Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  “The fall I’m talking about they’d rented a plane to fly them to Kaminiskeg Lake after deer, and they’d brought that dog along. The plane was flying high up crossing our lake when all of a sudden the dog like to took a fit, howling and yelling and jumping around ’til they feared he’d wreck the plane. Couldn’t do nothing with him, so the pilot took the plane down and landed her.

  “They was so mad they was just going to dump the dog and take right off again, but when they saw him and Harv crawling all over each other, they slowed up, and when we told them this was old Jo come home, they changed their minds. Couldn’t believe he could be so smart!

  “Didn’t want to leave him then. But when they tried to get him back into the plane, Harv offered to go get his gun.

  “ ‘You fellows try to fly away with my dog and you’re going to fly straight to hell,’ he tells them.

  “They left without Jo but on good terms with Harv, and next fall both come back and stayed at Ananias, and Jo and Harv took them hunting, and they got two prime bucks.”

  Although Harv did not hunt for “sport” (as the euphemism goes), he could and would kill any wild thing if its death contributed materially to the essential well-being of him and his family. On the other hand, should he encounter a wounded or crippled wild creature, even of a desired kind, he would sometimes bring it home alive and one of the children would be appointed its guardian. If it recovered, it would be returned to its own world.

  “Harv was specially soft on beavers,” Cliff recalled. “One winter he come on a young beaver with its front feet froze into a poacher’s trap. He brought it back to Ananias, and the girls nursed it back to health even though both front feet rotted off.

  “When spring come Harv turned it loose, but damned if it would go away. So he made a kind of lodge for it under the dock. It swum right into it and lived there four or five years and got along good enough to get itself a mate and a brood of kits every year.

  “Many’s the time I’d be out there fishing and old Two Foot or one of his bunch from under the dock would come alongside as if just to pass the time of day. They never slapped their tails. It was like they knew damn well that’d scare the fish away.”

  One day Cliff took me to visit the beaver dam at the mouth of Coburn Creek, which runs into the head of West Reach. It was a colossal structure at least a hundred and fifty feet long and up to ten feet high on the downstream side. The pond behind it was backed by a grassy muskeg containing one of the finest moose pastures in the country.

  Cliff told me how one spring a mighty storm caused such a heavy runoff that the dam overflowed and threatened to collapse. For two days and nights the owners beavered to save it – then along came another heavy downpour.

  “One way or t’other most of us hereabouts had a stake in that dam,” Cliff explained. “Deer, bear, foxes, wolves, and plenty others used it for a bridge. Without it they’d have had to swim West Reach or plough through swamp for miles and miles. Our folk used it from the time they first come. It was wide enough to carry a wagon, and when I was a younker there was still a cart track across it. The moose needed the dam too because, though we et a good few of them, a good many more would have starved in hard winters without the swamp pasture beyond the dam.”

  Harv, who had been keeping an anxious eye on the threatened dam, concluded the beavers could no longer deal with the problem unassisted so he rowed back to Ananias and rousted out the entire human population – four grown men, half a dozen youths and children, and as many girls and women – armed them with axes, crosscut saws, and spades, and led them in skiffs and canoes to the aid of the beleaguered beaver.

  Some cut trees into logs and rolled or carried these to the pond. Others used their canoes to tow logs or bundles of brushwood to the inner side of the dam, where they could be manoeuvred into place by women and children who also dug and hauled bucket after bucket of clay and mud with which to cement the additions into place.

  As Cliff told it, “First off the beavers kept their distance but pretty soon they come back onto the job. Beavers and us worked together. When a girl dumped her pail of mud into a hole, pretty soon there’d be a beaver patting it down. Once, when Harv was trying to drive a pole into the front of the dam, a snaggle-toothed old beaver big as a dog come along and tried to steal it away. Was a sight to see, with Harv and that beaver tugging at that billet. Harv lost his temper.

  “ ‘Goddamn it!’ he yelled. ‘Let go or I’ll kick your good tooth out!’

  “The beaver hung on and, when Harv slipped and lost his grip, the beaver hauled the billet into deep water and floated it about fifty feet along, with Harv stumbling and cursing along the top of the dam.

  “Harv almost fell into a new break he hadn’t even knowed was there, but the beaver knowed. And that was where he put the billet, and the long and the short of it was, the dam stayed put.”

  Deer and moose were staple foods for Harv’s extended family, which at any given time could include up to half a dozen adults and as many as a dozen youngsters. Hunting was not a recreation for those people – it was a vital function that elicited an almost religious attitude echoing the ethos of the aboriginal ancestors of us all.

  “If you shot something when Harv was around,” Cliff told me, “you made good and sure you killed it quick and clean. If he seen you take a gut shot he’d belt you, like as not. And if you just wounded something you had to stay onto it ’til you killed it dead, suppose it took all day and half the night.

  “More’n once I seen Harv hold his own fire when a deer outsmarted the dogs as was trailing it. ‘That there deer earned a second chance,’ he’d say. One time a cow moose the dogs was running mired herself up to her belly so bad in a muskeg Harv could have just knocked her on the head. ’Stead of which he spent an afternoon cutting and hauling poles and jamming them under her ’til she could get good enough footing to scramble clear and get away.

  “He could take a knock good as he gave. One time when my brother George was ten and I was twelve, he took us deer hunting and we come upon a gang of foolhens – spruce grouse, you call them – sitting all in a row on a branch like a bunch of old biddies at a Bible meeting, clucking and clicking away at us like we was the devil’s spawn.

  “Now Harv had told us kids time and again, ‘Don’t you kill foolhens. Someday you might be caught out with no grub and no gun to get none, and ready to starve to death. Then a foolhen shows up and all you got to do is tap her on the head or wring her neck and there’s your dinner. So leave them be unless you needs one bad.’

  “He’d drilled that into us real good, but that day he was in a foul mood. We’d been out since dawn and got nothing, and the only chance he’d had for a shot at a deer his old gun misfired, which made him wild. Anyhow, when we come upon that bunch of foolhens Harv grabbed a little .22 off George and quick as a wink shot the head off one of the birds.

  “George just stood there a second or two looking at his granddaddy. Never said a word, but all of a sudden he cocked his arm and swung a punch right up from the ground to Harv’s jaw.

  “It knocked the old man’s glasses up onto his forehead and sent his cap flying after the rest of the foolhens as George yells, ‘Leave ’em be, you old bastid! Don’t you know nothin’?’

  “Harv was pleased as punch. Week or two later he proudly told our dad George had loosened two of his teeth and ‘they ain’t set yet!’ ”

  The weather closed in on Ananias and Cliff and I found ourselves confined in Harv’s house by pelting rain and furious gusts. We lit a big fire in the living room, did a little cooking, drank a modicum, and yarned a lot. Or, rather, Cliff yarned and I listened, occasionally egging him on.

  “What about women?” I asked innocently. “Was Harv much interested in them?”

  Cliff snorted – literally.

  “Nope. Not so’s you’d notice. Not more’n eight days of the week – not to mention the nights. Mind you, he might tickle any one of them come within reach and no doubt he did father his sh
are of wood colts. Truth to tell, there wasn’t many ladies round about he hadn’t jumped, or tried to, one time or another.…

  “’Cept for Leathy Grant.

  “Leathy was Watt Grant’s daughter, come to live with Harv and Liza, his second wife, after Watt got drowned on a log drive down the Ottawa.

  “Now Leathy was a good deal worse than just shy of men – she was plain man-scared. Would scream if one as much as looked her over. Was so goddamn flighty she wouldn’t undress at night ’less every lamp in the house was out, fearful somebody might see her dimple.

  “One time after Harv was getting a little long in the tooth, he was out digging potatoes and grunting and groaning every time he leaned over to pick one up ’cause of a bad back. I happened by, and asked him why he didn’t get Leathy to do it for him.

  “ ‘Leathy!’ he spits. ‘Goddamn it, boy, she wouldn’t stoop down in front of no potato! Potatoes got eyes, ain’t they? Could peek right up under her skirt!’

  “Harv wasn’t much for religion so he steered clear of churches, though he never missed the revival meeting the Free Methodists held at the north end every August month.

  “It lasted a week, under canvas. A real old-fashioned come-all-ye. Harv took me and George up there once when we was about half growed. Told us the revival was the best Christly jumping ground short of Heaven herself. And the proof was in the pudding – more babies was born in April month in our neck of the woods than all the rest of the year.

  “All three of us was pretty well played out by the time we headed home. The kicker give out, and George and me had to row most of the way while Harv snoozed in the stern seat, with his ‘leetle eye’ opening every now and again just in case something come along.

  “But let me tell you about Harv and Miss Adelaide.

  “We never knowed where Miss Adelaide come from or who her folks was. What we heard, she was the oldest of three sisters come into the country from eastward before 1900 in a canoe paddled by an old fellow who might have been their daddy.

  “When they smashed the canoe in a rapid on the Madawaska and lost pretty much everything they had, the old fellow put Miss Adelaide in charge of the others – told them all to stay put and he set off to see could he find help. And never come back.

  “Miss Adelaide built a lean-to shelter then set the younger ones to looking for grub. They caught trout and suckers with their hands in a creek. Caught rabbits with snares made from willow roots. Picked berries in the bogs. But it was slim pickings, and when the old fellow never come back, one day Miss Adelaide gets the other two onto their feet and they pack up what little they had and set off on their own.

  “Took a while, no doubt, but they made their way through swamps, around lakes, over brooks, and through the woods ’til they come upon the camp of an Algonquin family, and them people took them in.

  “Now to git back to Harv – one time when he was still a young buck he’d been trailing a moose in Black Swamp for a couple days and was pretty well tuckered out when he come across a cabin in the middle of the swamp as had a sign nailed over the door that said:

  MINK STATION

  “Well, he didn’t know what to make of that but he thumped on the door and a pretty woman about his own age opened it and said she was sorry but the track hadn’t been laid so there wasn’t no trains running yet. Said she was Miss Adelaide, the station agent, and did he want to come in and wait, though it’d likely be a while?

  “Harv was flummoxed. Didn’t know if she was right in the head or what. He knew there weren’t no railroad into Black Swamp nor likely never would be. He couldn’t figure out how this woman got there nor what she might be up to. What he did know was she was a good-looker and friendly as a puppy.

  “He said she was built as neat as a young doe. Wore men’s knee-high lace-up boots, a fringed deerskin jacket, a short skirt, and a headband with beads all the colours of a rainbow.

  “ ‘She looked like an angel,’ he said, but was able as a man. She had built herself that cabin; cut her own winter wood; drove dogs and run a trapline; and paddled her own canoe out of Black Swamp to visit and to get stuff from the Indians was still living on the land – maybe the same ones she’d happened on when she was just a kid.

  “The way Harv told it, she could do pretty near anything he could. But she did seem a mite lonely. So he took up her invite … and it turned out to be good for all time.

  “They never got married because both was as stiff-necked as cranes with rheumatics and Miss Adelaide claimed she was honour bound not to leave Mink Station ’til the railroad sent someone to relieve her. As for Harv, he wouldn’t make an honest woman out of her ’til she was willing to move to Ananias, and she wouldn’t budge.

  “How did she get away into Black Swamp like that? Well, according to Harv, when she was about fifteen some white men camped near the Indian camp where she and her sisters was living. Said they were surveying for a railroad company was going to build a line through the swamp to get at the last big stand of virgin timber left in the country.

  “They was led by a red-headed fellow who was more interested in Miss Adelaide than in surveying. He got what he wanted by telling her the company was going to build a station right in the middle of Black Swamp called Mink Station and he’d be in charge of it, and then he’d marry her and they’d be the king and queen thereabouts.

  “When the redhead and his crowd went out that autumn, he promised to be back come spring. That winter she built the cabin where Mink Station was supposed to be. But, of course, he never did come back.

  “She stayed on there by herself and wouldn’t budge. Even after Harv found her, she still wouldn’t leave, though he was welcome to stay at her place and in her bed long as he pleased.

  “That being the way it was, Harv married a woman from Gilmour and got three young ones on her, one of them being my mother. But Mother died young so Harv took in Liza MacRae, a widow woman, and her sons. But he never did cut loose from Miss Adelaide – nor she from him.

  “Early on Harv had give her a heavy old army whistle had a screech to it you could hear three, four miles off on a still night. When Miss Adelaide got to feeling lonely, she’d push off in her canoe if it was summertime, on snowshoes in wintertime, and travel from Mink Station to the big ridge behind Ananias. Then she’d lay into that whistle!

  “When Harv heard it, he’d light out running. Liza couldn’t abide Miss Adelaide nor nothing about her. So of an evening if things was a mite dull in Harv’s house, one of us youngsters might straighten up in his chair and ask, ‘You hear something? … Thought I heard a whistle.…’

  “Liza would grab an iron skillet off the stove and just dare Harv to so much as stir from his chair. Generally he was too quick for her and he’d whip outside with her yowling after him. Which didn’t do no good for he’d be gone.

  “If it was a false alarm he’d come back madder than hell. But if it was the real thing, we might not see him again for quite a while. He had a little tilt somewhere up behind the ridge and that’s where they’d be at it. When he did come home, looking that pleased and satisfied, Liza wouldn’t speak to him for a week.

  “One winter when Harv was off north timber cruising for the Gilmour Lumber Company, Liza laid one too many chores onto me and I decided to get even. The night we had the first snow of the season I put on a worn-out pair of woman’s boots was in the back shed and slipped out and made tracks all around the place. Then I cached the boots and slipped back into the house and nobody the wiser.

  “George was the first one outside next morning, fetching a load of firewood. He come back in so het up he was like to piss himself. So Liza went out and had a look and all hell broke loose. She grabbed a hatchet and took off, yelling, ‘I’ll chop you up so fine, you black bitch, the ants won’t find enough of you for breakfast!’

  “Liza stayed on the boil ’til Harv come home. I figured she’d chew his head off, but she just hauled him into bed and jumped him so frequent I guess he was glad to go off for anothe
r round of timber cruising.

  “It’s a funny thing. Although I never laid eyes on Miss Adelaide myself, she seemed almost as close as my own kin. But after Harv went away for good, she was gone too – or almost gone.

  “The winter after he packed it in, I happened to be here on my lonesome and got snowed in by a big blizzard. When the wind dropped out, the snow was piled up higher than my arse. It was still as death everywhere outside. There was no birds, not even a whiskey jack or a raven. Nothing flying. Nothing moving. But somebody’d been out there. On racquets. And whoever it was had left a trail down from the ridge and right around the house.

  “Must’ve been somebody pretty small, and light on their feet because the tracks weren’t deep. And they was toed-in, Indian style. Whoever it was, they’d been followed by a dog walking in the racquet tracks like an old dog will.

  “And no, Squib – afore you ask – I never heard no whistle blow. Not then. Nor ever after.”

  In the summer of the year Cliff turned fourteen, a swarm of prospectors descended on the country. Their camps sprang up like toadstools after a rain. The reek of their campfires was everywhere, and human and non-human residents alike were forced to flee forest fires deliberately set to expose the naked rock beneath.

  The outlanders drifted secretively through gullies, up and down streams, and along the lakeshores, generally avoiding human contact, although occasionally one would show up at McAllister’s store in Gilmour. My regimental buddy Lorne McAllister was a teenager then and recalled them with contempt.

  “They was dirty buggers, Squib. Dirty spoken and mean too. Would only buy a bit of flour, sowbelly, or tea, and they pinched every penny. We had little enough truck with them, nor they with us.”

  Wes’makoon people were not themselves interested in whatever gold might lie beneath their feet. Gold had never filled their bellies or brought them joy in the past. At best, outsiders who came sniffing after it were viewed with suspicion.