling out of Jean Gentille’s pocket into the foaming water.
It was only when the rapids were too difficult or too dangerous to negotiate that we would portage.
“I feel bad that I am not helping to carry anything,” I squeaked to Jean Gentille from his pocket, as he trotted down a portage trail. “But then, I am hardly anything to carry. Isn’t that so, Jean Gentille?”
There was only a grunt for an answer.
SOME DIFFICULT TRUTHS ARE ENCOUNTERED
Of course this trip up the Ottawa River to where it joined the Mattawa River took many days. And the trip up the Mattawa River took many more days. Many of those days we were roused before dawn—sometimes well before dawn, perhaps three or four o’clock in the morning, maybe even two o’clock. I wouldn’t know, I am a squirrel—do you think I tell time?
The reason we struck off so early? La vieille, she was calmer then. Who is la vieille? The old woman—which is what we called the wind.
Even more horrifying than rising in the middle of the night to paddle, we had to do it without eating breakfast! Some may consider this inhumane. I consider it insquirrele.
But there was paddling and portaging to be done before we could eat. And what was breakfast when we finally ate it three hours after our day had begun? The same thing we had for dinner, left to cook all night over the embers: a thick soup of split peas or dried corn and salt pork. Two times a day, breakfast and dinner.
Of lunch, we shall not speak. Because there wasn’t any.
* * *
Every night, our brigade pitched camp on the shores of wherever we were. The older men knew the good spots from many previous trips.
The voyageurs unloaded the canoes, carrying all the cargo onto dry ground. They carried the canoes onto the beach and tipped them over to serve as shelter from rain, wind, and dew when they slept.
For protection from the black flies and mosquitoes, they applied to their skin a mix of bear fat and skunk urine. This also served as a repellant to me. I usually made a little nest well away from the aromatic crew.
But before sleep, there was much for each crew member to do.
Jean Henri went out and gathered firewood. He was so strong he could break up big branches with his bare hands.
Jean Jacques sang while he got a fire going.
Jean Paul dug out the cook pots and food from one of the parcels while Jean Louis mixed up flour and water to make bannock, a kind of fried bread.
Jean Méchant barked orders at Jean Luc and Jean Claude. “You two fix the leaks in the canoe.”
“How do we do that?” Jean Luc asked.
Jean Méchant smacked his forehead with his hand. “Stitch up the cracks in the canoe with spruce roots,” he said between his teeth, “and apply pitch to the seams.”
Jean Gentille had his nose in a book, reading. He loved to read. He carried an extra bundle of his own stuffed with books. Only books! And every chance he got, he read. Philosophy. Poetry. Plays. He knew all manner of wonderful things, too, although the other voyageurs didn’t seem to appreciate it.
WE ARE CAMPED AT TALON FALLS
My crew was camped with our brigade at Talon Falls and there was much merriment. The reason? Up until now, on first the Ottawa, then the Mattawa, we had been going—how shall I say?—uphill. Or that’s how it must have felt to paddle against the current.
But here was where the water changed her mind and decided to go the other direction. Which happened to be the direction we were going. Instead of paddling up the river, our canoes would run right down it.
Jean Jacques was leading everyone in singing “Youpe, youpe sur la rivière” (Hooray, hooray on the river). Everyone but Jean Gentille, who, as usual, was absorbed in his reading.
Everyone was in such a fine mood that nobody seemed to mind that I had climbed out of Jean Gentille’s pocket and helped myself to some pea soup.
“Did you know,” Jean Gentille said, as Jean Louis was dishing up the supper, “there is a fellow named Isaac Newton who has a theory that there is a force on earth called ‘gravity’ and we are all subject to its laws?”
“That is why I like to be out here in the wilderness,” Jean Méchant said, “where I am subject to no laws at all.”
“It says in this book,” Je
an Gentille continued, “that gravity is most commonly experienced as the agent that gives weight to objects. Judging by the weight of the cargo we carry across the portages, I believe we are indeed subject to the law of this ‘gravity.’ ”
“I repeat that out here in the wilderness I am not subject to the laws of any government or any gravity,” Jean Méchant asserted again. “What do the rest of you say?”
“Well, I don’t know….,” Jean Luc said. “Those bundles are very heavy. Something must make them so.”
“What makes them heavy is all the things inside,” Jean Méchant said. “If you take the things out, then they are no longer heavy.”
“That is true,” the other voyageurs agreed.
“I agree with this Newton fellow,” I chimed in. “For I have always wondered what causes objects to fall. Pinecones, for instance.”
“Look at that little squirrel with soup on his whiskers,” Jean Méchant muttered. “Chattering away about nothing.”
Nothing? Clearly, he did not understand. Perhaps a demonstration would clarify. I scampered a short way up a pine tree and said, “If I pluck a cone off a tree and let go, what happens? Does it float? No! It falls!” I dropped the cone. It landed on Jean Jacques’s head.
“Ouch!” he yelped, squinting up at me.
“Something must be pulling on the pinecone to make it fall.” I demonstrated with another cone. This one landed with a plop! in Jean Luc’s soup.
Jean Luc shook his fist at me.
“What is pulling on it?” I asked. “The earth! The earth’s gravity is pulling on it! That is what gives things weight.” I let another cone go. This one splatted with a whack! right into Jean Méchant’s upturned face.
He leapt up, mad as a hornet. “What is the matter with that pest? Why is he still with us?”
The others crowded around.
“He rides, but he doesn’t paddle!” said Jean Paul.
“He eats, but he doesn’t cook!” said Jean Louis.
“At the portages has he ever carried anything? Is it possible that he, himself, has been carried?” asked Jean Henri, staring pointedly at Jean Gentille.
“He has a terrible singing voice,” Jean Jacques said, then did a very bad imitation of me by simply trilling his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Rrr. Rrr. Rrr.” Really, it sounded nothing like me.
“He has to go,” Jean Méchant grumbled.
“Mais non,” Jean Gentille said. “He is a clever fellow. And full of enthusiasm. He showed us the way when we were lost. He doesn’t weigh much. If you are worried about what he eats, he can have a portion of my food.”
Jean Gentille was the best friend any voyageur could ever have and I loved him with each of the eight ounces of my being.
THE BERRY PICKING IS GOOD ON LAKE NIPISSING
How might I be useful? I wondered.
I considered it while pacing along the gunwales, while aimlessly somersaulting around the canoe, while singing voyageur songs at the top of my lungs. And, while absentmindedly gnawing on a leather strap, I realized I had very good teeth. Twigs, bark, rope, leather…you name it, I could chew through it.
And then, feeling a little rumble in my tummy, I had another thought. I was good at finding seeds, nuts, and berries.
As soon as we made camp on Lake Nipissing, I went out and picked a lot of strawberries.
When I got back to the camp, what did I hear but…
“Jean Gentille,” Jean Méchant said. “We have discussed this and have decided that the little red one will have to go.”
“But!” I interrupted. “I have gone out and picked strawberries. Voila!” I proclaimed, holding out my paws full of…well, there had been strawberries in those paws. Perhaps all the berries had not made it back to camp. In fact, perhaps none of them had. It had been a lot of picking! I got very hungry doing all that work.
“The squirrel has not earned a place in the canoe,” said Jean Jacques.
“He cannot be a voyageur if he doesn’t do anything that a voyageur does,” Jean Henri put in.
“Yes, he will have to go,” said Jean Claude.
“I believe the best way for him to go is in a ragoût,” finished Jean Louis.
“A ragoût?” I squeaked. “What is that?”
The others did not hear me. They were snorting with laughter.
Only Jean Gentille did not laugh. “A squirrel stew?” he said, and looked very, very sad.
* * *
That night, curled up in Jean Gentille’s pocket, I could not sleep.
I heard the lonely wolves yip and wail.
I heard the loons singing their sad songs to each other, from lakes far apart.
And I heard the crew discussing my fate:
Jean Louis would chase me.
Jean Claude would grab me.
Jean Méchant would chop off—ah, me—my head!
They discussed how to divvy up my estate:
My fur coat would go to Jean Méchant to line his moccasins.
My meat would go to Jean Louis for stew.
My bones would go to Jean Luc for sewing needles, and my sinews to Jean Jacques for guitar strings.
Alas, I was not long for this world.
Perhaps I should run away. It would be a hard, sad, and lonely life for me. I had only ever wanted to be a voyageur. But what is a voyageur without paddling mates? What is a voyageur without a canoe?
How I would miss the feel of the wind in my fur! No longer would I see the bright rings the jumping fish made or hear the slap of the beaver’s tail—at least not from the bow of a voyageur canoe.
Still, I could not ask my friend to protect me any longer.
I pondered all of this until we reached the French River where I made up my mind. I would run away.
THERE IS SOME DANGER ON THE FRENCH RIVER
In the morning, while the voyageurs were loading the canoes, I tiptoed away from the camp.
I followed the shoreline until I came to a mossy bank that lined the swiftly flowing river. There I plunked myself on a rock, head in paws, to think about where I should go next. Should I go west on my own or should I try to make my way back to Montreal? I was terribly homesick!
Just then, I saw the brigade coming down the foaming river, wending their way around boulders in the rapids. One by one, the canoes went by.
Over the roar of the water, I heard the shouts of the voyageurs. Were they calling me to come back and jump into the stewpot? Ho ho! That was not going to happen!
But, sacrebleu! The last canoe was upside down! My canoe! Red caps bobbed up and down as the voyageurs were swept downstream. There they went:
Jean Paul…
Jean Luc…
Jean Henri…
Jean Jacques…
Jean Louis…
Jean Claude…
Jean Méchant…
Mon Dieu! My friends were in danger. And where was Jean Gentille? What if…I dared not think of it!
There he was, swirling and spinning, twisting and twirling in the foamy river. Then—oh, no!—he disappeared under the water!
I bounded up and over fallen logs, along branches, as fast as I could go, trying to catch up to Jean Gentille.
His head popped up, and oh my! He’d lost his cap and his head was as hairless as a baby bird. I leapt out onto a boulder in the river.
“Grab my tail!” I chirred.
But before he could reach me, Jean Gentille was swept under again. Down the river he rushed, bobbing up and down in the current.
I flitted and flew through the cedars. Just as Jean Gentille’s head came up again, I scampered out on an overhanging bough.
“Take my paw!” I squeaked, but once again he disappeared under the water.
Where was he? Where was my friend? I waited. I watched. I trembled.
The other canoes of our brigade had stopped and the men were snagging our gear and parcels out of the water, along with my voyageurs and our canoe. My wet crew sat on the shore in their soggy shirts and dragging sashes and dripping beards. Some of the others had lost their caps in the river too.
The other men started to lay out our wet cargo to dry. In addition to the food we had to carry for ourselves—split peas, dried corn, and salt pork—there were wool blankets and bolts of scarlet cloth, mirrors, cooking pots and utensils, silver earbobs and trinkets, twists of tobacco, bags of flour, and things that made my fur stand on end: axes and knives, guns and ammunition, and most sinister of all…animal traps.
What do they do with all of these things? Especially those (shudder) traps?
I couldn’t wonder for long, for there! Sitting by the side of the river without his cap! Jean Gentille, shivering and wet, rubbing his hands together, his teeth chattering. He must have been very cold, especially with his head so bald and bare.
But there was a red cap, swirling along in the water, drifting close to shore. Jean Gentille reached down to snag it but another hand snatched it up before he could get to it. It was Jean Méchant! He wrung the hat out and plunked it on his own head.
Perhaps there was one small thing I could do to help Jean Gentille. Even though I knew that at any moment I might be grabbed and thrown into the stewpot, if there was something I could do for him, I wanted to do it.
I climbed up his pant leg and from there up his sleeve onto his shoulder. And from his shoulder onto his head. There I tenderly curled myself into a hat. I would be the warmest of warm fur hats for my cold friend.
From then on, down all the rapids of the French River, and along the northern channel of Lake Huron, many days’ worth of travel, I rode proudly upon Jean Gentille’s head. The others all agreed that Jean Gentille’s poor bald head needed a hat, so there I stayed. On sunny days I shielded him from the sun. I protected his head from rain and sleet. On windy days I clung tight, and I vowed that when the cold snows came I would keep his ears warm. I’d be his hat for as long as he liked, for we were the best of friends.
