The Backwoodsmen - Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

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the lake.

      “Ain’t that old Joe’s bateau out yonder, Chris?” he queried, his trained woodsman’s eye recognizing the craft by some minute detail of build or blemish.

      “I reckon it be!” answered Chris, after a moment’s scrutiny. “He’s let her git adrift. Water must be raisin’ sudden!”

      “She’ll be a fine quality o’ kindlin’ wood in another 64 hour, the rate she’s travelling” commented the other with mild interest. But the young giant in the stern was more concerned. He was sorry that old Joe should lose his boat.

      “Darned old fool, not to tie her!” he growled. “Ef ’twarn’t fer this wind ag’in’ us, we could ketch it an’ tow it ashore fer him. But we can’t.”

      “Wouldn’t stop fer it ef ’t had a bag o’ gold into it!” grunted the other, slogging on his paddle with renewed vigour as he looked forward to the camp-ground still so far ahead. He was hungry and tired, and couldn’t even take time to fill his pipe in that hurly-burly.

      Meanwhile the bateau had swept down swiftly, and passed them at a distance of not more than a hundred yards. It was with a qualm of regret that Chris saw it go by, to be ground to splinters in the yelling madness of the Devil’s Trough. After it had passed, riding the waves bravely like the good old craft that it was, he glanced back after it in half-humorous regret. As he did so, his eye caught something that made him look again. A little furry brown creature was peering over the gunwale at the canoe. The gunwale tipped toward him at that instant and he saw it distinctly. Yes, it was a woodchuck, and no mistake. And it seemed to be making mute appeal to him to come and save it from a dreadful doom. Chris hesitated, looking doubtfully at his companion’s heaving back. It 65 looked an unresponsive back. Moreover, Chris felt half ashamed of his own compassionate impulse. He knew that he was considered foolishly softhearted about animals and children and women, though few men cared to express such an opinion to him too frankly. He suspected that, in the present case, his companion would have a right to complain of him. But he could not stand the idea of letting the little beast––which had so evidently appealed to him for succour––go down into the horrors of the Devil’s Trough. His mind was made up.

      “Mart,” he exclaimed, “I’m goin’ to turn. There’s somethin’ aboard that there old bateau that I want.” And he put the head of the canoe straight up into a big wave.

      “The devil there is!” cried the other, taking in his paddle and looking around in angry protest. “What is it?”

      “Paddle, ye loon! Paddle hard!” ordered Chris. “I’ll tell ye when we git her ’round.”

      Thus commanded, and the man at the stern paddle being supreme in a canoe, the backwoodsman obeyed with a curse. It was no time to argue, while getting the canoe around in that sea. But as soon as the canoe was turned, and scudding with frightened swoops down the waves in pursuit of the fleeing bateau, he saw, and understood.

      “Confound you, Chris McKeen, if ’tain’t nothin’ 66 but a blankety blank woodchuck!” he shouted, making as if to back water and try to turn the canoe again.

      Chris’s grey eyes hardened. “Look a’ here, Mart Babcock,” he shouted, “don’t you be up to no foolishness. Ye kin cuss all ye like––but either paddle as I tell ye or take in yer paddle an’ set quiet. I’m runnin’ this ’ere canoe.”

      Babcock took in his paddle, cursing bitterly.

      “A woodchuck! A measly woodchuck!” he shouted, with unutterable contempt expressed in every word. “I know’d ye was a fool, Chris McKeen, but I didn’t know ye was so many kinds of a mush-head of a fool!”

      “Course it’s a woodchuck!” agreed Chris, surging on his paddle. “Do ye think I’d let the leetle critter go down the ‘Trough,’ jest so’s ye could git your bacon an’ tea an hour sooner? I always did like woodchucks, anyways.”

      “I’ll take it out o’ yer hide fer this when we git ashore; you wait!” stormed Babcock, courageously. He knew it would be some time before they could get ashore, and so he would have a chance to forget his threat.

      “‘It’s––Mandy Ann!’”

      “That’s all right, Mart!” assented McKeen. “My hide’ll be all here waitin’ on ye. But fer now you jest git ready to do ez I tell ye, an’ don’t let the canoe bump ez we come up alongside the bateau. It’s goin’ to be a mite resky, in this sea, gittin’ hold 67 of the leetle critter. I’m goin’ to take it home for Mandy Ann.”

      As the canoe swept down upon the swooping and staggering bateau, Babcock put out his paddle in readiness to fend or catch as he might be directed. A moment later Chris ran the canoe past and brought her up dexterously under the lee of the high-walled craft. Babcock caught her with a firm grip, at the same time holding her off with the paddle, and glanced in, while Chris’s eyes were still occupied. His dark face went white as cotton.

      “My God, Chris! Forgive me! I didn’t know!” he groaned.

      “It’s––Mandy Ann!” exclaimed her father, in a hushed voice, climbing into the bateau and catching the child into his arms.

      68

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      The sunny, weather-beaten, comfortable little house, with its grey sheds and low grey barn half enclosing its bright, untidy farmyard, stood on the top of the open hill, where every sweet forest wind could blow over it night and day.

      Fields of oats, buckwheat, and potatoes came up all about it over the slopes of the hill; and its only garden was a spacious patch of cabbages and “garden sass” three or four hundred yards down toward the edge of the forest, where a pocket of rich black loam had specially invited an experiment in horticulture.

      Like most backwoods farmers, Sam Coxen had been wont to look with large scorn on such petty interests as gardening; but a county show down at the Settlement had converted him, and now his cabbage patch was the chief object of his solicitude. He had proud dreams of prizes to be won at the next show––now not three weeks ahead.

      It was his habit, whenever he harnessed up the 69 team for a drive into the Settlement, to turn his head the last thing before leaving and cast a long, gratified look down over the cabbage patch, its cool, clear green standing out sharply against the yellow-brown of the surrounding fields. On this particular morning he did not turn for that look till he had jumped into the wagon and gathered up the reins. Then, as he gazed, a wave of indignation passed over his good-natured face.

      There, in the middle of the precious cabbages, biting with a sort of dainty eagerness at first one and then another, and wantonly tearing open the crisp heads with impatient strokes of his knife-edged fore hoofs, was a tall wide-antlered buck.

      Sam Coxen dropped the reins, sprang from the wagon, and rushed to the bars which led from the yard to the back field; and the horses––for the sake of his dignity he always drove the pair when he went into the Settlement––fell to cropping the short, fine grass that grew behind the well. In spite of having grown up in the backwoods, Sam was lacking in backwoods lore. He was no hunter, and he cared as little as he knew, about the wild kindreds of the forest. He had a vague, general idea that all deer were “skeery critters”; and if any one had told him that the buck, in mating season, was not unlikely to develop a fine militant spirit, he would have laughed with scorn.

      Climbing upon the bars, he yelled furiously at the 70 marauder, expecting to see him vanish like a red streak. But the buck merely raised his beautiful head and stared in mild surprise at the strange, noisy figure on the fence. Then he coolly slashed open another plump cabbage, and nibbled at the firm white heart.

      Very

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