by Michael Sims
Abner gave no attention to the man’s flippant speech. He got his great silver watch out of his pocket, pressed the stem and looked. Then he spoke in his deep, even voice.
“Dix,” he said, “it is nearly midnight; in an hour you must be on your journey, and I have something more to say. Listen! I knew this thing had been done the previous day because it had rained on the night that I met Alkire, and the earth of this ant heap had been disturbed after that. Moreover, this earth had been frozen, and that showed a night had passed since it had been placed there. And I knew the rider of that horse was Alkire because, beside the path near the severed twigs lay my knife, where it had fallen from his hand. This much I learned in some fifteen minutes; the rest took somewhat longer.
“I followed the track of the horse until it stopped in the little valley below. It was easy to follow while the horse ran, because the sod was torn; but when it ceased to run there was no track that I could follow. There was a little stream threading the valley, and I began at the wood and came slowly up to see if I could find where the horse had crossed. Finally I found a horse track and there was also a man’s track, which meant that you had caught the horse and were leading it away. But where?
“On the rising ground above there was an old orchard where there had once been a house. The work about that house had been done a hundred years. It was rotted down now. You had opened this orchard into the pasture. I rode all over the face of this hill and finally I entered this orchard. There was a great, flat, moss-covered stone lying a few steps from where the house had stood. As I looked I noticed that the moss growing from it into the earth had been broken along the edges of the stone, and then I noticed that for a few feet about the stone the ground had been resodded. I got down and lifted up some of this new sod. Under it the earth had been soaked with that … red paint.
“It was clever of you, Dix, to resod the ground; that took only a little time and it effectually concealed the place where you had killed the horse; but it was foolish of you to forget that the broken moss around the edges of the great flat stone could not be mended.”
“Abner!” cried Dix. “Stop!” And I saw that spray of sweat, and his face working like kneaded bread, and the shiver of that abominable chill on him.
Abner was silent for a moment and then he went on, but from another quarter.
“Twice,” said Abner, “the Angel of the Lord stood before me and I did not know it; but the third time I knew it. It is not in the cry of the wind, nor in the voice of many waters that His presence is made known to us. That man in Israel had only the sign that the beast under him would not go on. Twice I had as good a sign, and tonight, when Marks broke a stirrup-leather before my house and called me to the door and asked me for a knife to mend it, I saw and I came!”
The log that Abner had thrown on was burned down, and the fire was again a mass of embers; the room was filled with that dull red light. Dix had got on to his feet, and he stood now twisting before the fire, his hands reaching out to it, and that cold creeping in his bones, and the smell of the fire on him.
Abner rose. And when he spoke his voice was like a thing that has dimensions and weight.
“Dix,” he said, “you robbed the grazers; you shot Alkire out of his saddle; and a child you would have murdered!”
And I saw the sleeve of Abner’s coat begin to move, then it stopped. He stood staring at something against the wall. I looked to see what the thing was, but I did not see it. Abner was looking beyond the wall, as though it had been moved away.
And all the time Dix had been shaking with that hellish cold, and twisting on the hearth and crowding into the fire. Then he fell back, and he was the Dix I knew—his face was slack; his eye was furtive; and he was full of terror.
It was his weak whine that awakened Abner. He put up his hand and brought the fingers hard down over his face, and then he looked at this new creature, cringing and beset with fears.
“Dix,” he said, “Alkire was a just man; he sleeps as peacefully in that abandoned well under his horse as he would sleep in the churchyard. My hand has been held back; you may go. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”
“But where shall I go, Abner?” the creature wailed; “I have no money and I am cold.”
Abner took out his leather wallet and flung it toward the door.
“There is money,” he said—“a hundred dollars—and there is my coat. Go! But if I find you in the hills tomorrow, or if I ever find you, I warn you in the name of the living God that I will stamp you out of life!”
I saw the loathsome thing writhe into Abner’s coat and seize the wallet and slip out through the door; and a moment later I heard a horse. And I crept back on to Roy’s heifer skin.
When I came down at daylight my Uncle Abner was reading by the fire.
Hesketh Prichard
(1876–1922)
Several of mystery fiction’s distinguished writers hailed from Canada while setting most of their fiction elsewhere. This group includes, for example, Ross Macdonald, the creator of twentieth-century detective Lew Archer, and the great Victorian crime writer Grant Allen, creator of master con artistcontracted malaria in the Carib Colonel Clay. A different genus comprises writers from elsewhere who set some of their fiction in Canada. In this group we find Hesketh Prichard, an outsider who placed in the wilds of the north an original and intriguing variation on the Sherlock Holmes type of detective—November Joe.
Like Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, November Joe notices seemingly irrelevant minutiae in the woods. Like Sherlock Holmes, he turns coy about the clues’ importance until he’s ready to talk—and, when he solves a case, doesn’t hesitate to serve as a vigilante judge and jury. Although Hesketh Prichard doesn’t specify to which native people Joe belongs, and the text is even vague about whether his ancestry is only half-native, mostly he portrays Joe without the usual Anglo-Saxon condescension of the era. Our narrator’s primary response to Joe, in time-honored Watson fashion, is dazzled admiration.
Joe’s interpretations of the clues seem reasonable in part because Hesketh Prichard understood outdoor life. He was also the author of Through Trackless Labrador and Hunting-Camps in Wood and Wilderness. Born in India to a Scottish officer in the British military, he grew up to become an acclaimed cricket bowler and then a big-game hunter, restless explorer, and travel writer. He contracted malaria in the Caribbean, named a Patagonian river in honor of his mother, and discovered a South American species of grass that soon bore the species name prichardii. He is even credited with improving marksmanship and sniper training in the British army during World War I. He may refer to a moose’s “horns” when he means “antlers,” but he knows which part of a canoe’s hull is called the stem, that balsam boughs make soft bedding, and that in this region of North America ruffed grouse are known as hardwood partridges. Prichard also wrote under a pseudonym, H. Heron, collaborating with his mother, who wrote as E. Heron. Together they created the pioneer psychic detective Flaxman Low, and also Don Q, a figure similar to Robin Hood who later appeared in Hollywood films as Don Q, Son of Zorro, starring swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks.
“The Crime at Big Tree Portage” originally appeared as the third chapter of November Joe: Detective of the Woods, which Houghton Mifflin published in Boston in 1913. Like so many detective series of the time, it progresses from chapter to chapter although, after the first two set the scene, each chapter is a self-contained case. This first recorded adventure is set in the early autumn of 1908. The narrator, a harried Quebec businessman named James Quaritch, has been prescribed a three-month hunting trip in the wilderness to calm his money-stressed nerves. On earlier expeditions he met a smart teenage assistant guide named November Joe. When Quaritch’s doctor recommends a hunting trip, he explains that Joe is now a man of twenty-four who is not only a respected guide but has become something of a legend as a hawkeyed woodlands detective. Later a friend of Joe’s reveals that the tracker was offered a
thousand dollars a month to move to New York City and become a detective—but he turned the offer down, declaring that “he would rather be tied to a tree in the woods for the rest of his life than live on Fifth Avenue.” Joe lives twenty-seven miles from the nearest telegraph office, so Quaritch heads off to meet him at his camp, only to be asked to deliver to Joe the message that a man named Henry Lyon has been found murdered in his woodland camp and that tracking down the culprit will result in a fifty-dollar reward for November Joe. Quaritch talks Joe into letting him tag along and thus becomes the first backwoods Watson, in a vivid and suspenseful series that has been unfairly forgotten in the decades since its debut.
The Crime at Big Tree Portage
I have sometimes wondered whether he was not irked at the prospect of my proffered companionship, and whether he did not at first intend to shake me off by obvious and primitive methods.
He has in later days assured me that neither of my suppositions was correct, but there has been a far-off look in his eyes while he denied them, which leaves me still half-doubtful.
However these things may be, it is certain that I had my work, and more than my work, cut out for me in keeping up with November who, although he was carrying a pack while I was unloaded, travelled through the woods at an astonishing pace.
He moved from the thighs, bending a little forward. However thick the underbrush and the trees, he never once halted or even wavered, but passed onward with neither check nor pause. Meanwhile, I blundered in his tracks until at last, when we came out on the bank of a strong and swiftly flowing river, I was fairly done, and felt that, had the journey continued much longer, I must have been forced to give in.
November threw down his pack and signed to me to remain beside it, while he walked off downstream, only to reappear with a canoe.
We were soon aboard her. Of the remainder of our journey I am sorry to say I can recall very little. The rustle of the water as it hissed against our stem, and the wind in the birches and junipers on the banks, soon lulled me. I was only awakened by the canoe touching the bank at Big Tree.
Big Tree Portage is a recognized camping place, situated between the great main lumber-camp of Briston and Harpur and the settlement of St. Amiel, and it lies about equidistant from both. Old fire-scars in the clearing showed black not more than thirty yards from the water. From the canoe we were in full sight of the scene of the tragedy.
A small shelter of boughs stood beneath the spreading branches of a large fir; the ground all about was strewn with tins and debris. On a bare space in front of the shelter, beside the charred logs of a camp-fire, a patch of blue caught my eye. This, as my sight grew accustomed to the light, resolved itself into the shape of a huge man. He lay upon his face, and the wind fluttered the blue blouse which he was wearing. It came upon me with a shock that I was looking at the body of Henry Lyon, the murdered man.
November, standing up in the canoe, a wood picture in his buckskin shirt and jeans, surveyed the scene in silence, then pushed off again and paddled up and down, staring at the bank. After a bit he put in and waded ashore.
In obedience to a sign I stayed in the canoe, from which I watched the movements of my companion. First, he went to the body and examined it with minute care; next, he disappeared within the shelter, came out, and stood for a minute staring towards the river; finally, he called to me to come ashore.
I had seen November turn the body over, and as I came up I was aware of a great ginger-bearded face, horribly pale, confronting the sky. It was easy to see how the man had died, for the bullet had torn a hole at the base of the neck. The ground beside him was torn up as if by some small sharp instruments.
The idea occurred to me that I would try my hand at detection. I went into the shelter. There I found a blanket, two freshly flayed bearskins, and a pack, which lay open. I came out again and carefully examined the ground in all directions. Suddenly looking up, I saw November Joe watching me with a kind of grim and covert amusement.
“What are you looking for?” said he.
“The tracks of the murderer.”
“You won’t find them.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t make none.”
I pointed out the spot where the ground was torn.
“The lumberman that found him—spiked boots,” said November.
“How do you know he was not the murderer?”
“He didn’t get here till Lyon had been dead for hours. Compare his tracks with Lyon’s … much fresher. No, Mr. Sport, that cock won’t fight.”
“Then, as you seem to know so much, tell me what you do know.”
“I know that Lyon reached here in the afternoon of the day before yesterday. He’d been visiting his traps upstream. He hadn’t been here more’n a few minutes, and was lighting his pipe in the shelter there, when he hears a voice hail him. He comes out and sees a man in a canoe shoved into the bank. That man shot him dead and cleared off—without leaving a trace.”
“How can you be sure of all this?” I asked, for not one of these things had occurred to my mind.
“Because I found a pipe of tobacco not rightly lit, but just charred on top, beside Lyon’s body, and a newly used match in this shack. The man that killed him come downstream and surprised him.”
“How can you tell he came downstream?”
“Because, if he’d come upstream Lyon would ‘a’ seen him from the shack,” said November with admirable patience.
“You say the shot was fired from a canoe?”
“The river’s too wide to shoot across; and, anyway, there’s the mark of where the canoe rested agin the bank. No, this is the work of a right smart woodsman, and he’s not left me one clue as to who he is. But I’m not through with him, mister. Such men as he needs catching … Let’s boil the kettle.”
We laid the dead man inside the shack, and then, coming out once more into the sunlight, sat down beside a fire which we built among the stones on the bank of the river. Here November made tea in true woods fashion, drawing all the strength and bitterness from the leaves by boiling them. I was wondering what he would do next, for it appeared that our chance of catching the murderer was infinitesimal, since he had left no clue save the mark on the bank where his canoe had rested among the reeds while he fired his deadly bullet. I put my thoughts into words.
“You’re right,” said November. “When a chap who’s used to the woods life takes to crime, he’s harder to lay hands on than a lynx in a alder patch.”
“There is one thing which I don’t understand,” said I. “Why did not the murderer sink Lyon’s body in the water? It would have been well hidden there.”
The young woodsman pointed to the river, which foamed in low rapids about dark heads of rock.
“He couldn’t trust her; the current’s sharp, and would put the dead man ashore as like as not,” he replied. “And if he’d landed to carry it down to his canoe, he’d have left tracks. No, he’s done his work to rights from his point of view.”
I saw the force of the argument, and nodded.
“And more’n that, there’s few people,” he went on, “travel up and down this river. Lyon might ‘a’ laid in that clearing till he was a skeleton, but for the chance of that lumber-jack happening along.”
“Then which way do you think the murderer has fled?”
“Can’t say,” said he, “and, anyhow, he’s maybe eighty miles away by this time.”
“Will you try and follow him?”
“No, not yet. I must find out something about him first. But, look here, mister, there’s one fact you haven’t given much weight to. This shooting was pre-meditated. The murderer knew that Lyon would camp here. The chances are a hundred to one against their having met by accident. The chap that killed him followed him downstream. Now, suppose I can find Lyon’s last camp, I may learn something more. It can’t be very far off, for he had a tidy-sized pack to carry, besides those green skins, which loaded him a bit … And, anyway, it’s my only chance.”
>
So we set out upon our walk. November soon picked up Lyon’s trail, leading from Big Tree Portage to a disused tote-road, which again led us due west between the aisles of the forest. From midday on through the whole of the afternoon we travelled. Squirrels chattered and hissed at us from the spruces, hardwood partridges drummed in the clearings, and once a red-deer buck bounded across our path with its white flag waving and dipping as it was swallowed up in the sun-speckled orange and red of the woods.
Lyon’s trail was, fortunately, easy to follow, and it was only where, at long intervals, paths from the north or south broke into the main logging-road that November had reason to pause. But one by one we passed these by, until at last the tracks we were following shot away among the trees, and after a mile of deadfalls and moss debouched into a little clearing beside a backwater grown round with high yellow grass, and covered over the larger part of its surface with lily-pads.
The trail, after leading along the margin of this water, struck back to a higher reach of the same river that ran by Big Tree Portage, and then we were at once on the site of the deserted camp.
The very first thing my eye lit upon caused me to cry out in excitement, for side by side were two beds of balsam branches, that had evidently been placed under the shelter of the same tent cover. November, then, was right; Lyon had camped with someone on the night before he died.
I called out to him. His quiet patience and an attitude as if rather detached from events fell away from him like a cloak, and with almost uncanny swiftness he was making his examination of the camp.
I entirely believe that he was unconscious of my presence, so concentrated was he on his work as I followed him from spot to spot with an interest and excitement that no form of big-game shooting has ever given me. Now, man was the quarry, and, as it seemed, a man more dangerous than any beast. But I was destined to disappointment, for, as far as I could see, Joe discovered neither clue nor anything unusual.
