Mattie Mitchell

by Gary Collins

  He was the descendant of an ancient nomadic people who had roamed the steppes of a far eastern land. The land bridge that had kept the earth’s greatest land mass as one allowed his magnificent, wandering, fearless ancestors access to a land of wonders. In his veins coursed the blood of ageless corsairs for whom distant oceans were never a barrier. He was truly a man of the earth. He was timeless.

  A brief rest slowed his pulsating blood as his wet clothing cooled him. Knowing he would get a chill with a prolonged stop, he moved away from the rim of the valley. A few long strides took him across a narrow meadow and to the edge of the dripping woods beyond.

  He was about to enter a faint trace, his right hand lifting a snow-sodden alder branch out of his way, when a distant, muffled boom thudded up through the valley behind him. Mattie froze but didn’t turn his head toward the sound. For several minutes he waited, listening for the sound to come again.

  When it came again he turned, and before the sound had faded away he was standing once more on the valley edge. It had come from the direction of the sea just a few miles away to the west. Despite the high mountains with their deep valleys, there was no following echo from the loud noise, just a dull roar that hung for a while in the damp air before dissipating.

  It was a ship’s cannon fire. Mattie was as sure of that as if he had been standing on the coastline watching the white men play with their modern weapons. He had heard the sound many times before and had once been witness to a strange event involving the big black guns.

  IT HAD BEEN A QUIET, WARM SUNDAY morning that summer past. Mattie had decided to attend Mass in his small village. The Catholic Church had always played a big part in the lives of his people. It was a friendship that had begun long before Mattie’s time, across the water on the mainland of Canada.

  The native peoples of that vast land to the westward had no say in the forced occupation of their country by warring nations of white men. The two nations that were the most vicious in their dominance of so much natural virgin wealth were the English and the French. These two neighbouring countries had fought against each other for centuries on the east side of the Atlantic and now sought to extend their battlefield. They came to lord over the land. They wanted the fish and the fur-bearing animals, the immense tracts of timber, the stretches of fertile land. It was an unimaginable resource to the land-hungry and resource-starved explorers from Europe. It was a land that knew nothing of the modern invention of steel.

  The hook, the trap, and the gun would bring an ages-old native lifestyle to an end. The invading people with the sickly skin colour wanted to own the very land that the indigenous peoples had occupied forever. This was a concept the natives could not understand. How could anyone own the earth? It was under the feet of everyone. It was a part of all of their races. The magnificent waters running through it were like clear bloodlines that linked humans to the Great Spirit. The white man claimed ownership over the land that wasn’t theirs to take in the first place.

  The Mi’kmaq people of which Mattie Mitchell was a part would survive the wars, but would never be their own complete and unique nation again. Of the two foreign nations vying for dominance over the virgin continent, the Mi’kmaq aligned themselves with the French, and along with them their version of Catholicism.

  Mattie knew about his people’s belief in Glooscap, their god who came from nothing. According to their ancient belief, Glooscap was a man created from speech. Secretly, Mattie didn’t see much difference in this belief than the Christian belief. He had never heard the priest say where God came from. He knew God had a son who came from a woman whom had never lain with a man and that this man and his father were supposed to be the same person. This same God blew His breath upon the dust of the land and created man. Mattie dared not mention the similarities between the two beliefs. For Mattie, to sit at the back of the church and experience the reverence of something he never quite understood was in itself spiritual.

  Several wharves jutted out into the calm Sunday morning harbour, and as Mattie walked along he noticed a schooner was tied securely across the head of one of the wharves. Below her two masts, and fastened diagonally to them on the main- and fore booms, two stained brown sails were neatly furled. Docked as it was, the schooner and the rickety wharf had formed a T jutting from the craggy shoreline. Mattie had always liked the little schooners, though he had never sailed on one. Watching them sail in and out of the bays, sometimes seeing them below him as he stood atop a high fjord, they always seemed to be quick, spirited things, borne freely along by a brisk wind.

  As he drew nearer to the schooner, several shouting men were hastening out onto the wharf toward it. The rickety wharf creaked and buckled under the feet of so many hurrying men. Mattie stopped at the wharf’s entrance, and without venturing onto it, listened to the noisy white men.

  “I tells ’e ’tis no good to be wasting a cannon shot yet. ’Twill take seven days fer a body to come afloat.”

  This shout came from a bearded, burly man who had just appeared through the slanted forecastle door. Judging by the way the rest of the men were looking to him for answers, Mattie guessed he was the schooner’s skipper.

  “Well, ’tis not shot we’re asking ’e to fire from the bloody cannon. Only a charge of black powder, is all. An’ I always heard ’twould take only three days fer a drownded body to come back up. An’ ’tis been four days now since poor Walt disappeared.”

  The small, skinny man who was shouting his concerns into the captain’s face seemed to be speaking for the rest of the crowd. They all yelled in support.

  The church bell started to ring across the calm, black water. The men, some of them still standing on the wharf, some of them aboard the schooner, all turned as one toward the sound. Mattie stood with his hands in his pockets and continued watching. He was amused by the loud talk and wondered what would happen next. The ringing bell gave the captain what he thought could be a way out of shooting his cannon.

  “B’ys, can’t ya hear the bell ringing? ’Tis Sunday morning, fer gawd’s sake. I can’t be firing guns on Sunday morning.”

  “Don’t let that bother you none. ’Tis only the first bell, and besides, that’s a Catholic church. They got nothing against firing guns on Sunday. By the time the second bell rings out we can have it over with, an’ not only that, who knows? Poor Walt could be brought up from the deep!”

  The thin man was waving his arms at the skipper, pointing at the church and gesticulating out over the water at the same time. Mattie knew he was cursing at the schooner skipper. Cursing was something for which Mattie’s ancient Mi’kmaq language had no words. He had asked a white man once what he meant by those cursing words. Most of them had been drawn from the Bible, but the man who was so vehemently uttering them could not explain them. Mattie observed they were usually said during bouts of anger or excitement.

  The captain mumbled something that Mattie could not hear. Walking behind the tall mainmast of the schooner, the skipper stopped before a small bundle covered with a tarp. Pulling the heavy covering away from the pile, he exposed what appeared to be a tangle of manila and hemp ropes. It took him several minutes to reveal under the snarl of rope what indeed looked like a small cannon.

  “This is not a man-o’-war but a fishing vessel. The old whale gun could come in handy if we are of a mind to shoot at one of the big ones sometime.”

  The captain seemed to be a bit self-conscious due to the size of his “ship’s cannon” now exposed for all to see. Some of the men gathered around were taken aback by the small gun, but the skinny one who had the most lip was not.

  “By gawd, ’tis not the size of the gun that matters but the bloody racket it can make. That’s what we’re after this marnin’. Poor Walt loved the sound of a loud gun, he did—’twill bring him up, fer sure.”

  Mattie looked on with interest. He knew what they were about to do. He had seen it done once before. From the few glazed streaks of paint left on the gun, it was obvious it had once been black.
But now dark red blotches of rust dominated it’s surface. Pitted metal sores ran the length of the small cannon barrel, so that it resembled a small cylinder of discarded metal more than it did a cannon.

  Between the shouts and all the commotion around the schooner, Mattie learned that “poor Walt” had been missing for four days. It was also pointed out to the reluctant captain that he had last been seen walking along the shoreline long after dark and had not been seen since. Stumbling along is more like it, thought Mattie, who knew the missing man very well, but not by association. They were naming him right, he reasoned. Walt was a poor everything: a poor hunter and poor trapper as well as poor fisherman. The only time Walt was good at any of these things was when the bragging accounts coming from his drunken mouth drew a few unknowing listeners. Mattie also knew that Walt had been on a drinking binge this time for as many days as he had now been missing.

  Apparently a woman had looked out into the night from behind her kitchen curtain before heading upstairs to her bed, and she had seen him staggering along the landwash. From her account and because he had not been seen for days, and after a brief search around the surrounding forest had shown not a trace of him, it was determined that Walt had fallen into the cold waters of the bay.

  Mattie figured if he was in the water he could just as easily have been pushed in. Walt was known for his rowdiness when in his cups and would start fights that would seldom finish in his favour.

  An order of “Stand clear!” was suddenly shouted from the schooner captain, who was standing over the whale gun with what appeared to be a burning stick in his hand. He held the burning end against a thin, dark fuse sticking up out of the back of the cannon. Just when it seemed it would not ignite, it sizzled into a smoky yellow flame that travelled down the twisted length of fuse and disappeared into the bore of the cannon. By now everyone, including the skipper, had jumped out over the gunnels of the schooner to stand on the creaking wharf. From the mouth of the cannon came a single perfect ring of smoke. From the small hole where the burning fuse had disappeared came a long pfttt! sound like that of a fat squid on a jigger, and nothing more.

  Everyone started yelling at the captain at once, blaming him for the “dud” shot. The captain yelled back, “It wasn’t my fault! Maybe the bloody powder was damp!” He started to climb back aboard his schooner to check on the failed firing of the gun, when a blue, black, and white plume of smoke erupted from each end of the cannon. From the business end erupted a long, thin, yellow tongue of flame followed by an ear-splitting explosion that silenced the second church bell, which had just begun. The noise burst out over the still waters of the harbour, boomed way out the bay, and roared back from the hills. When the echo died, the next sounds came from every dog in the place. The barking that followed created almost as much disquiet as had the cannon. And, still, “poor Walt” did not appear.

  High in the hills, wet and tired, Mattie Mitchell smiled at the memory. The sound he had heard just a few minutes before came again. This wasn’t someone hoping to raise a dead body from the depths. Of that he was pretty sure. The sound did not come again. Striding once more into the dark forest, the tall Indian vanished from the mountain meadow.

  DOWN OVER THE WHITE MOUNTAINS, through the wooded gorges, across the sloped, spring-flowing valleys and out into the ice-packed Gulf of St. Lawrence, a small schooner lay jammed solid. Dark figures scrambling down her shaky rope ladders and wooden side sticks jumped drunkenly onto the hummocky ice that held them prisoner. The first few steps the black-clad men took left dirty, grease-stained prints on the virgin ice: the filth from the schooner’s deck trailing the hunters.

  The schooner’s white mainsail appeared to be new and was billowed full with a following wind. Her foresail was brown and showed many sewn patches, the stitching showing like the healed scabs from numerous wounds. This sail too was pulling with all of its strain. But still the schooner was not moving.

  The vessel was leaning to starboard at an alarming angle and was in danger of being broached by the terrible pressure exerted on her port side by the squeezing ice. On board, the men flung heavy hemp lines from her bow and, on the ice, the others hurriedly gathered them up. Placing the ropes over their shoulders, and bent over like straining, hauling dogs, and bellowing some obscure seaman’s shanty, the sealers pulled with all their might. Now the sails luffed a bit as the men shouted, the mast rigging creaked and clinked, the schooner yawed more to starboard and groaned her misery, but still she remained held in the frozen grip.

  At a command from the schooner’s skipper the ropes were discarded. The men hurried back along both sides of the hapless boat, where they stood and awaited further instructions. Two greasy poles about ten feet long were handed down over the sides of the schooner by the few men still on deck, along with several quart-sized cans of black powder. The two men who took the wooden poles quickly lashed one tin of the canned explosives to one end of each pile. Thin, black fuses no more than a foot long were attached to one end of the cans. Now the two men separated from the crowd. Running like proud warriors, their raised standards swaying as they went, they soon reached the bow of the stricken vessel.

  As the seal hunters watched, the “powder men”—these young men had to be quick on their feet—knelt on the ice and tried to find a hole suitable to push the ends of the poles beneath the surface. It was a difficult task, and at first it seemed they would have to resort to axes to chop a hole in the pressing ice. They finally found a suitable opening between the tumbled ice pans and rammed the powder cans, their smoking lucifers already lit, below the ice until they disappeared with only the black tips of the blasting tips showing above the ice.

  To the shouts of “Run, ya young buggers, run!” from the captain and excited yells from the watching men, the powder men raced back toward the ship, weaving around and jumping over the hummocks of ice. The shouting men fell suddenly silent when the two blasters reached them. For several seconds there was no sound at all. Then a deep, muffled rumble came from below the ice and, with a tumultuous whump, the exploding powder burst itself free of the ice. Pulverized snow and blue ice shot into the air and fell back like white chowder. Several thick, sheared ice pans rolled over, exposing their blue undersides.

  A narrow black lead of water appeared. The sails bent. The schooner lurched ahead a few feet and tried to right itself, but then stopped again. A frantic yell from the schooner’s deck sent the powder men racing back toward the vessel’s straining bow again.

  The process was repeated as before. A second blast bellowed upward, spending its energy among the tumbling ice pans. Another, wider lead of roiling water appeared. The schooner eagerly plunged its way into it, surging forward, seizing its chance for freedom. The men shouted in triumph and went running after the slow-moving schooner with its ropes trailing.

  The explosion of sound roared away over the ice toward the nearby land, the second sound wave following the first up through a mountain gorge, to die at the very edge of a silent valley.

  CHAPTER 3

  PRESENTLY, MATTIE CAME UPON A SMALL, snow-covered clearing in the middle of the thick forest. At the north side of the clearing and nestled into the edge of the trees stood a rough wigwam with a south-facing skin door. The trees in the place had not been cut and the clearing seemed to be natural. There are many such in every forest. The white surface of a small pond showed beyond the trees, and behind the wigwam Mattie could hear more than see a small stream running toward the small body of water. Listening to the burble of the stream, he noted another sign of the fading winter. When he had left this place a week ago the brook was frozen and silent.

  He stopped at the edge of the heavy trees to examine the wigwam. The structure blended in so completely with its surroundings that a furtive glance could very well have passed over it. It stood no more than ten feet wide at its circular base and its height ended in a narrow, conical shape about as high as the base was wide. Dozens of smooth, unpeeled, green aspen poles had long since been driven in
to the earth at an oblique angle. Their raised, axe-sharpened, crossed ends were blackened from countless campfires. This wooden skeleton was covered with overlapping layers of pale white birch bark that stopped short of the raised pole ends. Lodged over this bark layer and resting between each underlying pole were more poles of slender aspen holding the thin natural covering secure. The door was made from the hides of two or more stitched caribou quarters, the thick fur intact and laced at the top.

  Nothing seemed disturbed and after a while Mattie stepped boldly across the clearing and approached the wigwam. When he released the heavy load from his tired shoulders and straightened his back, he staggered just a bit with the sudden relief from the day-long weight. The thump line left a reddish mark across his forehead. Wisps of steam that had been clinging to his wet woollen jacket beneath the loaded pack drifted away from the man as he stretched erect.

  The door opened without a sound when he threw back the animal skin to reveal a black, oblong hole. He fastened the bottom end of the skin door above the opening. His frame filling the entrance, Mattie had to double over to step inside. Walking to the cold, grey ash firepit, he knelt down. Over time, the constant use of this fireplace had worn and burned a shallow hole in the earth, so that now it was below the level of the floor.

  Taking some thinly crushed birch bark and dried yellow mosses, he laid them on a larger piece of birch placed on the dead ashes. He placed small twigs and then larger ones on top. Rising, he returned outside, picked up his pack with one hand, and walked back to the fireplace. From deep inside the pack he found a well-tied pouch, from which he removed a small wooden box. From inside it he drew a rectangular piece of steel and a dull grey, crescent-shaped piece of chert.

  Creating a small hole inside the crushed starter pile and with the steel in his right hand, Mattie made a sudden, rapid scrape against the sharp edge of the chert. He was rewarded with an instant spray of yellow sparks, which fell among the waiting fire starter. Bending over the smouldering tinder, he blew a long, soft breath. The glow became a flaring burst of fire. He carefully placed the nest of the prepared kindling over it and watched as it smoked, then blazed into life. And as simple as that, Mattie had a warm campfire going.