by John Buchan
He read the story after breakfast on the Sunday morning, and was so excited that he had to skip about the verandah of the camp. It promised to be a blistering hot day, and since there was nothing better to do he decided to go to church. Donald’s family was latitudinarian in their devotions. At home they were Presbyterian, but at Bellefleurs his father on Sunday used to read the English Prayer Book, and quite often Donald accompanied the Martel family to the little white church with its silvered spire, where Father Laflamme ministered. So that day he joined Simone and Aristide at Mass and sat reverently through a service of which he comprehended not one word, sniffing the scent of incense with a feeling that he was doing something rather adventurous. And all the time his heart within him was exulting over Thermopylae.
Wandering about after luncheon he found Father Laflamme basking in a chair in front of the presbytery and reading his breviary. Donald flung himself on the grass beside him, for Father Laflamme was good company whether he chose to talk or not. By and by the priest closed his book.
“Idle, Donald? What are your plans today?”
“None. Oh yes! I am going up the river with Negog this evening.”
“Not to fish, I hope. Your father doesn’t allow fishing on Sunday.”
“‘Course not, but I want to look at the water. There’s a big fish in Baptiste’s Pool. Negog says I may have a try for him to-morrow.”
“Until then you have nothing to do? Have you no book?”
“Yes. I was reading a book this morning. About the Greeks. I found the best story I’ve ever read — about the Spartan fellows that stuck up the Persians at a place called Thermopeily.”
“You haven’t got it right. It’s Thermopylae. Yes, that’s a pretty good story. There are many others like it, you know — a man, or a handful of men sacrificing their lives to save their country. We have a fine Canadian one. Did you ever hear about Dollard — Adam Dollard — or Daulac, as some call him?”
Donald had not.
“Some day, if you remind me, I’ll tell you the whole story, for it’s a long one. But here’s the gist of it. It happened in May in the year 1660, when the French in Canada were hanging on by their eyelids. There were only a few thousands of them, and their enemies, the Iroquois, were mustering on all sides for an attack which was to wipe them out for good. That was before the King of France had sent any soldiers. The Indian plan was for a big army to go down the Ottawa and others to go down the Richelieu, while the forces which had devastated the Isle of Orleans waited in the east. So Quebec and Montreal would be enclosed on all sides.
“Well, the captain of the guard at Montreal was a young French soldier of twenty-five, Dollard, the Sieur des Ormeaux in France. He concluded that attack was the best kind of defence, so he got permission from the Governor, Maisonneuve, to go up the Ottawa river to a place called the Long Sault, where the rapids are. His plan was to attack the Iroquois as they came down the stream at a spot where they would be at a disadvantage. Sixteen young Frenchmen joined him, all under thirty, and like Crusaders, before they set out they confessed and received the Sacrament. They took an oath never to ask quarter.
“They reached the Long Sault in time and built a fort with palisades. Soon the Iroquois appeared and were greeted by a deadly volley. The Indians disembarked in a fury, built a fort of their own, and settled down to destroy Dollard, who had been joined by a few Hurons and Algonquins. They fought for five days, while the Frenchmen suffered desperately from thirst and hunger. On the fifth day came the main attack, which was beaten off. But it could be only a question of time. In the end the savages rushed the place and Dollard died and all his little band. But he did not die in vain. The Iroquois had lost heavily and sat down to think. If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins and one Huron, they argued, could hold up seven hundred of their best warriors for more than a week behind a wooden palisade, what would happen if some hundreds of Frenchmen defended themselves behind walls of stone? The invaders melted away into the woods and Canada was saved.”
Donald drew a long breath.
“Gosh!” he said. “That was as good as Thermopylae.”
Father Laflamme smiled.
“It’s a fine story. But I think I know a finer. After all, Dollard was a professional soldier. And he longed to be a martyr. He came to Canada to die — otherwise he would have gone to fall in the battles against the Turks. But there was once a Canadian who did the same kind of thing, and he had no hankerings after martyrdom. Did you ever hear of Cadieux?”
Donald shook his head.
“Cadieux — Cadieux de Courville.” Father Laflamme repeated the name almost lovingly. “I have a peculiar liking for Cadieux. There wasn’t much of the saint about him, and he certainly didn’t want to be a martyr. He was a coureur de bois — you know about them — the adventurers who went to the back of beyond seeking furs and in their wanderings discovered Canada. Some of them were no better than outlaws and made any amount of trouble with the Indians, but most were decent fellows who preferred travelling the woods to working at a trade or driving a plough. Cadieux was the leader of his band of coureurs. There was nothing about woodcraft he did not know; he could follow a trail like an Indian, and no weather could stop him — a sort of Ulysses — a man of many shifts and devices. He was always laughing and he was always singing. Sometimes the songs would be the hymns of his childhood, like Mon petit Jésus, bonjour; but more often they were love songs like La Rose Blanche; or nursery rhymes out of France, like Compagnons de la Marjolaine or Trois petites Dorion; or wild songs of the woods, like Tenaouich’ Tenaga. He was a poet, too, on his own account, and made at least one song which can never be forgotten.
“He was pious, this Cadieux, in his own way, though he did not go to church very often, since he lived mostly where there were no churches. He admired greatly the stout-hearted priest Dollier de Casson, who had been a cavalry officer under Turenne and could lay out any Indian brave with a blow of his fist, and in trouble he prayed much to St. Anthony of Padua, who was his favourite saint. When he came back to Montreal from his winter’s hunting he did not lie drunk, like many coureurs, until he had spent the price of his beaver skins or fracas about naked with a brandy keg under his arm. No, he would dance with the young girls and tell wonderful tales to the boys, and would play with the children. A bon enfant was this Cadieux, and all eyes followed him affectionately when he marched into town, with his fringed leggings, and embroidered shirt, and ceinture flechée, and an eagle plume in his beaded hat. There was no better-loved youth in all Canada.”
Father Laflamme paused.
“I cannot tell you the story now, for I must go to the village to see Grandmother Gauthier, who is sick.”
“But please tell me what happened to him,” Donald begged.
“He died very nobly. He and his companions were returning from the West down the Ottawa river in the spring with a heavy load of furs. They fell in with a big band of Iroquois who had destroyed a French settlement on Lake Huron, and were now beating the forest for French hunters. This was after the time of Dollard, and Canada was no longer in danger of an Iroquois invasion, but there was always a risk to lonely settlements and isolated trappers and traders. Well, the coureurs had been able to slip through the Iroquois’ net, but they were hotly pursued, and at Calumet island in the Ottawa the crisis came. If they could pass the rapids there they could reach the French settlements and safety. Cadieux had delayed the pursuit, but at the Calumet rapids the Indians were close on him and they must be stopped if his men were to pass. Alone he held up the enemy, and slew so many that the Iroquois retreated. But he got his death wound. When his comrades came back to look for him they found that he had dug his grave and was lying dead in it. Beside him lay a song which he had written on birch-bark. We still sing that swan song of the dead Cadieux. It begins:
‘Petit rocher de la haute montagne
Je viens ici finir cette campagne.’”
Father Laflamme crooned the verse in his deep voice to a sad, eeri
e tune, which reminded Donald of the old songs of the Hebrides which his mother sometimes sang.
For the rest of the afternoon the melody rang in his head. He had not caught any of the lines, but the air was firm in his memory. He hummed it at tea-time, and he was still humming it when Negog and he strolled up the river to Baptiste’s Pool. One queer thing happened. He set Negog humming it. Now an Indian does not sing; he howls. After his childhood there seems to be no tunefulness in his voice. But Negog was now making odd sounds just above his breath, and if there was little music in them they had the rhythm of Father Laflamme’s song.
Beyond doubt there were salmon in Baptiste’s Pool. One great fellow broke water near the other bank, and in the rapids at the top Donald could see moving fish. To-morrow he decided he would have a try for them with his little greenheart trout-rod, and Heaven be kind to him if he hooked one.
But somehow the prospect did not greatly excite him. His head was still full of the stories of the day: Thermopylae, Dollard, and above all Cadieux. Cadieux’s song, melancholy as a lost wind, sighed in his ears. Negog had not made a fire. He was sitting on a tussock of grass smoking his pipe and watching the boy as he wandered by the shingle.
Presently Donald came to a spit of rock which ran far out into the pool. Here the current of the Manitou was close to the farther shore, and between it and him was a stretch of still water, golden in the sunset. As Donald looked into the depths a picture shaped itself.
* * * *
He was in the air, looking down from a great height on a wide landscape. It was one which he seemed to know, and yet did not know, for though the general lines of it were familiar the details were strange.
There could be no mistake about Quebec. The passing of time had not changed the line of the Laurentians in the north, the bold bluff of Cap Diamond or the shining waters which cradled the Isle of Orleans. Only there was less cultivated land in the St. Charles valley, and the forest came closer to the shore. It was a shabby little town. There was a huddle of houses at the water’s brink, and above on the peninsula, close to the edge of the rock, was a square fort, whose guns commanded the lower town and the river narrows. One side of the fort was the Château of St. Louis, the Governor’s residence, an ugly building of wood, with the fleur de lys drooping from the flag-pole, and near it a tall new church, and the stone walls of the Ursuline Convent, the Hôtel Dieu, and Bishop Laval’s Seminary. On the highest point of land, as a warning to evildoers, stood a great gibbet with the bones of a dead felon in a cage.
Donald’s viewpoint seemed at one moment to be high in the air, giving him a wide prospect, and at another close to the ground. The St. Lawrence unveiled itself as he moved west. The woods crowded down to the water, but at Three Rivers there was a cluster of dwellings and a church inside a palisade. After that little farms began to dot the riverside, strung out like the beads in a ragged rosary — a shingled house and barn, a few fields of charred stumps with crops sown between, and then the mat of the forest. He had a clearer view now, and could pick out the rude wharves, the home-made boats at their moorings, the barefoot children playing in the mud — healthy little imps fed on rye bread and stewed eels. And everywhere he saw Indians moving freely in and out of the settlements; tame Hurons, for the most part, but now and then a swaggering figure from the warrior tribes of the south shore.
Presently he was looking down on Montreal. He knew that it was Montreal because of the Mountain, but it was very unlike the bustling city of his acquaintance. There was a line of small houses along the river, and the foreshadowing of a street, which in wet weather must have been like a muskeg. On the west side there was a fort, and on the east rose a huge windmill of stone enclosed in a wall loopholed for muskets. There was no palisade round the town, and Donald saw Indians in the streets who were not tame Hurons or Algonquins. He saw the Hôtel Dieu and the seminary of St. Sulpice, both fortified for defence. Montreal had a frontier air. There were soldiers of the French regiment of Carignan lounging at the tavern doors, big fellows with looped hats and bandoliers. The men, too, in the streets had a touch of the wilderness in their air. They had the long stride of a folk accustomed to winter journeys on snow-shoes, and the keen eyes of those whose life hung on their vigilance; while they wore for the most part buckskin coats and fringed leggings, and in their caps tufts of turkey feathers. Donald knew that he was looking at the famed coureurs de bois.
The view was still unfolding itself. Now he had gone westward past Lake St. Louis and the Lake of the Two Mountains, and was in the broad vale of the Ottawa. It was early May, the grass was already springing, and the young leaves of maple, birch, and poplar made a pale green shimmer among the dusk of the pines. Near the river was an occasional farm, and sometimes at the mouth of a tributary a palisaded village with its church and mill. And then there came a line of unbroken forest, stretching from the far Laurentians to the Ontario hills, and muffling the water’s edge.
It was like looking down on an ant-hill and waiting for the ants to show themselves. The place seemed silent and dead, but Donald knew that somewhere it held a fierce life.
By and by he found what he sought.
Three canoes were coming down the river, big forty-foot canoes of the kind used for heavy transport. Amidships they were laden with pelts, in bales with the fur inside, the product of months of winter hunting. Till now they had had a prosperous voyage, no short commons of green berries, and Labrador tea and tripe de roche, but full meals of corn and venison, and in Lent they had eaten beaver-tails, which, since the beaver is an aquatic beast, were permitted fare. The crews, fifteen in all, were ten white voyageurs, four Hurons, and one Récollet friar, Father Anastase, who had been picked up in the woods west of Lake Nipissing, a fugitive from a mission which the Iroquois had destroyed. The priest was in a sad state; his feet were so blistered that it was agony to put them to the ground; his brown Franciscan robe was in tatters, and in the place of a cord he had a length of grape-vine. But he was not the least cheerful of the party, and he hugged the treasures which he had rescued from the burning mission, a picture of St. Ignatius, and another of Our Lady of Pity surrounded by the five wounds of her son. As the men plied their paddles they were always casting glances behind them. When they landed on a spit of land to eat a meal of Indian porridge and dried venison, they seemed in a fever to be off again. Clearly there was some deadly peril in their rear.
But the company were in no panic. Their brown faces were solemn, but as composed as if they had been in the Montreal streets. Donald knew their names. There were Du Gay and Pepin from Montreal, and young La Violette from Three Rivers, and Jean Poncet from the lower Ottawa, who knew the country best, and Nicholas Brûlé, so-called because he had once been tortured at an Indian stake. There was a lean tow-headed youth, whom they called Jemme Anglais — English Jim — who had made the English colonies too hot to hold him and had skipped over the border. But especially there was a short fellow with a merry face and immense breadth of shoulder, with the pale eyes of the marksman and the stout calves of one whose legs were trained for the winter woods. In that silent company he alone gave tongue, for he was always humming or singing, and often his laugh rang out as gay as a child’s. He was the leader of the band, for he gave the orders.... Donald knew that he was looking at the famous Cadieux.
“In five hours we reach the Calumet rapids,” he said. “After that we are safe, for at Mercier’s Mill there is a strong stockade and twenty stout lads to hold it.”
“What about the portage?” one asked. “That’s a difficult business, and the Iroquois will overtake us there.”
“There must be no portage,” was the answer. “We must shoot the rapids. Jean Poncet is a good white-water man and will bring us through. He goes bowsman in the first canoe and you others must follow his steering.”
The priest spoke up. “They have the pace of us,” he said. “They have birch-bark canoes, lightly laden. I fear they will be upon us before Calumet.”
“They may be dela
yed,” said Cadieux.
“It will be a narrow thing,” said English Jim. “I have a horrid tingling at the roots of my hair.” He glanced at the Récollet, whom he liked to chaff, for he came of Puritan stock. “I am in the mood to make a pact with Satan and cry, ‘Acabri, Acabra, Acabram!’ if he will give us a passage in his chasse-galerie.”
The Father frowned. “Peace, my son! The Devil’s flying-boat would take us not to Mercier’s Mill but to Hell.”
“Better a cheerful hell than an Indian stake,” was the answer.
As they pushed off Cadieux remained behind. “Good speed, my brave ones,” he cried. “Don’t touch land again until you are past Calumet. Follow Poncet close, for he is your hope of salvation.”
“What about yourself?” one asked.
“I stay behind to guard your rear.”
“You’re crazy, captain,” Du Gay cried. “What can you do against a hundred howling wolves?”
Cadieux grinned. “I have already done something. I have visited their camp and burnt two of their canoes, besides scaring them into fits with my ghost drum. That meant half a day’s grace.... I have stripped the bark from a tree and drawn on the trunk their own pictures so that they thought a rival band of Senecas was ahead of them, and waited for hours to send out scouts to enquire.”
“What start do you reckon we have?” English Jim asked.
“An hour, maybe. Not more. If they come upon us before Calumet we shall not make the rapids. They have muskets from Albany — God’s malison on the Dutch! — and can blow us out of the water. Therefore they must not get beyond the start of the portage.”
“For the love of Christ, Cadieux,” young La Violette cried, “don’t go hunting for death. Come with us. If need be let’s go to Heaven together.”
