The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

  “He made himself a dugout or birch canoe to cross in when the weather cleared.”

  “But then why came he not to Wauswaugoning by canoe?”

  “Because,” persisted Hugh, “when he reached the mainland he fell in with some enemy here at the Devil Track River. We know his wound was not received in the wreck. You yourself say it was a knife wound. Black Thunder wasn’t killed in the wreck either. They escaped unharmed but the bateau was beyond repair. So they built a canoe and crossed to this shore. Here they were set upon and Black Thunder was killed and father sorely wounded.”

  Again the sceptical Blaise shook his head. “Why were they away down here so far below the Grand Portage? And why, if they had a canoe, brought they not the furs and the packet with them?”

  Hugh was aware of the weak links in his theory, yet he clung to it. “Maybe they did bring them,” he said, “but couldn’t carry them overland, so they hid them.”

  “No, no. Our father told me that the furs were not far from the wreck. He said that three or four times. I cannot be mistaken.”

  “Perhaps their canoe wasn’t big enough to hold all of the pelts,” Hugh speculated. “What they did bring may have fallen into Ohrante’s hands. So father spoke only of the rest, hidden in a secret place near the wreck. To me that seems reasonable enough. But,” he admitted honestly, “I don’t quite understand how they came to be so far down the shore here, and, if the packet is valuable, why didn’t father bring that with him if he brought anything? And why didn’t he tell you that the storm drove him on Isle Royale?”

  “You forget,” Blaise said slowly, “that our father’s body was very weak and his spirit just about to leave it. I asked him where to find the bateau. He told me of the way it was marked, but he could say no more. I think he could not hear my questions.”

  Both lads were silent for several minutes, then Hugh said decisively, “Well, Blaise, there are just two things we can do, unless we give up the quest entirely. We can go back down the shore, searching the land for some sign of the cache, or we can cross to Isle Royale, find the cleft in the rocks where the bateau lies, and seek there for the furs and the packet. I am for the latter plan. To search the whole shore from here to the Fond du Lac for a hidden cache to which we have no clue seems to me a hopeless task.”

  “But to cross that long stretch of open water in a small canoe,” Blaise returned doubtfully.

  “We must choose good weather of course, and paddle our swiftest to reach the island before a change comes. Perhaps we can rig some kind of sail and make better time than with our paddles.”

  It was plain that Hugh had made up his mind to return to Isle Royale. Hitherto he had been content to let Blaise take the lead, but now he was asserting his elder brother’s right to leadership. Better than his white brother, Blaise understood the hazards of such an undertaking, but the half-breed lad was proud. He was not going to admit himself less courageous than his elder brother. If Hugh dared take the risk, he, Little Caribou, as his mother’s people called him, dared take it also.

  The brothers must provision themselves for the trip. Even if they reached the island safely and in good time, they could not guess how long their search might take, or how many days or weeks they might be delayed before they could return. Fresh supplies might have reached the Grand Portage by now and corn at least could be bought. From the Indians always to be found near the posts, other food supplies and new moccasins might be obtained.

  Considering food supplies reminded the lads of their hunger. They decided to devote the remaining hours of daylight to fishing for their supper. They would start for the Grand Portage in the morning. Blaise paddled slowly along a submerged reef some distance out from shore, while Hugh fished.

  In a very few minutes he felt a pull at his line. Hand over hand he hauled it in, Blaise helping by managing the canoe so that the line did not slacken even for an instant. Nearer and nearer Hugh drew his prize, until he could see the gleaming silver of the big fish flashing through the clear water. Then came the critical moment. He had no landing net, and reaching over the side with net or gaff would have been a risk at best. Without shifting his weight enough to destroy the balance, while Blaise endeavored to hold the canoe steady with his paddle, Hugh must land his fish squarely in the bottom. With a sudden swing, the long, silvery, dark-flecked body, tail wildly flapping, was raised from the water and flung into the canoe. Almost before it touched the bottom, Hugh had seized his knife and dealt a swift blow. A few ineffectual flaps and the big fish lay still.

  “Fifteen pounds at least,” Hugh exulted. “I have seen larger trout, but most of them were taken in nets.”

  “They grow very big sometimes, two, three times as big, but it is not good to catch such a big one with a line. Unless you have great luck, it overturns your canoe.”

  The sight of the big trout sharpened the boys’ hunger pangs and took away all zest from further fishing. They paddled full speed for shore and supper.

  Favored by good weather they made a quick trip to the Grand Portage. In the bay a small ship lay at anchor, and they knew supplies must have arrived.

  “That is not the Otter,” Hugh remarked as they paddled by.

  “No, it is not one of the Old Company’s ships. I think it belongs to the New Company.”

  “I’m glad it isn’t the Otter,” Hugh replied. “I shouldn’t know how to answer Baptiste’s questions.”

  The ship proved, as Blaise had guessed, to belong to the New Company. She sailed the day after the boys arrived, but had left ample supplies. They had no difficulty in buying the needed stores, though Hugh’s money was exhausted by the purchases. He left explanations to Blaise, confident that his younger brother could not be persuaded to divulge the destination or purpose of their trip.

  Again bad weather held the lads at the Grand Portage and Wauswaugoning. The last day of their stay, when they were returning from the New Company’s post, they came upon the camp of the trappers whose bateau had loomed like a ship through the morning mist when the boys were leaving the Bay of the Beaver. Hugh recognized at once the tall fellow in the scarlet cap who had replied to his shout of greeting. The trappers had disposed of their furs at the Old Company’s post and were about to leave. They were going to portage their supplies to Fort Charlotte above the falls of the Pigeon River and go up the river in a canoe. Hugh inquired what they intended to do with their small bateau which was drawn up on the shore.

  “You want it?” the leader questioned in his big voice.

  “Will you sell it?” the boy asked eagerly.

  The man nodded. “What you give?”

  Hugh flushed with chagrin, remembering that all his money was gone. Blaise came to the rescue by offering to trade some ammunition for the boat. The man shook his head. Blaise added to his offer a small quantity of food supplies, but still the fellow refused. “Too little,” he grumbled, then added something in his curious mixture of Scotch-English and Ojibwa. He was a Scotch half-breed and Hugh found his dialect difficult to understand.

  Blaise shrugged, walked over to the boat and examined it. He turned towards the man and spoke in rapid Ojibwa. The fellow answered in the same tongue, pointing to the lad’s gun.

  “What does he say?” asked Hugh.

  “I told him his bateau needs mending,” Blaise answered in French, “but he will not trade for anything but my gun, which is better than his. I will not give him the gun. Our father gave it to me.”

  Hugh understood his half-brother’s feeling, but he was eager to secure the boat. “He may have my gun,” he whispered. He knew that the tall fellow understood some French. “Tell him if he will include the sail—he had one, you know—I’ll give him my gun and some ammunition. Mine doesn’t shoot as accurately as yours, but it looks newer.”

  Blaise made the offer in Ojibwa, Hugh repeated it in English, and after an unsucc
essful attempt to get more, the man agreed. He put into the boat the mast and canvas, which he had been using as a shelter, and Hugh handed over the gun and ammunition.

  The rest of the day was spent in making a few necessary repairs to the bateau, and the following morning, before a light southwest breeze, the lads set sail. Blaise knew nothing of this sort of water travel, but Hugh had handled a sailboat before, though never one quite so clumsy as this crude, heavy bateau. The boat was pointed at both ends, flat bottomed and built of thick, hand-hewn boards. It carried a small, square sail on a stubby mast. With axe and knife Hugh had made a crude rudder and had lashed it to the stern in the place of the paddle the trappers had been content to steer with. Blaise quickly learned to handle the rudder, leaving Hugh free to manage the sail. It was a satisfaction to the older boy to find something in which he excelled his younger brother and could take the lead. It restored his self-respect as the elder. Blaise, on the other hand, obeyed orders instantly and proved himself as reliable a subordinate as he had been leader. The breeze holding steady, the bateau made fairly good speed. They might possibly have made better time in a canoe, but the new mode of travel was a pleasant change from the constant labor of plying the blades.

  Had the lads but known it, their wisest course would have been to cross directly from the Grand Portage to the southwestern end of Isle Royale and then skirt the island to its northeast tip. But they had no map to tell them this. Indeed in those days the position of Isle Royale was but imperfectly understood. It had been visited by scarcely any white men and was avoided by the Indians. During the boys’ detention at the Grand Portage, rain and fog had rendered the island, some eighteen or twenty miles away, invisible. The day they set sail the sky was blue overhead, but there was still haze enough on the water to obscure the distance. It was not strange that they believed Isle Royale farther off than it really was. From its northeastern end the Otter had sailed to the Kaministikwia, and Hugh took for granted that the shortest way to reach the island must be from some point on Thunder Bay. He was aware of the deep curve made by the shore to form the great bay, and realized that to follow clear around that curve would be a loss of time. Instead of turning north to follow the shore, he held on to the northeast, along the inner side of a long line of narrow, rocky islands and reefs, rising from the water like the summits of a mountain chain and forming a breakwater for the protection of the bay.

  It was from one of those islands, now called McKellar Island, south about two miles from the towering heights of the Isle du Paté and at least fifteen miles by water from the southern mouth of the Kaministikwia, that the adventurers finally set out for Isle Royale. Before they dared attempt the perilous sail across the long stretch of the open lake, they remained in camp a day to let the southwest wind, which had risen to half a gale, blow itself out. Wind they needed for their venture, but not too much wind.

  CHAPTER XIV

  SAILING TOWARDS THE SUNRISE

  “Truly the spirit of the winds favors us.” Blaise forgot for the moment his Christian training and spoke in the manner of his Indian forefathers. He had waked at dawn and, finding the lake merely rippled by a steady west breeze, had aroused Hugh.

  So anxious were the two to take advantage of the perfect weather that they did not wait for breakfast, but hastily flung their blankets and cooking utensils into the boat. With the two strong paddles included in the purchase, they ran the bateau out of the little cove where it had lain sheltered. Then, hoisting the sail, they steered towards the dawn.

  Hugh Beaupré never forgot that sail into the sunrise. Ahead of him the sky, all rose and gold and faint green blending into soft blue, met the water without the faintest, thinnest line of land between. Before and around the boat, the lake shimmered with the reflected tints that glorified even the patched and dirty sail. Was he bound for the other side of the world, for some glorious, unearthly realm beyond that gleaming water? A sense of mingled dread and exultation swept over the boy, his face flushed, his gray eyes sparkled, his pulse quickened. He knew the feeling of the explorer setting out for new lands, realms of he knows not what perils and delights.

  The moment of thrill passed, and Hugh turned to glance at Blaise. The younger boy, his hand on the tiller rope, sat like a statue, his dark face tense, his shining hazel eyes betraying a kindred feeling to that which had held Hugh in its thrall. Never before in all their days of journeying together had the white lad and the half-breed felt such perfect comradeship. Speech was unnecessary between them.

  As the sun rose higher and the day advanced, Blaise was not so sure that fortune was favoring the venture. The wind sank until the water was broken by the merest ripple only. There was scarcely enough pressure against the sail to keep the boat moving.

  “At this rate we shall be a week in reaching the island,” said Hugh, anxiously eying the canvas. “We can go faster with the paddles. Lash the rudder and we’ll try the blades.”

  For the first time since they had changed from canoe to sailboat Blaise voiced an objection. “To paddle this heavy bateau is hard work,” he said. “We cannot keep at it all day and all night, as we could in a bark canoe. As long as the wind blows at all and we move onward, even slowly, we had best save our strength. Soon we shall need it. Before the sun is overhead, there will be no wind at all, and then we must paddle.”

  Hugh nodded agreement, but, less patient than his half-brother, he found it trying to sit idle waiting for the gentle breeze to die. Blaise had prophesied truly. Before noon the sail was hanging loose and idle, the water, blue under a cloudless sky, was without a wrinkle. It is not often really hot on the open waters of Lake Superior, but that day the sun glared down upon the little boat, and the distance shimmered with heat haze. The bateau had no oars or oarlocks, only two stout paddles, and paddling the heavy, clumsy boat was slow, hot work.

  Pausing for a moment’s rest after an hour’s steady plying of his blade, Hugh uttered an exclamation. “Look, Blaise,” he cried. “We haven’t so far to go. There is the Isle Royale ahead, and not far away either.”

  He pointed with his blade to the hazy blue masses across the still water. High the land towered, with points and bays and detached islands. Encouraged by the sight, the two bent to their paddles.

  In a few minutes Hugh cried out again. “How strange the island looks, Blaise! I don’t remember any flat-topped place like that. See, it looks as if it had been sliced off with a knife.”

  The distant shore had taken on a strange appearance. High towering land it seemed to be, but curiously level and flattened at the top, like no land Hugh had seen around Lake Superior.

  “There is something wrong,” the boy went on, puzzled. “We must be off our course. That is not Isle Royale, at least not the part I saw. Where are we, Blaise? Are we going in the wrong direction? Can that be part of the mainland?”

  “It is not the mainland over that way,” Blaise made prompt reply. “It must be some part of Minong.” He used the Indian name for the island.

  “But I saw nothing the——” Hugh began, then broke off to cry out, “Look, look, the island is changing before our eyes! It towers up there to the right, and over there, where it was high a moment ago, it shrinks and fades away!”

  “It is some enchanted land,” the younger boy murmured, gazing in wonder at the dim blue shapes that loomed in one place, shrank in another, changed size and form before his awestruck eyes. “It is a land of spirits.” He ceased his paddling to cross himself.

  For a moment Hugh too was inclined to believe that he and his brother were the victims of witchcraft. But, though not free from superstition, he had less of it than the half-breed. Moreover he remembered the looming of the very boat he was now in, when he had first seen it in the mists of dawn, and also the rock that had looked like an island, when he was on his way from Michilimackinac. The captain of the ship had told him of some of the queer visions called mirages he had seen w
hen sailing the lakes. Turning towards Blaise, Hugh attempted to explain the strange sight ahead.

  “It is the mirage. I have heard of it. The Captain of the Athabasca told me that the mirage is caused by the light shining through mist or layers of cloud or air that reflect in some way we do not understand, making images of land appear where there is no land or changing the appearance of the real land. Sometimes, he said, images of islands are seen upside down in the sky, above the real water-line. It is all very strange and no one quite understands why it comes or how, but there is no enchantment about it, Blaise.”

  The younger boy nodded, his eyes still on the changing, hazy shapes ahead. Without reply, he resumed his paddling. How much he understood of his elder brother’s explanation, Hugh could not tell. At any rate Blaise was too proud to show further fear of something Hugh did not seem to be afraid of.

  In silence the two plied their paddles under the hot sun, but the heavy wooden boat did not respond like a bark canoe to their efforts. Progress was very slow. White clouds were gathering in the south, moving slowly up and across the sky, though the water remained quiet. The clouds veiled the sun. The distant land shrank to a mere blue line, its natural shape and size, and seemed to come no nearer for all their efforts. Both boys were growing anxious. After the heat and stillness of the day, the clouds, slow moving though they were, threatened storm. The two dug their blades into the water, straining muscles of arms and shoulders to put all their strength into the stroke.

  A crinkle, a ripple was spreading over the green-blue water. A breeze was coming up from the southwest. Hugh laid down his blade to raise the sail. In the west the rays of the setting sun were breaking through the clouds and dyeing them crimson, flame and orange. He was glad to see the sun again, for it brought him assurance that he was keeping the course, not swinging too far to north or south.