The days are still warm, but autumn is surely here.

The days are still warm, but autumn is surely here.  The wasps are dying everywhere and lie in heaps on all the window-sills; the great water spiders have disappeared, and all day long the yellow leaves drift down silently, steadily, in the forests.  Wreaths of vapor hang over the trees, and every wind brings the pungent fall odor of distant forest fires.  The hillsides are a blaze of color, with basswoods a beautiful butter-yellow, oaks, russet and maroon and sugar maples, a flame of scarlet against the dark-green velvet of the cedars and hemlocks.  Each birch stands forth, a slender Danæ, white feet in a drift of gold.  The woods here on the island are thinning rapidly.  All sorts of hidden dells and boulders are coming to light.  Soon the whole island will lie open to the sight, and then there will no longer be anything mysterious about it.

Dried heads of goldenrod, life everlasting, and a few closed gentians are all that are left of the flowers; but the red and orange garlands of the bittersweet wave from every bush, the juniper berries are purple, and the sumacs are a wonder of great garnet velvet cones.

From a walk round the trails I bring in an assortment of seeds: beggar’s ticks, stick-seeds, Spanish needles, pitchforks—“the tramps of the vegetable world,” Burroughs calls them.  They cover my skirt, they cling to my woolen leggings, they perch on the brim of my hat.  Little pocket-shaped cases, pods with hooks, seeds shaped like tiny twin turtles, and furry balls like miniature chestnut burrs.  As I pick and brush and tear them off I wish I knew what plants had fathered every one of them.

At the approach of cold weather the small animals and the few birds that are left draw nearer to the house.  Grouse are in all the paths, flying up everywhere.  They rise with a thrashing, pounding noise and soar away over the bushes, to settle again only a little further on.  Last evening, at twilight, two of them came on the porch, the little cock ruffling it bravely, wings dragging, fantail spread, ruff standing valiantly erect.  A hen followed sedately at his heels.  They are very pretty, about the size of bantam chickens.  How I hope that I shall be here to see their young in the spring!

This afternoon a red squirrel came round the corner of the house and sat down, absentmindedly, beside me on a bench.  When he looked up and saw what he had done he gave a shriek and a bound and fled chattering off toward the sundial.  But he will come back and will probably be darting into the house when he thinks my back is turned, for there is nothing half so impudent or so mischievous as the red squirrel.  I am told that they do not “den in” as the chipmunks do.

The rabbits do their best to help me get rid of my stores.  There are hundreds of them about.  They sit under the bushes, peering out; they appear and disappear between the dry stalks of the brakes.  At evening they come close to the house, and catch bits of bread and potatoes thrown to them, then sit in the paths munching contentedly.  They are not rabbits, correctly speaking, but Canadian hares, with long brown fur, bulging black eyes, furry ears, fringed with black, and very long hind legs.  One of them comes so close and seems so fearless that it should not be difficult to tame him.  I have named him Peter.  These hares turn snow-white in winter, I am told.  Even now their coats are showing white where the winter coat is growing.

In the dusk the porcupines come pushing through the fallen leaves, snuffling and grunting.  Away in the woods the bobcats scream and snarl.  The natives accuse the bobcat of a pretty trick of lying flattened out on a limb, waiting for his prey to pass underneath, then he drops on its back to tear with tooth and talon.  They warn me not to walk in the woods after dark, for fear of this Canada lynx.

But my natural histories say that, while the lynx sometimes follows the hunter for long distances, he does it only because he is curious, and that there is no authentic record of the bobcat’s ever having attacked a man.  So I shall continue to take my walks abroad, without fear that a fierce tree cat will drop on me.  But late in the night, when I am waked by that eerie sound, that begins with a low meow, like the cry of the house cat, and goes on louder and louder, to end in a horrid screech, full of a malevolent violence, I cover my head and am glad that I am safe indoors.  I know that the lynx has come forth from his lair in a hollow tree and is hunting my poor rabbits.

There is no telephone line to the island; sometimes I am stormbound for a week, but in some underground way, the news of the neighborhood reaches me sooner or later.  Therefore, when I came out of doors the other morning, I was instantly aware of a sense of impending disaster, that hung over all the landscape.  There was no cheerful popping of guns in the fields, no hoarse voice bawled to the cattle.  At Blake’s the cause of the silence was explained.  All the men round Many Islands had been summoned to the County Court at Frontenac, to be tried for the illegal netting and export of fish out of season.  A knot of angry men had gathered on the shore, discussing the summons; anxious women hovered in the background; speculation was rife as to the identity of the informer.

It could have been none of our men, for the obvious reason that all were in the same boat.  Black Jack Beaulac, Yankee Jim, Little Jack, Long Joe, William Foret, all had received the same summons.  It must have been an inspector from Glen Avon.

“Did we not all remember a strange, white boat in the lake?  That was, without doubt, the fish warden come to spy out for nets.”

I know very little about the legality of nets versus hooks, or the open and closed seasons for fishing, but even to my ignorance there seemed grave doubts about the line of defense to be offered, and I was conscious that, being an alien and a “sport” (vernacular for sportsman, that is, summer visitor), the matter was not being freely discussed in my presence.

Next morning, while it was yet dark, Foret’s motor boat was heard, chugging solemnly round the shore, gathering up the victims to take them to court.  All day the women went softly, each wondering what was happening to her man, and devising means for scraping up the money for fines, if fines it had to be.  Henry Blake went off to town to the trial, and the day passed gray and lowering.

At red sunset the boat turned in at the narrows, but before she hove in sight the very beat of her engine signaled victory.  She came swinging down the lake, her crew upright, alert, the flag of Canada flew in the wind, her propeller kicked the water joyously.  As she made the round of the lake, to Blake’s, to Beaulac’s, to Drapeau’s, to the Mines, it needed none to tell us that all was well.

Foret touched at the island last to give news of the fight.  The case had been dismissed for lack of evidence.  There had been no conviction, no fines.

“How did it happen that there were no witnesses?” I asked.

Foret took out his pouch and stuffed his pipe carefully before he answered.

“There was eight or nine fellers there from Blue Bay,” he said.  “They looked like they’d come to testify, but, after we had talked to them a bit, it seemed like they hadn’t nothing at all to say.”

“What had you told them?” I persisted.

“Well, we told them that if any man felt like he’d any information to give, concerning netting fer fish, he’d best make his plans to leave the lake afore twelve o’clock to-night.  We meant it too; they knowed that.  Black Jack give them some very plain talk, Black Jack did.  I guess,” with a grin, “I guess that I was about the politest man there.”

“I was fined once,” William went on, reminiscently, “twenty-five dollars it was too, an’ it just about cleaned me out.  They put me on oath, you see, an’ of course, when a man’s on his oath he can’t lie.  But the next time I went to town I seen a lawyer, an’ he told me they hadn’t no right to ask me that question.  A man ain’t called on to testify against himself.  So now, when the judge asks me: ‘Did you, or did you not, net fer fish?’  I says, ‘That’s fer you to prove.  Bring on your witnesses.’  Howsoever,” he went on, “as long as all this has come up, I guess we’d as well eat mudcats fer a spell.”

So mudcats it was, until the herring began to run.

Foret has kept me supplied with fish this fall, explaining carefully that he will sell me pickerel, herring, and catfish but not bass.  Bass, being a game fish, may not be caught for the market.  I have paid for the pickerel by the pound and the bass have been gifts, for, as William justly remarks: “What are a few bass, now and then, in a friendly way?”

Foret is long, lean, powerful, with thin, keen face, steady, dark eyes, and the long, silent tread of the woodsman.  Sometimes he works in the Mica Mines; sometimes he farms a bit, or fells trees.  More often he hunts and fishes, but always he is a delightful companion, because of his unconquerable optimism and fervent interest in all that concerns a matter in hand.  He never admits a difficulty, no obstacle ever daunts him, and no one has ever heard him say an unkind thing about any living creature.

When William goes off to a dance, Jean Foret is wild with anxiety.  When he drinks a bit too much and the other men throw him into a hayfield or a barn, to sleep it off, she ranges the county in a despairing search.  When he sobers and comes home, subdued and bearing gifts, who is so contrite as he?

“Never again will I go to a dance.  There’s nothing to it at all,” he assures you.  “A man’s better off to home.”

But once in so often William takes his fling—only he is never ugly or quarrelsome when he drinks.  Even when his mind has lost control, he is quiet and peaceable, they say.

The Forets live on the mainland, three miles off, along the shore.  William is building their house by degrees.  This season he went as far as the inner wall, frame, studding, windows, chimney, and floor.  There is also an outer casing of builder’s paper tacked on with small disks of tin.  The whole edifice stands on stilts, about five feet off the ground, giving fine harbor for the hounds, and a pig or two beneath.  The first time I called to see them William made a great show of driving these animals forth.

“The boards is so thin,” he apologized, “that it seems like I can smell them dogs up through the floor.”

When I remember that one thickness of board and a few sheets of paper are all that stand between the Forets and the winter blasts, I shudder.  Not so the Forets.  They are apparently quite undismayed and look forward to the approach of winter without misgiving.

The house is divided into two rooms, each about ten feet square.  There are lace curtains at the tiny windows, bright pictures, mostly colored calendars, a gay rag carpet, and over all the comfort of an exquisite neatness, for Mrs. Foret is the cleanest housekeeper imaginable—Jennie Foret, with her snapping, black eyes, her dark hair upreared in a militant pompadour, her trim, alert figure, and quick, light movements.  Where did she acquire her love of order and her dainty, cleanly ways, I wonder?

It is a friendly place.  Chickens, ducks, geese, cats, dogs, horses and cows roll, run, squawk, and squeal all over the hillside.  In the cove before the house live-boxes are moored, motor boat and skiffs lie at anchor.  There are nets and skins drying on the fences.  Two bunches of ribbon-grass do duty for a formal garden, standing sentinel on either side of the path that winds to the door.  The house looks away across the “drowned lands” where the wicked roots and snags of the submerged forest stand in the water, threatening navigation.  The channel to the landing is winding and treacherous.  But, once at the door, no guest is ever turned away.  Wandering miner, tramp, bewildered emigrant, each is sure of a meal, a bed, and something to set him on his way.

CHAPTER IV

Wild geese flying over, cold mornings, colder nights, warn me that it is time to lay in supplies of firewood, oil and food against the coming of winter.  Last evening a laden rowboat passed the island, going eastward under the Moon of Travelers.  In the stern were a stove, a chair, a coffeepot, a frying pan, a great pile of bedding, and, surmounting all, a fiddle.  The man at the oars threw me a surly “Good night,” and turning, looked back at me with a scowl.  It was Old Bill Shelly, the hermit of the countryside—trapper, frogger, netter of fish, and general ne’er-do-well.  He has built log shacks all round the shores—little, one-room affairs, filled with a miscellaneous assortment of nets, guns, dogs, all forlorn and filthy past description.  When one becomes uninhabitable, he leaves it and moves on to the next, but at the approach of cold weather he always goes into winter quarters at Blue Bay, and his flitting, like the flitting of the other wild things, means that all nature is getting ready for “le grand frête.”

Poor Shelly! his is the only hostile glance that I have encountered in my wanderings.  Even Old Kate, the witch at Les Rapides, has smiled at me.

“Mind Old Kate,” the neighbors caution me.  “If she ever crosses her fingers at you, it’s all day with you then.”

But when I met her in the road she spoke in quite a friendly way.

“Cold weather coming,” she said.  “Get in your wood.”

Doubtless she thinks me another as crazy as herself.

So I must set about getting enough wood to last until the January sawing, and must pack eggs and butter against the time when hens stop laying and cows go dry, for there is no shop nearer than Sark, six miles away, and even if one could reach it, through the winds on the lake, or the drifts in the roads, there would be no butter or eggs to buy.

Tom Jackson, at the far end of the lake, has consented to sell me eight cords of hard wood; but to bring it to the island we must hire the big scow that ferries mica from the mines, and must have Foret’s motor boat to tug it.

This life is a great education as regards the relative values of things.  Wood and water, oil and food, are seen here in their true perspective.  Already I have learned to rate the wealth of a family by the size of the woodpile, that stands, like a rampart in the dooryard, for I know what a big stock of logs means in thrift, foresight, and hard labor.  I know what it cost to get my own wood to my hand.

City folk can pass a loaded woodcart without special emotion, indeed, half the time they do not see it, so concerned are they with the price of theater tickets, or the cut of the season’s gowns.  But I shall never look at one without seeing again a great scow moving slowly on the blue bosom of a lake, and I shall smell the delicious odor of fresh-cut maple, beech, and cedar, far sweeter than the breath of any summer garden.

Ah me!  How prosaic will seem the city’s conveniences of pipes and furnaces as compared with the daily adventure of carrying in the logs, and battling down a windswept trail to dip the pails into a pit of crystal ice water!  Never again shall I turn on the spigot in a bathroom without a swift vision of that drift-filled path through the woods that leads out on the lake, to where the upright stake marks the water hole, hidden under last night’s fall of snow.

To one who has only to push a button or strike a match to have a room flooded with light, the problem of illumination is not perplexing.  Here, the five-gallon oil tank must be ferried across the lake to Blake’s farm; whence it must be again sent by boat to Jackson’s shore, and there loaded on a wagon for Sark.  Back it must come to the shore, to Blake’s, and to the island storehouse—all this taking from ten days to two weeks, according to when Henry Blake is sending in to the store.

The city postman is no very heroic figure, but little Jimmie Dodd is, as he beats his way across the lake, and through the high drifts on the island, his slender body bowed under a great bag of mail, his small face blue with the cold.  Letters mean something to us here.  They leave the train at Glen Avon, they come by stage to Sark, then they follow the oil tank route over water and wood trails to me, and it takes as long to get a letter from “The States” as to hear from England, “The Old Country.”

To-day a shrill, childish yell sounded from the water.  There was Jimmie, in a boat, with a great basket of eggs.  He was fending carefully off from shore, as the high wind threatened to dash his fragile cargo against the rocks.  Before those eggs were loaded into the skiff a woman had walked five miles with them on her back.  I spent a long, happy afternoon, standing them upright on their small ends in boxes of salt.  When they were all packed, twenty-four dozens of eggs seemed a great number for one woman to eat, even if she expected to have a long winter in which to eat them.

The wood is all stacked on the porch, but it was hard work to get it there.  The scow docked on a beach at the far side of the island, there the logs were gayly thrown ashore, and there Tom Jackson washed his hands of all further responsibility concerning them.  The duck-shooting had commenced; no man could be found to draw that wood through the island to the house, so there it stayed.

At length William Foret came to my aid and promised to haul it, and I was jubilant.  I did not then know that Foret will promise any one anything.  No man can promise more delightfully than he.  He is always perfectly willing, apparently, to help anyone out of any dilemma, he recognizes no difficulty in the way, and to hear him make light of one’s most pressing problem is to come to the conclusion that there is no problem there.  So when William promised to get the wood to the house I believed him and was content.

Meanwhile the days went on, each colder than the last.  Each morning I toiled to and fro from the beach, carrying enough wood, two sticks at a time, to last the day.  Each evening I made a pilgrimage along the shore to Foret’s to ask why tarried the wheels of his chariot.  Sometimes he was at home and greeted me with a charming cordiality, more often he was away, fishing or hunting or cutting down a bee-tree.  Always he was coming to the island the very next day.  The Forets were cut to the heart to learn that I was carrying my own wood.  But for this reason or that, William would have been there long ago.  I was not to worry at all.  That fuel would be stacked before the snow fell.

I always started to Foret’s with wrath in my heart, I always left there soothed and comforted, and by the time I had eaten supper in the boat, had watched the sunset over the islands, and had listened to the bell on Blake’s old red cow, I would go to bed really believing that William was coming the next day.

Sure enough, he did appear one afternoon and attacked the woodpile with a very fury of energy, trundling load after load up the trail for perhaps an hour.  Suddenly he sat down his barrow and gazed fixedly out across the lake.

“There, I heard my gun,” he observed.  “It’s two fellers from Glen Avon, come to have me cut them down a bee-tree.  I told the woman”—meaning Mrs. Foret—“to take the little rifle and shoot three times if they come, an’ that’s her.  I got to go.”

“Oh, Mr. Foret!” I expostulated, almost with tears, “have you the heart to leave this wood?  Here, you take my pistol and shoot for them to come over and lend a hand with this work.”

But William was already climbing into his boat.

“It’s the little rifle,” he said, sentimentally, “I’ve got to go,” and away he chugged, leaving me raging on the shore.

After all he did come back, and the very next day, Mrs. Foret and little Emmie, their adopted child, with him.  We all carried wood, Jean and I in baskets, little Emmie, one stick at a time in her small arms.  By evening it was all stacked and we were exhausted.  There it stands, eight feet high, all round the house and the place looks like a stockade.

After supper William cleaned and oiled the famous pistol; we women washed the dishes and little Emmie skirmished about, getting in every one’s way, while Jean Foret shrieked dire threats of the laying on of a “gad” that one knew would never be applied.  The crows flew home across the sky.  The child crept close to William’s side and fell asleep.  He moved the heavy little head very gently, until it rested more comfortably against his great shoulder.

“Our little girl would have been just the age of this one, if she had lived,” he said.

There was a sudden hush, while I remembered the Foret baby that had died at birth, when Jennie had almost died too, and when Dr. Le Baron had said that she could never have another.

Presently we gathered barrow, baskets and sleeping child, and I watched their boat go off, threading its way between the islands and points, a little moving speck on the amber water.

Across, on the shore, Joey Drapeau was plowing for the fall rye.  His voice, bawling threatening and slaughter to the steaming horses, came across to me, softened by the distance.  It was Saturday night.  Soon the work would be done for another week.  Then the men would go out on the lake, jerking along in their cranky little flat-bottomed punts.  They would sing under the stars, girls’ voices mingling with their harsher tones.

Little fiery clouds broke off from the sides of the crater, into which the sun had dropped, and were drifting across the quiet sky.  A long finger of light crossed over the island and ran like a torch along the eastern horizon, turning the treetops to flame color and burnished copper, and the upland meadows to gold.

On the island the woods were dark, and somewhere in their depths a screech owl’s cry shuddered away into silence.