It was not until Steel, piloted by Raoul, had entered the tunnelled hemlock maze below that he smelled smoke. And, after he had been looking at a vast windfall for a few moments, he realized that he was staring at a dwelling made by human hands for human habitation.
The stark bleached and tangled mass of this huge windfall projected from the hemlock’s edges far out across the channel. Some tempest had cut a knife-like slice from the oak and chestnut timber, piling it like a gigantic bundle of twigs. And in the midst of this abattis stood the dwelling of the recent Jules Vallé.
Where the great trees lay uprooted, piled high in chaotic confusion, the walls of the hut had been faced with grey bark. Where, on stilts made from saplings, the dwelling projected over the frozen channel, it had been rounded and woven out of reeds and roots, as cleverly as a muskrat’s domed abode, set in among scraggy and leafless tamaracks, concealed by the bristling abattis of the windfall.
A thin, translucent smoke eddied from a single clay chimney. Otherwise there were no signs of life there except a runway leading to the closed door. It twisted narrowly and naturally through the windfall, like the runway made by rabbits through briers. Along this Steel followed the boy and silently entered the hut at his heels.
Two rooms were visible; in one was a rusty range; and a dishevelled girl of fifteen or so knelt there shoving in chunks of frosty wood.
“Jeanne!” said the boy.
The girl turned her head, stared at Steel through the curly disorder of her hair, rose, and came toward him, brushing aside the tangle of bronze locks.
“I don’t know who he is,” remarked the boy, glancing at Steel without embarrassment, “but I guess he wants something to eat — or something.... Is there anything?”
“I could make a stew—” looking at Steel with eyes like her brother’s, big, grey, and fearless. “There is a partridge and two squirrels in the stewpan.”
“I am not hungry,” said the man, slightly uneasy under her clear, expressionless gaze.
“Oh,” she said, coolly. “Why did you come, then?” The simplicity of the question; the direct gaze left the man at a loss.
“I guess he’s trapping it,” remarked the boy, turning away, busy with his odoriferous skunk pelt once more. “Are you?” she asked in a friendly voice.
“No,” said Steel, “I’m not trapping.”
“Hunting,” she concluded with a doubtful glance at his equipment. “But the deer are in the mountains, yarding, and we have had no meat yet.” She stepped nearer: “Raoul tries very hard — but he is so young,” she added, lowering her voice to a confidential tone.... “Will you drop your pack and sit down? And I’ll start the fire.”
“Thank you,” said Steel.
“If you’re fixing to stay here a spell,” remarked the boy, looking around over his shoulder, “I’ll get some balsam boughs for you.”
“There are only two bunks,” explained the girl. “Father sleeps in the kitchen. It’s warm: you’ll find it quite nice.”
“Are you sure you can keep me?” asked Steel, glancing furtively around at the stark poverty of the place.
“We’ll do our best,” nodded Raoul, fussing with his pelt. “Jeanne can cook all right when there’s anything to cook; can’t you, Jeanne?”
The girl blushed and presently ventured a glance at Steel, who had rid himself of pack, snowshoes, and rifle.
There were two benches in the hut, but no chairs: Jeanne seated herself and began to twist up her tangled hair.
The gown she wore was tied on with strings, the apron a rag. Arms and body seemed thin and immature; only her oval face was softly rounded under its weather-bloom from sun and wind.
“And so you and your brother live here all alone,” remarked Steel pleasantly.
“With father.”
“Of course,” he said hastily. “I forgot your father. But even — with him here — it must be pretty lonely for you sometimes.”
“It’s lonely all right,” remarked Raoul, the transplanted city boy’s vernacular still flavouring his speech.
“Nobody has ever come to the house,” explained Jeanne, “except Dan Cloon and Bram Chace. They run father’s furs — and anything else we may have.”
“Your father was — is — a trapper?”
“I guess he does about everything. He has had a great deal of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes, with people who interfere when he is trying to earn a living. It makes him very angry — because we are so poor, and they won’t let father make a living.”
“Who won’t let him?” asked Steel quietly.
“I don’t exactly know — game protectors — and other men. When the woods yonder took fire they burned for three days before the call for fire fighters went out and the Fire Warden came. They promised father two dollars a day, and he fought the fire for a week. But” — and the girl’s eyes flashed— “they never paid him. And the Fire Warden swore at father and said he ought to be jailed!”
“Jailed? Why?”
“I didn’t hear the reason he gave; Raoul and I were a little distance away, beating out sparks in the brush field. Father became very, very angry, and that night there was nothing to eat, and that made him still angrier. And he said he had a right to live and that some day he’d kill any man who interfered with him.”
Steel seated himself on a bench, crossed one knee over the other, and folded his arms to listen.
Raoul, who was now scrubbing his hands in a basin of soap and water, turned his curly head:
“We left the city because we couldn’t live on father’s wages. Now it seems we can’t even live here.”
“As soon as we came here, where we do no harm to anybody,” said the girl, “the State interfered with father. We can’t even live in Hell’s Ashes without getting into trouble.”
“The State stole a whole barrel of partridges that father shot,” explained Raoul, “and Bram Chace was sent to jail.”
“And father had to go away for three months.... We nearly died that winter — the porcupines got in and stole most of the pork; and fishing through the ice was poor, and rabbits scarce.”
“I had sore gums,” said Raoul carelessly. “Raw potatoes cured me; Hank brought us half a sack.”
“Were you two children here all winter alone and without any food except what you could kill?” asked Steel.
The girl nodded and shrugged:
“It was not so very bad — only Raoul ate some roots that poisoned him, and I was afraid he was dying. And if a deer had not come down by our kitchen door one morning I think we both might have died.” She picked up a handful of moss and birch-bark, shoved it into the range and lighted it.
Steel said:
“Did you shoot the deer, Jeanne?”
She came back to the bench beside him:
“Yes, I shot the buck. It was hard work getting the first bit of meat. I had no strength and Raoul was very sick. But the soup was good and I managed to cut up the buck, little by little.”
“The chickadees, meat-birds, and jays had a feast. I could see them from the window,” said Raoul. “But I was afraid the wildcats would drag off our deer before Jeanne could cut it up. And I was too sick to help her. Oh, it was fierce, I can tell you.”
Jeanne sat a moment, silent and absent-eyed, her small, weather-stained hands gathered under her apron. Then, glancing up from her reverie, she encountered Steel’s gaze and smiled faintly. Rising, she took the brimming stewpan and set it on the rusty range, covering it.
The range was about done for; through its bulging sides, cracks showed red streaks of fire; and the thought came to Steel that a conflagration would leave these children naked in the most desolate and wretched wilderness he had ever seen.
Raoul said:
“I guess I’ll take a look at my traps. Jeanne, are you going to fish or look after the deadfalls?”
“I guess I can do both,” replied the girl, picking up the almost furless remains of a coonskin overcoa
t and struggling into it.
A rusty shotgun stood in a corner: the boy took it, nodded civilly to his guest, and went out. Steel, however, caught him at the doorstep, holding out his own warm Mackinaw.
“Get into this, Raoul,” he insisted; “and wear these one-fingered mitts, too.”
The boy, astonished, suffered himself to be invested with the warm wool garment, looking up at Steel with an expression varying between surprise and doubt.
“Won’t you want it yourself?” he asked at length.
“No. Run along, Raoul. All the deer have not yet yarded. Keep a sharp lookout.”
“I will,” said the boy.
Halfway out of the abattis he turned and came running back.
“I meant to say thank you,” he explained. “You are very kind to me. I noticed that when you first spoke to me. Your — your face is — kind.”
“Don’t mention it, old chap,” returned Steel, flushing; and, on impulse, he threw one arm around the boy’s shoulders.... And that finished him; a blinding light flared in his brain, illuminating the source of impulse. For had his young wife survived childbirth his son should now have been as tall as this ragged boy beside him.
The man’s throat had closed, choking back the convulsive, inarticulate sound of a sorrow forever new; his arm slipped from the boy’s shoulders.
“Good-bye,” said the child. The man only nodded, turned back into the hut.
To and fro he strode, hands clasped tightly behind his back. Jeanne, tugging at a pair of timber-jack’s boots, glanced up at him now and then. After a while he fished out a brier pipe from the pocket of his heavy leather shooting coat and set it between his teeth, still continuing his sturdy, nervous pacing.
The girl wound an old wool comforter around her head and throat, picked up a tangled bundle of tip-ups, lines, sinkers, and hooks, pocketed a rag in which strips of meat from some uneatable animal were rolled, glanced once more at Steel, and then moved toward the door.
“Jeanne,” he said brusquely.
She halted.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“And Raoul?”
“Thirteen.”
Neither spoke for a few moments; then Steel took his fur cap, gloves and rifle from the bench beside him.
“I’ll go with you,” he said briefly.
On the way through the snowy hemlocks down to the frozen channel she replied very simply, almost carelessly, to his steady fire of questions, telling him unconcernedly of her childhood’s poverty and want in the city; of starvation wages, of strikes, of violence, of police, and of hospitals.
But the more dreadful destitution of this fatherless child, here amid these devastated wastes, was now more painfully apparent to the man. And when with her slender, frozen fingers, she began to untangle the stiff fishlines, he stepped up and took from her the whole mess of line, hook, and sinker, drew off his fur gloves with his teeth, pulled them over her unresisting hands, and set about disentangling the snarl himself.
“I am used to doing it,” she expostulated, timidly.
“So am I,” he said. “Where’s your bait, Jeanne?”
She drew from the pocket of her moth-eaten coonskin coat the cloth-covered roll of shredded flesh.
“What is it?” he inquired, sniffing gingerly.
“Fox.”
“Oh. Well, it’s good enough for lake trout.”
He baited and laid out each line beside the holes already excavated, broke the shell of ice over them with his rifle butt, set the tip-ups in place, lowered the baited hooks. The child looked on gravely.
“Is it well done, Jeanne?” he asked gaily.
“Yes.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.... Won’t you take your gloves now?”
“Nonsense,” he said, pulling out and loading his pipe.
When he had lighted it he walked over and passed his arm under hers. She looked up at him out of her clear, grey eyes.
“We’ll walk about on the ice to keep warm,” he explained. So together, arm under arm, they paced the ice along the line of fish holes, up and down, to and fro, till in her face the pink began to glow and her lovely mouth grew red.
“You’re quite certain that you’re warm enough?” he asked.
“Yes. Your gloves keep my wrists so comfortable. Are you sure you don’t need them?”
“Very sure.... Jeanne, would you tell me a little about your mother?”
“Yes,” said the child seriously. “She is dead.”
He waited.
“It was in the city.... A very cold winter. In Mama’s room there was an air shaft, and never any sun. The doctor said that was why she died.”
“I see.”
“Mama was so pretty.... She loved music.... She spoke French and English very well. She had been a salesgirl in a Montreal music shop.... Did you ever see Papa?”
“Yes — once.”
“He is very handsome. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” he said warmly, swallowing the lie and the memory of Jules Vallé as he lay there on the station platform, all splashed with blackish blood — a gaunt, shrunken, emaciated, grotesque thing of horror in his dingy trapper’s dress.
A tip-up signalled them; Steel walked over to it and jerked a white perch out onto the ice. Before he could bait again, the flapping fish had frozen stiff.
“That’s a very good fish to eat,” remarked Jeanne gravely, “and we are very lucky to get him, because there are not many in this creek.”
Hanging closer and more confidently to Steel’s arm as they resumed their pacing, she chattered at hazard of this and that:
“As for fish, I like trout — speckled ones, not the lake trout. But I don’t mind eating ‘lakers’; indeed, I am only too willing when I’m hungry.... And” — her voice became charmingly low and confidential— “please don’t tell Raoul, but I can not eat pickerel, because inside one that I cleaned I found — ugh! — a rat!”
“Horrible!” he admitted. “But a big pickerel will do that — and even snap up a young duck.”
She gave a dainty shudder and clung tighter to his arm.
“Once,” she said, “when Father was away and Raoul had gone trapping, I was fishing — down yonder where the stream flows through the woods, I saw three lynxes come out on the ice and look at me.”
“Were you afraid?” he smiled.
“Not at first. But when I threw a stick at them and they only sat down on the ice and snarled at me — then I was afraid.”
“Rather,” he said. “What did you do, Jeanne?”
“I called as loudly as I could. But Raoul was too far away on the sand-hills to hear me. Then I threw more sticks, but those wildcats sat there flattening their ears at me.... And I began to walk backward toward the house. And what do you suppose?”
“What?” he asked, much interested.
“Why, all they wanted was the frozen pile of fish I had caught. And they came trotting up and began to fight and snarl — I never saw such a sight! Wasn’t it funny?”
They both laughed, she clinging to his arm, grey eyes dancing, enjoying his mirth, he enjoying her youthful delight in her own story.
As for Jeanne, her little heart, which had so suddenly thawed out from the long winter of its hibernation, awoke, exulting like an April bluebird.
What a wonderful comrade was this tall man who had so miraculously appeared in her isolated life to talk to her, walk with her, laugh with her, care for her with great, warm fur gloves because her hands were numb and cracked!
When her laughter died away, and the excitement had died in her eyes, she walked beside him, clasping his arm, as though she were treading in a blissful dream.
Looking around at her, he saw the vague, reminiscent smile still touching her red lips, the happy light lingering still in her pretty eyes.
“What a jolly little comrade you are!” he said.
“Oh!... But you!” she breathed, smiling up at him. “You are more
like a boy than a man.”
“I am thirty-two, Jeanne.”
“Really? You seem no older than I. I shall be sixteen on Christmas Day.”
“A birthday!” he exclaimed.
But as she did not seem to think the day of any particular interest, either as Christmas or as her natal day, and as she merely looked at him blankly when he spoke of presents, he said nothing more. But within him his heart was heavy for the childless parents of the earth who would have made a birthday and a Christmas mean something to this adorable child.
And then, abruptly and with a shock, he recollected that French Jules was dead and buried; and that sooner or later he must tell this girl and her brother.
A tip-up signalled; he jerked from the black water another perch, rebaited, came back; and Jeanne naively took possession of his arm again.
“Jeanne,” he said, “Pm hungry. How about you?”
“I always am.”
“What have you to cook?”
“Frozen potatoes,” she replied. “They are not very good. But I’ll try to fry them so you won’t mind. And then we have the stew. Shall we go and look at my deadfalls first?”
“Deadfalls,” he repeated, dismayed. “Do you set deadfalls?”
“Yes; I’ve set a lot of them. Shall we look at them before dinner?”
His position amused him. Here he was, a special warden sworn to a special duty, conniving, aiding, and abetting this ragged, half-starved, and delightful child in breaking the State game laws.
Up through the thicket they walked, broken twigs teaching her the secret mazes and labyrinths to follow; and presently he found himself standing and watching her lift a big, flat stone from the neck of a cock-grouse. The huge bird’s crop was bulging with chestnuts, one of which had lured him to destruction.
She lifted the magnificent game bird triumphantly: Steel took it without blinking and, doubling back its limp, ruffled neck, forced it into his hunting pocket.
And when all the deadfalls had been visited and they had returned to the ice, he strung the fish on a willow wand, wound up the lines, and, taking fish and rifle in one hand, abandoned the other arm to Jeanne, who took possession of it naturally and without the slightest self-consciousness.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1179
