LITMIR.BIZ

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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!"

      Chapter II

      II

       Table of Contents

      Having spied out the land and roughly laid out his trap-line trails, the trapper returned to Otter Cove. After looking to right and left, he picked a camp-site beside a little spring that poured down over a ledge of rocks. All around were spruce and fir trees six or seven inches in diameter. White birches grew thickly above the ledge.

      He set himself against the trees with single cross-cut saw and ax. He leaped and cut and sawed, cackling and screaming till all the blue jays within a mile came screaming and fluttering to see what new phenomenon had arrived among them.

      Scolding the blue jays and being scolded in turn, French Louie put down trees, logged them off, and, having notched them, built them up in a crib twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and five feet high on each side. He peak-roofed the shack with scoops—logs split in two and gouged down the inside, and then laid round down, round up, so that the rain and melting snow would run down the troughs. He filled in the spaces in the roof where air might enter with thick caribou moss. He chinked the walls of his cabin with moss and clay. Happily he found a clay-bank, or what served as clay.

      He built his cabin in three days. He put in a split-plank door and two windows, one in front and one on the side to the south. He rigged up a stove pedestal, and put upon it a good cast-iron stove. He ran a pipe through a large sheet of iron in the roof.

      "By gar! I don' want my cabin to burn down!"

      He dug a root-cellar and a fur-shed, dug out the spring, and put in a trough that led the water into the corner of his cabin, where it ran out under the side through a hollow log spout, carefully banked up so that no wind could come through it. He cut ten cords of wood up on the rock—good birch and maple body wood—stacked it on both sides of his cabin, and covered it with pole sheds, thatched with spruce and balsam boughs.

      "By gar! I want my main camp all right!" he declared.

      When he had finished his main camp, it was all right. It would stand against any blizzard, because no gale could reach it. It was down out of the cold. It was stored and supplied for the winter campaign, except for "roots"—potatoes, carrots, turnips—and supplies that he would put in later in the fall.

      The same day that he finished his cabin he headed back into the woods, "to feex 'em op a bit."

      He peeked and peered to right and left, picking up the places he had seen before with unerring memory. He avoided rock ledges, circled back to clear river gorges, and traversed stone gullies, over some of which he made a bridge by felling tall spruces. He wallowed through the deep moss of dark swamps, and surprised himself, as he pretended, by discovering little

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