South from Hudson Bay: An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys

by Ethel C. Brill

  XIV PEMBINA

  Without alarm or hint of lurking enemy, men and beasts made their wayslowly up the steep river bank and through the woods to the prairie. Thecarts, shafts out, had been arranged in a circle, and within thisdefensive barricade camp had been pitched. Families fortunate enough tohave tents had set them up. Others had devised shelters by stretching abuffalo skin, a blanket, or a square of canvas over the box and one wheelof a cart. The ponies, hobbled around the fore legs or staked out withlong rawhide ropes, were left to feed on the short, dry prairie grass,and to take care of themselves, but the few precious oxen and cows werecarefully watched and guarded against straying.

  With the fuel brought from the woods fires were kindled within thecircle. Kettles were swung on tripods of sticks or on stakes driven intothe hard ground and slanted over the blaze. Pemmican and tea had beensupplied to the Swiss. The older settlers had, in addition, a littlebarley meal for porridge and a few potatoes which they roasted in theashes. Louis and Walter eked out their scanty supper with a handful ofhazelnuts that had escaped the notice of the squirrels in the woods. Theautumn was too far advanced for berries of any kind.

  After the meal, Walter made the acquaintance of the MacKay family, Neil'sburly, red-bearded father, his mother, his two sisters, and next youngerbrother. The eldest brother, who was married, had gone to Pembina nearlya month earlier. Mrs. MacKay, a tall, thin woman with a rather sternface, spoke little French, but with true Highland hospitality she madeWalter and Louis welcome to the family fire. Wrapped in a blanket andknitting a stocking, she sat on a three-legged stool close to the blaze.At her right was her older daughter patching, by firelight, the sleeve ofa blue cloth capote. On the other side, the father was mending a piece ofharness, cutting the ends of the rawhide straps into fine strips andbraiding them as if he were splicing a rope. Neil too was busy cleaningand oiling his gun, and his younger brother, a sandy-haired lad of ten,was whittling a wooden arrow. The two little children had been put to bedin a snug nest of blankets and robes underneath the cart. The sight ofthis family gathering around the fire gave Walter a feeling ofhomesickness and loneliness that brought a lump to his throat. Thefeeling deepened as he and his companion strolled from cart to cart andfire to fire. Everyone in the camp but Louis and himself had his ownfamily circle, and Louis was on the way to home and mother.

  It was the Lajimonieres who gave the two boys the warmest welcome andmade the Swiss lad forget his homesickness. They were old friends of theBrabant family, and Louis called Madame Lajimoniere "_marraine_." She hadacted as his godmother when Pere Provencher baptized him. Indeed she wasgodmother to so many of the Canadian children at St. Boniface and Pembinathat the younger members of the two settlements seldom called her by anyother name. There was no Indian blood in Marie Lajimoniere, and she hadlived in the valley of the Red River longer than any other white woman.Several years before the first band of Selkirk settlers had reached theforks of the Assiniboine and the Red, she had come with her husband tothe Red River country from Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. When, in1818, the Roman Catholic missionaries, Father Provencher and FatherDumoulin, had arrived in the Selkirk Colony, Madame Lajimoniere hadreceived them with warmth and enthusiasm. She was a devout member oftheir church, and she gladly stood sponsor for the Canadian and _boisbrule_ children brought to the priests for baptism. Louis had a warmaffection for his _marraine_, and Walter took an immediate liking to herand her family.

  One of the Lajimoniere children was a girl of about Elise Perier's age, aslender, black-haired, red-cheeked girl named Reine. When Reine, somewhatshyly, questioned the Swiss boy about his long journey from Fort York, hetold her of Elise and Max and Mr. Perier, and how anxious he was abouttheir welfare.

  "Oh, we will all help to make them comfortable and happy when they cometo Pembina," Reine eagerly assured him. "It will be delightful to have anew girl, just my age, who speaks French. The Scotch girls are so hard totalk to, when you don't know their language or they yours. I shall likeyour sister I know, and I hope she will like me."

  At Louis' urging, Jean Baptiste Lajimoniere told Walter of the greatestadventure of his adventurous life. In the winter of 1815 and '16 he hadgone alone from Red River to Montreal. He carried letters to LordSelkirk,--who had come over from England,--telling how the Northwestershad driven away his colonists. All alone, the plucky voyageur faced theperils and hardships of the long wilderness journey. He came throughsafely, to give the letters into Lord Selkirk's own hands and relate tohis own ears the story of the settlers' troubles. Lajimoniere told histale well, and the boy forgot his own perplexities as he listened. Notuntil the story was finished did Walter realize how late the hour was,long past time to seek his blanket. Madame Lajimoniere and the childrenhad already disappeared under their buffalo skin shelter, Louis hadstolen quietly away, and the whole camp was wrapped in silence.

  Walter thanked the guide, said good night, and hurried back to his owncamping place. The horses and cattle had been brought within the circleand picketed or tied to cart wheels. The settlers were taking no chanceof Indian horse thieves making away with their beasts. Everyone in thecamp, except the guards stationed outside the barricade, was sleeping,and the fires were burning low. The night was dark, without moon orstars. How lonely and insignificant was this little circle of carts, withthe prairie stretching around it and the vast arch of the sky overhead!The flickering light of the fires, only partly revealing picketed beasts,clumsy carts, and rude shelters, seemed merely to intensify the darkness,the vastness, the loneliness beyond.

  Not a wild animal, except a few gophers, had been seen all day; the carttrain was too noisy. But now the wind that swept the prairie brought achorus of voices, the high-pitched barking of the small prairie wolves,and the long-drawn howling of the big, gray timber ones. The dogsanswered, until their masters, waking, belabored them into silence. Thecamps along the rivers and the shores of Lake Winnipeg had seemed remoteenough from civilization, but not one had impressed the mountain-bred ladwith such an overwhelming sense of loneliness as did this circle of cartson the prairie.

  He found Louis already asleep, and crawled in beside him. There he lay,listening to the wolves and, when their howlings ceased for a time, tothe faint and far-away cries of a flock of migrating birds passing highoverhead. Then he drifted away into sleep.

  The approach of dawn was beginning to gray the blackness in the east whenevery dog in the camp suddenly began to growl. The horses grew restive,neighing and moving about. Startled wide awake, Walter, thrilling at thethought of a Sioux attack, asked his comrade what the matter was. Louisdid not know. He had thrown aside his blanket and was crawling out fromunder the cart. As Walter followed, he heard the guide calling to thewatchers beyond the barricade. The guards replied that all was quiet onthe prairie. They could see nothing wrong, discern no moving form.

  For a few minutes everyone in the camp was awake, anxious, excited, butnothing happened, no war whoop came out of the darkness. The dogs ceasedgrowling, the ponies neighing, and soon all was silence again. What hadcaused the alarm, whether prowling wild beast or skulking man, or themere restlessness of some sleepless dog or nervous horse, no one couldtell.

  The camp was astir before the sun was up, and the first task was to waterthe horses and cattle. Louis remained behind to get breakfast whileWalter rode the pony to the river.

  The late start from Fort Douglas made getting to Pembina that dayimpossible. After plodding along the prairie track and crossing severalsmall streams, the cart train passed a cold and stormy night in the openbeyond the wooded bank of a muddy creek that Louis called Riviere auxMarais. Pembina was reached next day in a driving storm of rain, sleetand snow.

  The Pembina River took its name from _anepeminan_, the Ojibwa term forthe shrub we call highbush cranberry. The junction of the Pembina withthe Red was an old trading place. The Northwest men had establishedthemselves there before the close of the eighteenth century, and in theearly ye
ars of the nineteenth all three rival companies, the Northwest,the Hudson Bay, and the New Northwest or X. Y. Company, as it was calledby the old Northwesters, maintained posts a short distance from oneanother. Those old posts were gone,--burned or torn down,--long beforethe time of this story. The two forts then standing had been built at alater date. Fort Daer, the Selkirk Colony post, dated from the autumn of1812, when the first of the colonists, under the leadership of MilesMcDonnell, had come to the Pembina to winter. It stood on the south bankof that river near where it empties into the Red. Just opposite, acrossthe Pembina, was a former Northwest fort, which had become, since theuniting of the companies, a Hudson Bay trading post.

  Some of the Scotch settlers and all of the Swiss except Walter were to belodged at Fort Daer until they could build cabins of their own. Louis hadasked Walter to be his guest. The cart he was driving, which was not hisown, was loaded with the household goods of some of the settlers, and hadto be taken to Fort Daer. After leaving the fort, the two boys, carryingtheir scanty belongings in packs, made their way to Louis' home. Thelittle village of log cabins was not actually on the Pembina, but nearthe bank of the Red a mile or more from the junction point. The arrivalat Fort Daer of a cart train from down river was an important event, butthe abominable weather curbed curiosity, and the boys saw few people asthey made their way against the storm to the Brabant cabin.

  Louis' mother, hoping that he might have come with the party from FortDouglas, was on the lookout for him. Before he could reach the door, itflew open. Followed by the younger children and three shaggy-haired sleddogs, Mrs. Brabant ran out into the sleet and snow. Very heartily Louishugged and kissed her. When he presented his companion, she welcomedWalter warmly. The children greeted him shyly. The dogs, inclined atfirst to resent his presence, concluded, after a curt command and a kickor two from the moccasined toe of Louis' younger brother, to accept thenewcomer as one of the family.

  To the Swiss lad, weary, soaked, and chilled through, the rude but snugcabin with a fire blazing in the rough stone fireplace, promised acomfort that seemed almost heavenly. He had not spent a night or eveneaten a meal inside a building for many weeks. The warmth was sograteful, the smell from the steaming kettle that hung above the blaze soappetizing, that for a few minutes he could do nothing but stand beforethe fire, speechless, half dazed by the sudden transition from the wetand the bitter cold.

  He was roused by Mrs. Brabant who offered him dry moccasins and one ofthe shirts she had been making for Louis during his absence. Walter had adry shirt in his pack, but he accepted the moccasins gratefully. Hisshoes were not only soaked, but so worn from the long journey that theyscarcely held together. The cabin, one of the best in the settlement,boasted two rooms, and Louis' mother and sisters retired to the other onewhile the boys changed their clothes. As soon as they were warm andpartly dry, supper was served.

  The household sat on stools and floor in front of the fire, each with hiscup and wooden platter. From the bubbling pot standing on the hearthMadame Brabant ladled out generous portions. The rich and savory stew wasmade up of buffalo meat, wild goose, potatoes, carrots, onions, and otheringredients that Walter did not recognize but enjoyed nevertheless. Itwas the best meal he had tasted in months, and he ate until he could holdno more.

  The hunters had returned only a few days before from the great fallbuffalo chase, and there was abundance of meat in the settlement. It wasduring the autumn hunt two years before that Louis' father had beenaccidentally killed, and the Brabant family had not accompanied thehunters since that time, but Mrs. Brabant's brother had brought her asupply of fresh and dried meat and pemmican. The goose thirteen-year-oldRaoul had shot, and the potatoes and other vegetables were from theBrabant garden. The grasshopper hordes had missed Pembina. Mrs. Brabantexpressed sympathy for the poor Selkirk colonists who had lost all theircrops. She listened with lively interest to the boys' account of the tripfrom Fort York, and asked the Swiss lad many questions about his ownpeople.

  Walter was so grateful for shelter, warmth, food, and the kindly welcomehe was receiving that he could not have been critical of the Brabantfamily whatever they had been. As it happened, he liked them allheartily. He was to discover, within the next few days, that thishousehold was considerably superior to most of those in Pembina. Theinterior of the cabin was neat and clean, differing markedly in thisrespect from many of the _bois brule_ dwellings. Her straight black hair,smoothly arranged in braids hanging over her shoulders, her dark skin,and high cheek-bones betrayed the Ojibwa in Louis' mother, but in everyother way, especially in her ready smile, lively speech, and alertmovements, she seemed wholly French. She wore deerskin leggings withmoccasins, but her dark blue calico dress, belted with a strip of brightbeadwork, was fresh and clean. Her little daughters were dressed in thesame fashion, except that Marie, the elder, who was about ten years old,wore skirt and tunic of soft, fringed doeskin, instead of calico. Thedark eyes of both little girls sparkled when Louis, unknotting a smallbundle wrapped in a red handkerchief, handed each one a length ofbright-colored ribbon, one red, the other orange, to tie in their longblack braids. For his mother he brought a silk handkerchief, a giltlocket, and a packet of good tea, the kind, he had been told, the ChiefFactor at Fort York drank. Raoul was made happy with a shiny new knife.

  Louis and Walter were tired enough to take to their blankets early. Mrs.Brabant and the girls slept in a great box bed, made of hand-hewn boardspainted bright blue, that stood in the corner of the room where thefireplace was. In the smaller room, which was nothing but a lean-to shedwith a dirt floor, was a curious couch for the boys. It was made ofstrips of rawhide stretched tightly on a frame of poles, and was coveredwith buffalo robe and blankets. This cot Louis shared with Walter, whofound the rawhide straps not nearly so hard as bare ground. Raoul rolledhimself in a robe and lay down in front of the fire.