by John Buchan
Then one morning they reached the sea tides. Alan tasted the water and a new light came into his wild eyes. He bade Hector take up his pipes and play “The White Sands of Barra.”
It was plain that Alan was very ill. Hector had to lift him ashore in the evening; he ate little food, but suffered from a raging thirst; he had begun to talk with himself, and babbled often like a man in a nightmare. To the Indians he seemed “fey,” — one on whom the hand of God had been laid, and they hastened to obey his lightest word.... And then one flaming evening the fiord opened into an ocean bay, and the sun set in crimson beyond a horizon of sea. Faintly outlined against the crimson were the shadows of far mountains.
Alan was on his feet peering into the west. Now at last the fever seemed to have left his eyes.
“Rejoice!” he cried, “Chunnaic mi m’eileanan,” and Hector knew his meaning. That night on his pipes he played without reproof that lilt of triumph, “A Kiss of the King’s Hand.”
Next morning the dying man embarked in one of the big dug-outs used for the ocean journey. There were Haidas there from the Islands, come to barter sea-otter skins for candle-fish oil, and such was the spell cast by Alan that they readily gave him a passage. With a sad heart Donald watched that strange ferrying. Behind were the snow peaks of the Coast range, and the thousand mountain miles which separated Alan from the white folk. In front over the gleaming morning sea rose the tall woods and the green muffled hills of the Ultimate Islands.
“I will die there,” said Alan. “That is the fate I have always sought, for it was the fortune spae’d for me as a laddie. You, Hector, will see that there is a stone with the proper writing set over my grave, and you will go home somehow and some time and tell my friends what befell me. Tell them that I have reached the goal of all my dreams. I would have written it, but I have no paper, and I am too near death.”
He died soon after he was brought ashore. A group of Haidas, tall men with the raven totem on their foreheads, were there to greet him, and their medicine man made a great lamenting over him, while Hector played that most heart-rending of all airs, “Macruimen’s Farewell.”... Then it seemed to Donald that a great slab of black slate was laid over the grave, and under Hector’s direction words were engraved thereon. They were Chunnaic mi m’eileanan fhein—” I have seen my islands.” The date was added.
The picture dissolved and two others succeeded. One showed Hector’s doings — how in a Haida boat he sailed south, was captured by a Spanish man-o’-war, taken to Panama, and finally, after many adventures, reached Canada by sea. He never saw Montreal and the headquarters of the Nor’-Westers, for he died of phthisis at Halifax, so Alan’s message was undelivered. The other was a picture of Alan’s grave. A group of English seamen stood around it, among them a square-faced sturdy man, who was Captain George Vancouver. He was reading the inscription aloud and making havoc of the Gaelic.
“There’s been an Englishman here before,” he said. “That date’s in good English. But God knows what the rest of the lingo is. It looks like a lunatic who had a cold in his head.”
“Hullo!” said Donald’s father one evening when he was reading his three-days’-old newspaper. “They’ve found an inscription in Gaelic in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Dated, too. There must be a queer story behind that.”
“It was great-uncle Alan,” said Donald.
His father laughed. “Perhaps it was. If we could prove that, then Alan Macdonnell reached the Pacific from Canada four years before Alexander Mackenzie.”
THE BLESSED ISLES
THE air is quiet as a grave,
With never a wandering breeze
Or the fall of a breaking wave
In the hollow shell of the seas.
Ocean and heavens are a maze
Of hues like a peacock’s breast,
And far in the rainbow haze
Lie the Isles of the West.
Uist and Barra and Lews —
Honey-sweet are the words —
They set my heart in a muse
And give me wings like a bird’s.
Darlings, soon will I fly
To the home of the tern and the bee,
And deep in the heather lie
Of the Isles of the Sea.
* * * *
But they say there are other lands
For him who has heart and will,
Whiter than Barra’s sands,
Greener than Icolmkill,
Where the cool sweet waters flow,
And the White Bird sings in the skies
Such songs as immortals know
In the fields of Paradise.
So I’ll launch my boat on the seas
And sail o’er the shadowy deep,
Past the Island of Apple Trees
And the little Island of Sheep,
And follow St. Brandan’s way
Far into the golden West,
Till I harbour at close of day
In the Isles of the Blest.
CHAPTER VI. Big Dog
IT promised to be a hot day, but the light south wind blowing in from the Gulf had still a morning freshness as Donald pranced down the slope between the camp and the river. He had no plans except a desire to see Negog and to find out what Aristide Martel was doing. If Joe Petit-Pont was stacking hay it might be good fun to give him a hand. Or they might take the dog Glooskap (he had come from Nova Scotia as a puppy and had got his name there) and go into the woods and watch him chase the squirrels. Glooskap was getting fat and was as likely to catch a squirrel as a wild duck; but hope sprang eternal in his breast, and he was a comic figure as he lay sprawled at the foot of a sugar maple while his quarry spat at him from above.
Or there were the river and the canoes. They might go exploring up to the foot of the waterfall.
Simone Martel waved to him from the road which led from the village. She had become very lady-like since she had gone to school, and the new dignity made her slower in the race, though once she had been the fastest runner of them all. Also she now wore a neat straw hat, and her hair, once like a bramble bush for confusion, was tidily plaited.
“Jimmy Brush is here,” she announced.
Donald shouted and then whistled long.
“Where is he?” he demanded.
“He’s with Aristide, and they’re at Cold Waters.”
“Come on,” said Donald, “I’ll race you there.”
“I can’t come yet,” said Simone primly. “I go to see my aunt Anastasie, who has a migraine, and then—”
But Donald was already half-way across the big pasture, jumping the little seedling firs, and howling like a dervish.
Jimmy Brush was to Donald and Aristide what Huckleberry Finn was to Tom Sawyer, the perfect boy, and his life was the fulfilment of their wildest dreams. He never went near a school or a church, and social duties weighed on him not at all; but he was profoundly learned in more important matters than Latin and arithmetic, and he had the fine manners which are due to perfect health, imperturbable good-humour, and a heavy-handed parent. His age was pretty much Donald’s, but life had already begun to write on his face, and he looked older. The profession of his father was a mystery, but handy-man was perhaps the best description, since there were few things he could not turn his hand to. The Brushes were genuine nomads, for father and son travelled all the roads of Quebec and Gaspé in a kind of springless buggy drawn by an ancient horse. April released them from some lair in the cities, and until the first snows their wayside fires crackled by night in the lee of the pine woods or among the gravel of the river shore.
Jimmy’s mother had been Irish, and his father claimed mysteriously to be French, and had a long story of a Brouche who had been a great man up Lac St. Jean way. But his real origin was proclaimed by his high cheek-bones and russet skin, and dark, deep-set eyes — all of which Jimmy faithfully reproduced. The Brushes were of Indian race, though they never talked about it, and appeared to speak no Indian tongue. They were not Crees, or Montagnais, or
Hurons, or any of the eastern or northern stocks. Father Laflamme knew all about them, and so did Negog, who was always respectful when he spoke of them. They were Plains Indians from the very distant west — Bloods or Blackfoot or Stonies or Piegans — and they showed their origin in one curious way. They had learned woodcraft in the east, but they had horsecraft in their bones. There was no horse ailment that the elder Brush could not doctor, and Jimmy would talk to Celestin Martel’s percherons as to old friends, and get answers out of them.
Donald found the two boys at Cold Waters, which was a cleft in the hillside with an icy spring in it. There the Brush tent was pitched; before it were the smouldering ashes of the breakfast fire, the elder Brush busy with a new halter, Aristide prone on his face, an eager audience for Jimmy, who was speaking in his slow, quiet French. An Indian tent is apt in summer to smell strong, but not so the Brushes’, for the flaps were tied back and the bedding was being aired like a badger’s straw.
Jimmy could not budge until the evening, for he had moccasins to shape for his stay in Bellefleurs, having just completed the ruin of a pair of Quebec shoes.
“Negog told me Jimmy had come,” Aristide informed Donald. “He wants us to be down by the river to-night before sundown. Bad luck I can’t come, for they’re stacking the hay to-day and we’ll work till it’s dark. It will be all right to-morrow, and Jimmy will have finished his job then.”
Donald spent a pleasant day in the company of Joe Petit-pont and the Martel family, and returned to tea with his hair full of hayseed and a most superior thirst. Thereafter he found Negog sorting nets on the camp verandah, and squatted beside him. Negog was in one of his silent moods, and Donald was glad when Jimmy Brush appeared as quietly as the fall of a leaf. Jimmy had a half of his blood white, which, blended with his Indian ancestry, gave him the figure of a lean, dusky young Apollo. His slim legs showed that he was no woodsman, for the snow-shoe muscles were undeveloped, and, unlike the forest-bred, he was straight as an arrow. He spoke fluent French, and the slangy English of the cities, and he had a smattering of half a dozen Indian dialects. His smile, Donald’s mother used to say, was the most engaging thing on the continent.
Having been to the Toronto races that spring he babbled about horses, a subject which did not greatly interest Donald. Negog listened attentively and sniffed. Then he said something in a strange tongue, which Jimmy seemed to recognise, for he laughed.
“This guy says horses are only big dogs,” he told Donald. “He says I got to wise-up about my family, for they were about sunk by the big dogs until they got their guns. I sure will ask Dad about it.”
“He doesn’t know,” said Negog grimly.
“That’s just too bad.”
Jimmy was on his feet and racing Donald to the river before Negog had tidied up his nets and put them away.
* * * *
Donald’s feet were drawn by some instinct to the edge of the shingle, and the low-pitched talk of Negog and Jimmy and even the murmur of the stream, were muted in the twilit stillness. Of his senses only his eyes were awake, and in the molten gold of the shallows a picture shaped itself....
He saw a great flat country, wider and wilder than any he had ever known. Midway in a deep trench a muddy river looped and twined, which he knew to be the South Saskatchewan. Nothing obstructed the vision until it reached the horizon, which was the extreme limit of sight like a horizon at sea; but towards the west the hawk eyes of the Indians could discern a shadowy sierra of blue mountain. But, though as a whole the land was flat, it was less a plain than a hummocky plateau, for it rolled and eddied in smooth waves of downland. It was early summer, and the pasture, still untouched by the plough, was fresh and juicy, though except for the great river there was no running water.
An Indian tribe were shifting camp. The tall painted teepees were coming down, and the tent poles were being fastened to the backs of the dogs, so that they formed a travois supporting big skin packs which trailed like a sledge. There was a terrific bustle at the rear of the camp where the squaws and children were collected, but there was quiet in the front, where the warriors were formed up in their societies. These Piegans were tall folk, like all of the Blackfoot confederacy, slim, long of leg, and light on their feet as antelopes.
Donald’s attention was fixed on one of the youngest of the warriors, a boy not out of his teens. He was that ancestor of more than two centuries ago to whom Jimmy Brush had cast back, for, though older and more fully developed, he was Jimmy’s living image. Donald found that he knew all about him, what he had done and was going to do, and that in some queer way he could see inside his mind.
The boy’s old name had been Two Dogs, because two dogs had been the first sight that his mother had seen after his birth. But now he had a new name, for at the buffalo hunt three days ago he had been solemnly admitted into the best of the tribal societies, the Thunder Hawks, and he had been given the new name of West Wind. More, the Sun Dance of yesterday, when offerings had been made to the Great Spirit and there had been the ritual of the cutting of buffalo tongues by the women, had been in honour of his own mother, the most famous lady of the tribe. She had been given a wonderful medicine-bag of raw hide, full of precious ceremonial things, and West Wind, as her eldest son, had had another. It was his dearest possession and was now packed on a dog’s back in the special care of his blood brother Grey Wolflet, who had hurt his leg at the buffalo hunt and so was not equal to battle.
For it was to battle that they went. Gone were the gaudy blues and greens and yellows of the Sun Dance, and the braves were painted with the sombre Spanish brown which meant war. Their arrows and spears were new-tipped with obsidian, for a party of young men had just been to the mountains in the far south to get supplies of that precious stone.
War had been in the air ever since the buffalo hunt. The Piegans claimed as their hunting-ground all the land drained by the southern feeders of the South Saskatchewan, between what are now called the Old Man and the Red Deer rivers, that being their share of the Blackfoot territory. But at the buffalo hunt there had been few buffalo, since others had been there before them, and the hollows were raw with the blood and bones of beasts newly killed. In the evening when the hunters turned back, the smoke of camp fires was seen in the west, and word was brought that the Snake tribe were hunting there — were indeed moving eastward into the sacred Piegan preserves.
It was a challenge that must be met. A council of the elders had decreed that these interlopers from the south should be summarily punished and that the tribe was capable of dealing with them without help from Blood or Blackfoot.... West Wind shook his new spear in the air, and lovingly felt the points of his new-tipped arrows. Soon they would be finding a home in Snake parts.
To Donald’s excited eyes the fight seemed a muddled affair. The Piegans advanced on a broad front, like beaters at a partridge drive, with their old men, their sick, women, children, and baggage dogs sheltering behind them. There were no rearguards or flank guards. The Snakes, short, broad, sinewy fellows painted with stripes of green and red, were notably fewer in numbers than the Piegans, but they had horses, a score at least, wild, leggy beasts with yard-long manes. Their tactics were simple and effective. They spread out before the Piegan advance and, while their centre slowly retreated, the horsemen on the wings got to the Piegan rear and scuppered the camp followers.
The inevitable result followed. The Piegans turned to protect their belongings and then the Snake centre attacked. There was no great slaughter, for the Piegans, being more numerous, were able to encircle their baggage train, and the horsemen had no longer a chance. But they were compelled to fall back, and only nightfall stopped the running fight. Women and children had been murdered and much plunder taken. West Wind’s mother had an arrow wound in her arm, and his companion-in-arms, Grey Wolflet, had been slain and scalped.
In the darkness of the night, when the pickets had reported that the enemy had retired, the Piegan warriors held solemn counsel.
First th
e old men spoke. The Great Spirit, they said, had favoured their enemies, and had given them Big Dogs that could carry a man and run swift as the wind. It was foolish to contend against the Great Spirit. These Dogs from the south were no doubt endowed with magic, not only with speed but with immortality. No Piegan could bend a bow against them, therefore let them take counsel with others of the Blackfoot confederacy, and make a treaty with the Snake people to share their hunting-ground.
But the view of the elders was not that of the younger braves. They would have none of this treaty-making. The Big Dogs (Misstutim they called them) were doubtless animals and like other dogs. They were from the south, and it was well known that the south was the home of strange beasts — serpents that rattled, and suchlike. Who said they were immortal? None had died in the fight because the Piegans had been too confused to shoot at them. At the next encounter let them see whether the brutes were arrow-proof.
The discussion raged. The old men stuck to their view and the young men to theirs. It was pointed out that the Big Dogs might be mortal, but that they ran so fast that it would be hard to hit them.
“Not faster than an elk,” said West Wind, “and elk have often fallen to our bows.”
They might be hit, said the elders, but an arrow at long range would not cripple them, and the shots could only be at long range since in an instant the beasts were in their ranks.
“Then let us hold our fire,” said West Wind.
But if we do that, the old men argued, the Dogs will still overtake us, for it is well known that arrows, though they may eventually kill, have no instant stopping power.
