The Wolver/Chapter 1
I
FRENCH LOUIE abandoned his old trap-line on Pigeon River and sailed east along Lake Superior, intending to strike north into new country, if he could find any. When he reached Black Bay he was tempted to stop there, at the peninsula. The islands south of Nipigon also attracted him; but he passed them all by, because he was afraid of the dreadful period when the water is filled with ice in cakes, and a trapper would have to venture across the straits in an open boat, wet and with the ice hanging from his ears and fingers and frozen in solid armor upon his clothes.
No coward was French Louie, but he hated and feared the water when it ran in waves before a westerly gale and froze where it struck. He preferred the green timber, hanging with snow, and the deep woods, where a man walks on web snowshoes and lives in a bark teepee or little log cabin.
So he kept on sailing in his twenty-four-foot half-cabin sailboat, stopping in at Little St. Ignace to talk to the fishermen, stopping at Rossport to talk to the storekeepers and trappers, stopping at Black River to talk with the Indians, for French Louie was fluent in three languages.
There was no hurry. He had taken up his traps and brought down his outfit on the March crusts, and had been safe in his main camp on Pigeon River during the April thaws. He had loaded his sailboat in early June, and now, as he told himself, he was a "reg'laire spo't, lak a Yankee."
What mattered it to him if the fishing was good? Only that he needed a pound or two a day to eat. If the wind blew a gale, he would lie in a snug bay. If the lake was glistening calm, he laughed and let the sun shine upon his face as he sprawled on the cabin deck. Long since mosquitoes, punkies, and black flies had learned not to blunt their delicate boring-tools on his tough skin.
In the cabin of his little sailboat he carried treasure—gold. He had never wasted the profits of his campaigns against the fur-bearers. In one moose-hide bag, each coin wrapped in a mouse-skin, were nearly a thousand dollars in gold.
"My wolf-bag!" he grinned. "Ever' dollaire from wolfs—skins an' bounties, by gar! I like a wolf! By gar, I like heem bes' of all in a bag—three dollaire for hees skin an' five dollaire for hees bounty, eef dat what dey pay me!"
French Louie was an old man. In his young days he had been very gallant. He had loved often, and had married two or three times or more; and now he saw the fitness of things—that old men should not be gallivanting around.
Long ago he had married a young French girl, and had loved her truly till she died. Then he had married a Yankee girl, not so young, but sensible. When she died, he had wooed and won a cross old Indian widow, one of the kind that never grows fat, and he had lived with her during years of excitement and turmoil. Finally she—what did she do? French Louie would have to stop and think. When a man has loved deeply and often—oh, well!
But now those days were gone, and French Louie had no mistaken ideas on the subject. It was time for him to flock by himself back in the green timber, and live close to all those beautiful things which he found were a sort of substitute—for an old man—for affairs of the heart.
He would tell himself that in fact the green timber was an affair of the heart. What? Couldn't a man love the white canoe-birch? Couldn't he enjoy the herds of moose as if they were his own cattle? Couldn't he have ten thousand grouse, big spruce fellows and little ruffed fellows, for his chickens? And could canary-bird sing prettier than chickadee, or parrot talk better than raven or fish-crow or owl?
Recluse? Hermit? Soured on the world? Not a bit of it! No one lived on better terms with people than old French Louie. He would talk to the girls with all the gallantry of past days. And how those old fellows can talk! How well they know what to say to the young and rosy-cheeked! But French Louie had no serious intentions—none whatever.
"I am old," he would say; "so old that I am no good to eat! I am all dried up, an' need no smoke to cure me! By gar, I bet my hide is two inches thick on my back! Look at this!"
He would show the deep crease across his forehead, where the head-strap of his pack-line had cut a wide, deep furrow, and perhaps had misshaped his skull a bit. He was very proud of the old marks and scars and furrows made by the recurring toil of his trapping life.
Not that he had always been a mere trapper. In the old days, when he had had a wife, he had trapped in the winters and fished in the summers.
"By gar, a woman keep a man workin'! A man learn to enj'y work, if he haf a woman to keep it hot to home, by gar!"
French Louie had laughed his way through sixty years of life. Ever mad? Oh, yes—for two minutes! By that time he had won peace with any man.
With women he never was angry—for of what use would that be? You cannot cut a woman's throat, nor hit her on the head with a club, nor even strike her with a small, sharp-knuckled fist. Such procedure would be exceedingly impolite. Instead of being angry with a woman, the best way would be to go over the trap-line, or out to the points, to haul the gill-nets.
So French Louie idled along the North Shore, talking gallantly to white, breed, and Indian women. One could almost tell that he was coming by the laughter that sounded upon his arrival in town or fish-camp. The men could bear him no ill-will, because they knew that French Louie knew he was old, and because he helped to keep the women good-natured to their own men.
In that sparsely settled land it behooved the women to be good-natured, for sometimes a man would just melt away into the green timber and never return. It is unpleasant to have one's man disappear!
June, July, and half of August went by, and French Louie had arrived at Port Coldwell. He knew all the gossip of the North Shore by this time. He had met all the local trappers and all the local fishermen.
He had told two boys, who were just starting to fish for themselves, things about lake-trout and other food fish which even many old, old fishermen did not know. Those two boys were bringing in as many fish as old-timers, to the delight of French Louie, who liked to see youth prosper, because a young man with money knows how to spend it and get the good out of it. At the same time, they had bought a good motor-boat, and were saving while they spent. French Louie would pound his knees with joy when he saw one of them taking a walk with some North Shore girl in the gathering twilight.
"By gar!" he would grin. "I tell 'em to feesh, an' they feesh—but I don' have to tell 'em a new way to spark the gals! They don' need no teachin' about gals, young feller don'!"
One day French Louie awakened from his fairy-land of enjoyment, stared at the calendar, and uttered a shout:
"August feefteen! Vat? By gar! De fur prime, an' I ain' got a trap set! I ain' got mah line blazed! Hi, hi, hi! I mus' get right to work!"
He jumped four feet into the air and whirled his feet around like a pinwheel. He stormed up to the Port Coldwell store, and poured out a torrent of invective and orders for supplies. He hauled his boat up and painted the top. Then he painted and recalked the bottom, and put in an extra rib or two, in case he should "bomp ker-slam into a rock, by gar!"
On the first day of September he bade adieu tenderly to the seven houses, the store, and the railroad station at Port Coldwell. He waved his hand at one of those foreign girls who could talk no Indian, French, or English, but whose language sounded like a squirrel with a cold—a girl who smiled and would have been willing to leap aboard his little boat and accompany him out of a cruel civilization into a kindly wilderness.
But no! French Louie must attend to his business now, and he was old. He hoisted his sail-to the air that was drawing through the inlet. Outside, his jib and mainsail swelled out to- the breeze, and away he went, lifting and jumping and singing to the slap of the waves and the fiddling whine of his taut sheets and growling sail.
"To work! To work!" he shouted. "By gar! A man gets so tired doin' not'in' he mos' die of eet, by gar!"
He turned into Swallow River, Simmons Harbor, Spruce Bay, and ran out to visit Otter Island Light.
"By gar, Cap'n Mac!" he greeted the light-keeper. "I be'n lonesome, an' like I nevaire see a feller agin!"
"Glad to see you, Louie! Any mail for me?"
"By gar, on the boat—lettaires an' papers an' magazines! I forget to bring 'em op. Come aboard! By gar—sh-h!"
On board the boat he brought out a bottle of wine, swore his friend to secrecy, and then they smacked their lips over it.
Another week went by, and French Louie started up in amazement. He screamed and cackled like a cat whose tail has been stepped on. Time had played a scurvy trick on him. Time had swindled him. He had been asleep. He had been chloroformed. There was no such thing as that lost week! It could not possibly be!
That very afternoon French Louie steered out of Big Dave's Harbor across Otter Harbor into Otter Bay. He drove his sailboat right up the middle of Otter Bay and headed full tilt upon the white sand-bar at the other end, not striking his sail till the keel grated. Then down he let the sail clatter, and the bow of his boat slid clear up out of the water.
"By gar!" Louie laughed. "I bet I near run agroun' dat time!"
If he had loafed all summer long, now he set to work with tremendous energy. He ran up the bay shore and anchored in the cove at the end. There he put a few supplies into his pack, and headed back into the woods.
He carried his trapping-ax, and bounded through the woods, looking at the brooks, at the bars of sand and mud along the rivers and around the shores of the ponds. He studied the tops of the ridges and the hills of unusual height. At intervals, as at the forks of a stream, the foot of a lake, in a pass through some conspicuous ridge, he slashed a blaze on trees along the routes that he followed.
He was looking the country over for fur signs, and to get the lay of the land. He had to pick routes for his trap-lines, and these must conform with the courses run by the wild life.
He found fisher, marten, mink, and other tracks. In the sand he saw where wolves had tramped; along the foot of stone cliffs he found where lynx had passed by. In the gaps through the long ridges he discovered runways which were used in common by all the woods creatures, from moose and bear down to rabbits and mice. Even the grouse flew through these low places in the ridges, and hawks sometimes waited near them, in hope of seeing an easy victim dart over the divide, exposed to attack.
In the lakes were plenty of trout, which he could catch through holes in the ice, to vary his own diet and use for bait. In the swamps were rabbits innumerable. Grouse lived around the little openings which appeared in the woods, either the barren rocks or the grassy beaver meadows.
"Hi, hi!" French Louie cheered himself. "Plenty of fur! Plenty offings to eat, an' I got a fur pocket!"