Winter has thrown a veil of lace over the islands

Winter has thrown a veil of lace over the islands, a wet, clinging snow that covers every tree-trunk, rock, and stump, and turns the cedars to mounds of fluffy whiteness.  The paths lie under archways of bending, snow-laden branches, and all the underbrush is hidden.  The island wears many jewels, for every ice-incrusted twig flashes a cluster of diamonds, the orange berries of the bittersweet, each encased in clear ice, are like topaz, and the small frozen pools between the stones reflect the sky and shine like sapphires.

There have been snows since the first week in November, but this is the first that has remained, and how it shows the midnight activities of all the wild folk!  The porch floor is a white page on which they have left their signatures.  Here, by the storeroom door, are innumerable little stitch-like strokes.  They were made by the deer mouse’s wee paws.  There are the prints of the squirrel’s little hands and a long swathe, where his brush swept the snow.  The chickadees and nuthatches came very early.  Their three-fingered prints are all over the woodpile, and on the paths are the blurred, ragged tracks left by the grouse’s snowshoes.  Over the hill runs a row of deep, round holes, showing that a fox has passed that way, and the rabbit’s tracks are everywhere.

Every day the water freezes farther and farther out from the shores, and it is increasingly difficult to force a channel through it to the open lake.  The bay in front of the Blake’s house is frozen straight across, and I land far away on the point and scramble through the bushes to the house when I must go over for the mail.  Frozen cascades hang down over the rocks, pale-blue, jade and softest cream color.  The rocks themselves are capped with frozen spray and the driftwood wears long beards of ice.

Walking along the beach to-day I heard a great chirping and twittering, like the sound made by innumerable very small birds.  Could a late flock of migrants be stopping in the treetops?  I wondered.  But when I searched for the birds there were none.  The chirping noises came from the thin shore ice, whose crystals, rubbed together by the gently moving water, were making the birdlike sounds.  Now and then would come a sudden “ping” like the stroke on the wire string of a banjo, and sometimes a clear, sustained tone, like the note of a violin.

As the ice grew thicker these sounds all stopped and over all the land broods a profound silence.  The winds are still, no bird voices come out of the woods; even the waves seem hardly to rise and fall against the shores.  It is as though all nature were holding her breath to wait the coming of the ice.

“When the lake freezes over, when the ice holds,” we have a habit of saying, and, looking across the uncertainties of the shut-in time, when I shall not be able to use the boat and when no one can cross over to me, I too am longing for the ice.

The boat can no longer be left in the water.  Any cold morning would find it frozen in until spring.  It must also be turned every evening, lest it fill with snow in the night, so I haul that heavy skiff out on the sand; and, sure enough, the accident, so confidently predicted by my friends, came to pass, for in the turning the boat slipped, and down it came, full weight across my foot.

I am somewhat a judge of pain.  I know quite a good deal about suffering of one kind and another, but this hurt was something special in the way of an agony.  It turned me sick and dizzy, and for several minutes I could only stand and gasp, while the trees turned round and round against the sky.  When their whirling had slowed down a bit, and I had caught my breath, I hobbled down to the edge of the lake, kicked a hole in the thin ice with my good foot, and thrust the hurt one into the icy water.  Then I spoke aloud!  I did not in the least mean to say the words that came to my lips, no one could have been more surprised than I when I heard them, but with my horrified face turned up to the evening sky, and the consciousness that there was no way in the world of getting help if I were badly hurt, I said, “Great God Almighty!”

Thinking it over, I am inclined to believe that the ejaculation was, after all, a prayer.

Knowing that I should probably not be able to walk for days, I then hobbled to and fro from the house to the lake, filling every pail and tub.  Then I carried in as much wood as I could, and at last took off my shoe.

It was a wicked-looking injury, a foot swollen, bruised, and crushed.  I blessed my little medicine chest, with its bichloride and morphia tablets, its cotton and gauze, that made the long hours of that night endurable.  For more than a week I did my housework with a knee on the seat of a chair that I pushed along before me round the cabin and the porch.  No one came to the island, nor could I get far enough from the house to call a passing boat.

One afternoon there was a great sound of chopping in the narrows between this island and Blake’s Point.  I called, but no one answered.  Later I learned that Henry Blake had left a herring net there and that it had frozen in.  But at that time I felt only the faintest interest in whatever was going forward.  They might have chopped a way through to China and I would not have cared.

The long days dragged on, while my hurt foot slowly healed.  I may say here that it was never fully healed until the following spring.  I had always to keep it bandaged even after it had ceased to pain and it was not until May that I could forget that it had been injured.

On the eighth the calm weather broke in a day of wild winds and flying clouds, when the waves rolled in on the shores, and the driftwood pounded on the beaches.  At evening, when the storm had lulled, the lake looked like a wide expanse of crinkled lead foil.

Next morning I waked to a bright blue day and dazzling sunshine.  At first I feared that I had been suddenly deafened, the stillness so stopped my ears.  Then I realized what had happened.  There was no sound of the moving water.  The ice had come!

The lake was a silver mirror that reflected every tree, every bowlder, every floating cloud.  The islands hung between two skies, were lighted by two suns.  An eagle, soaring over the lake, saw his double far below, even to his white back, that flashed in the sunlight when he wheeled.

In the glancing beauty of that morning my heart flung open all her doors, my breath came quickly, and my spirit sang.  For the first time in my life I understood how frost and cold, how ice and snow, can praise and magnify the Lord.

That evening the snow came, turning the lake into a vast white plain “white as no fuller on earth could white it,” that lay without spot or wrinkle under the Indian’s Moon of the Snowshoes.

This was the ninth of the month.  Then followed long, silent days, when I read and sewed and dreamed, and forgot what day of the week it was, or what time of the day, and wondered how long it would be before someone could come over from the mainland to tell me that the ice was safe to walk on.

Each afternoon I hobbled to the beach and paraded there, according to agreement with Mary Blake, to let her see that I was still alive.  The rabbit came in and sat by the fire—a queer, silent little companion.  The red squirrel scampered all over the outside of the house, peeping at me through the windows, and whisking in at the open door to steal a potato or a nut, when he thought my back was turned.  Funny little Rufus!  He spent a long, hard-working day, stealing the contents of a basket of frozen potatoes put out for his amusement.  For months afterward I found those potatoes, hard as bullets, stuck in the crotches of the cedars all over the island.

From the ninth to the nineteenth I saw no one and heard no voice.  Then I descried two men walking across the lake.  They carried long poles, with which they struck the ice ahead to test its thickness.  Each stroke ran along the ice to the shore, with the sound of iron ringing against stone.  I saw the stick fall some seconds before I heard the noise.

I had never seen men walking across a lake before.  I had never realized that this lake would become a solid floor on which men could walk.  I shall never forget the excitement with which I watched them do it.

Half an hour later Jimmie Dodd burst in, with red cheeks and shining eyes, to tell me that the ice would hold.

The way to the farm being once more open, I made my Christmas cake, mixing it here in the cabin and carrying it three quarters of a mile across to the Blakes’ big oven.  The finished loaf came back over the ice, an excellent cake, as all my Christmas visitors testified.

For let no one assume that because the inhabitants of this island are few there has been no Christmas here.  On the contrary, the feast began on Christmas Eve and lasted for a week.  The tree, a young white pine, was cut on the island, the trimmings came from Toronto, and great was the anxiety lest the ice should not be strong enough to bear the wagon that brought them over from Loon Lake Station.  But the final freeze came just in time, and we, the rabbit and I, spent happy days tying on all the glittering trifles that go to the making of that prettiest thing in the world—a Christmas tree.  There was a big gold star on the topmost twig.  There were oranges and boxes of candy for all invited and uninvited children round the lake, and when all was finished, our first visitor was a storm-driven chickadee, that wandered in and stayed with us, perched on a glittering branch.

On Christmas Eve the Blakes came and had cake and coffee and viewed the tree.  On Christmas day, came the little Beaulacs, from Loon Bay, some walking, some in arms, some dragged in a big wooden box over the ice, and were refreshed with tea and bread and butter and cake, after which they sat round the tree, regarding it with great eyes of wonder.  Next day the Forets came to help me eat the Christmas duck and tinned plum pudding, and after them the Big John Beaulacs, from far back of Sark.

So it went, with a party every day, while the brave little tree stood glowing and twinkling at us all.  It was interesting to note how many errands the men found to bring them to the island while the Christmas tree was standing, and how their heavy faces lightened at sight of it.  Surely it fulfilled its purpose, sending out messages of good will and friendliness and the love of God from the feather tip of each tiniest twig.

At midnight on Christmas Eve I went out on the porch and walked to and fro there in the biting cold.  The rabbit, that had been sleeping, a bunch of snow-white fur, on the woodpile, hopped down and followed at my heels.  The lake was a shield of frosted silver.  The moon shone bright as day.  One great star blazed over the shoulder of the opposite island—it might have been the very star of Bethlehem.  So diamond clear was the air, so near leaned the sky, that I might almost have reached and touched that star.  The night was so white, so still that I fancied I could almost hear the angels’ song, and in the rainbow glory of the moonlight could catch swift glimpses of the flashing of their wings.

We walked there, the rabbit and I, until the cold drove me in, to sleep beside the tree and dream of a procession of little Beaulacs, creeping over the ice, each one with a star in his hand.

CHAPTER VIII

The Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half the countryside.  They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, Marie John, and so on.  The Little Jack Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the point and three miles away.  The road to Loon Lake Station starts at their landing.  They live in a barn, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot log structure, banked with earth to keep out the cold.  In its one room, along with a double bed, a cooking stove, table, sideboard, sewing machine, rocking chair, boxes, pots and pans, and a clutter of harness and old junk of all kinds, live John and Rose and the six young Beaulacs, beginning with sixteen-year-old Louis and ending with the baby.  There is one door and a small window, that, so far as I know, has never been opened.  In summer, when the door is left ajar, the room is apt to be further inhabited by hens, ducks, cats, and even a lamb or two.

The house stands in a clearing on a perfectly bare hill, but in summer, the whole slope is golden with sheets of tansy, and the small dug-out milk house is shaded by a giant lilac bush, sole remnant of some long-forgotten garden.  At the foot of the hill, rotting, flat-bottomed boats wallow in the mud, and there the little Beaulacs spend happy days fishing for mudcats, wading for frogs, screaming, wrangling, and throwing stones into the water.

They have not always lived in a barn.  They have had two other houses, each burned to the ground, with all the pitiful furnishings it contained—crushing blows to people as poor as the Beaulacs.  After the last fire they moved into the barn, the only shelter left standing, intending to build again in the spring.  But log-hauling is work, building materials cost money, and time went on.  Now they have settled down contentedly in the barn, and will stay there, I doubt not, until this roof falls down about their heads.  They have no fear of another fire.  That would be impossible, for, as one of the children tells me, the last one happened on the full of the moon—sure sign that they can never be burned out again.

Like other men of the settlement, John Beaulac works at the mica mine, hunts, fishes, and farms a bit.  Rose walks barefoot over the fields, after the plow, digs the small garden, raises chickens, picks wild berries, and sells frogs to the summer campers, contriving thus to supply the few clothes and groceries needed.  For the rest, they live a happy, carefree life in the open, and the young Beaulacs scramble up somehow.

Rose handles the boxes of supplies that come from Toronto for the island, driving them in from Loon Lake and bringing them across the lake by wagon or boat, as the time of the year permits.  Last time she refused, very firmly, to allow me to pay for that hauling.

“We ain’t agoin’ to tax you nothin’,” she declared.

When I expostulated, she only shook her frowsy head more violently.

“No,” she said, “we do it fer you fer nothin’.  It ain’t like you had a man here to do fer you,” she reasoned.

Then she looked at her own man with pride and at me with a vast pity, because I had no man to work myself to death for.

In a pioneer neighborhood, where every woman must have some man, however worthless, to hew the wood and care for the stock, and where every man must have some woman, to cook and to keep the house, however lazy a slattern she may be, I, who live alone, pay for my wood and draw the water, must be a creature not to be understood.

Yesterday the Beaulacs invited me to go with them to the races in Henderson’s Bay—a trying out of the neighborhood horses before the yearly races to be held at Queensport next week.  Scrambling and falling down the slippery trail, in answer to their halloo, I found a straw-filled wagon body set on runners and drawn by Beaulac’s old mare.  She, not having been “sharp shod,” slipped and slid, threatening to break a leg at every step, while the wagon slewed from side to side over the ice.  It was the first time that I had driven over a lake.  My heart was in my mouth all the way.

Henderson’s Bay, a long arm of Many Islands, stretches for a mile into the land.  It is a beautiful horseshoe, with the farm house at the toe.  The course was laid out on the dull green ice, little cedar bushes set up to mark the quarter miles.  An old reaper, frozen in near the shore, served as the judges’ stand.

We drew up at the side of the track, in the lee of a high rock that somewhat sheltered us from the piercing wind.  It was a friendly scene.  The encircling arms of the shore stretched round and seemed to gather us close.  The smoke from the house chimneys curled up to the low-leaning gray sky, and Henderson’s herd, led by a dignified old bull, strolled down over the hill as though to see the race.  Far away on the ice, black spots appeared, later discerned to be fast-moving buggies, sleighs, and wagons coming to the meet.  When they were all assembled there must have been as many as seven vehicles.  There were four horses to be tried.  They were harnessed in turn to a little two-wheeled affair called a bike.  There is only one “bike” here, so no two horses could run at a time, and there had to be a great unhitching and harnessing again after every trial of speed.  Joe Boggs, the neighborhood jockey, drove with arms and legs all spraddled out, like a spider, and urged on his poor steeds with wild cries of: “Hi-hi-hi-hi”—enough to frighten a sensible horse to death.

I have never beheld a more professional looking horseman than Mr. Boggs.  His disreputable old squirrel-skin cap, that hung off the back of his head, his high boots, the bow of his legs, the squint of his eye, even the way he chewed a straw between races, bespoke the true jockey.  One felt that if Joe Boggs could not put a horse over the track, no one could.

Rose Beaulac too was a keen judge of a horse.  She criticized the entries unsparingly—Rose, with her long, dry-looking coon skin coat, and her dirty red “tuque” cocked over one eye.

“That old mare,” she would say, cuttingly, “I knowed her in her best days, and then she wasn’t much.”

That settled the mare for us.  Our money was not on her.

There was, however, one horse that she did consider worth praise.  She told me with awe that his owner had refused four hundred dollars for him—a staggering sum.  So valued was this animal that he was not to be allowed to run any more until the Queensport races, but when it was learned that I wished to admire him, his owner consented to put him once round the course, for my pleasure.

After the contestants had each done his best—or worst—the meet broke up, with many “Good-days” and “Come-overs,” and we drove back over the ice, the old mare plunging and sliding along seemingly quite accustomed to being driven, at a gallop, over a sheet of glass.

The eye swept the outline of the shore on which stand the seven homesteads of this arm of the lake.  Each roof shelters a family of a different race and creed.  Many Islands is a type of the whole of this strong, young country, that takes in men of all lands and minds, gives them her fertile prairies almost for the asking, and makes them over into good Canadians.

There are the Blakes, from “The States,” and aggressively American; the Jacksons, Canadian born and Methodist; the Hendersons, English and Church of England; the McDougals, Scotch and Presbyterian; the Cassidys, Irish and Catholic; Harry Sprig-gins, a sharp-faced little London cockney; and the Beaulacs, true French Canadian.  Once in a while a Swede wanders in and hires out for the wood-cutting, or an Indian comes along through the lakes in his canoe, and camps for awhile on one of the islands.  Amid all the differences of belief and the clash of temperament, the people manage to be friendly and neighborly; the children play together; the young folk marry, and the next generation is all Canadian.

They all speak English, but when one stops to listen, literal translations of idioms and queer turns of phrase stand out.  Foret always speaks of a “little, small” bird or tree or what not, and for him things are always “perfectly all right.”

“Do yer moind thot pig, I sold Black Jack?” asks Uncle Dan Cassidy.

“’Ow har you to-d’y?” inquires Harry Spriggins.

“Oh, not too bad,” answers John Beaulac.  “Pas trop mal,” he is saying, of course.

When John has finished a job he stands off, hands in pockets, and observes: “That iss now ahl bunkum sah.”  After a moment’s pondering one knows that “Bon comme ça” is what he means.

They speak of coming home through the “Brooly.”  That is the scrub wood through which a forest fire once swept.  It is the land “brulé”—burned over.  While they live in Canada their talk is of far away lands, and it is to the “Old Country” that they mean to return some day.

And from the house on the island I see the life go by—the stern, bare life of the country—with its never-ending toil, its uncounted sacrifices, its feuds, its ready charities and the piteous, unnecessary sufferings of the sick.  Blessed be the rural telephone, lately come to Many Islands, that has made it possible for Dr. LeBaron to reach a patient the day he is called.  Thrice blessed the tinkle of those little bells that bring the voices of the world to the farms, shut in behind the snowdrifts.  To the women, dulled with labor and shaken with loneliness, they are the little bells of courage.

I stopped at a farm the other day—a very lonely place.  Scarce were the first greetings over when the young mistress of the house said, proudly: “We have the telephone here.  Would you care to talk to any of your friends?”

Something in her tone, the eager shining of her eyes, brought a rush of tears to my own.  It was the supreme effort of hospitality.  She was offering me the thing that had meant life itself to her, the dear privilege of speaking with a friend.