Cedar Creek Part 10

'I wouldn't desire,' said the latter, seating himself on the end of the table, while his wife superintended a pan of frizzling pork on the coals--'I wouldn't desire, for a feller that wanted to settle down for good, a more promising location than yourn at the Cedars. The high ground grows the very best sorts of hard wood--oak, sugar maple, elm, ba.s.swood. Not too many beech, or I'd expect sand; with here and there a big pine and a handful of balsams. The underbrushing ain't much, except in the swamp.'

'I'm glad to hear that,' said Mr. Holt, 'for the fall is going fast, and we'll have to work pretty hard before snow comes.'

'So I'm thinkin'. But _you_ ain't going to settle: you haven't the cut of it: you're settled already.'

'How do you know?'

'Oh, you didn't listen as they did,' pointing his thumb towards the Wynns, 'when I fell to talkin' of the ground. I know'd my men at once.

Nor you didn't stare about as they did, as if the house and fixins was a show at a copper ahead.'

'You must excuse our curiosity,' said Robert politely.

'Surely; every man that has eyes is welcome to use 'em,' replied the backwoodsman bluntly. 'We ain't got no manners in the bush, nor don't want 'em, as I tell Mary here, when she talks any palaver. Now, wife, them pritters must be done;' and he left his seat on the table to pry over her pan.

'Then take the cakes out of the bake-kettle, will you?' said Mary; 'and if them ducks be raw, 'tain't my fault, remember.' She was evidently a woman of few words, but trenchant.

Thus warned, her husband did not press the point, but took the stewing fowl under his own care, displaying a practical experience of cookery won in many a day of bush life.

'These duck was shot on your pond, stranger; if you be a good hand with the gun, you'll never want for fresh meat while that water holds together. The finest maskelonge and pickerel I ever see was hooked out of it.'

Arthur's face brightened; for the sportsman instinct was strong in him, and he had been disappointed hitherto by finding the woods along their track empty of game.

''Cos the critters have more sense than to wait by the road to be shot,' explained the backwoodsman, as he dished up his stew--a sort of hodgepodge of wild-fowl, the theory of which would have horrified an epicure; but the practical effect was most savoury.

Now the boy Benny had never in his small life seen any edifice n.o.bler than a loghouse on the ground-floor; and the upper storey which Mr.

Callaghan had built with his chips seemed to him as queer a phenomenon as a man having two heads.

'Well, only think of that!' exclaimed Andy; 'the boy doesn't know what a stairs is.'

'And how should he?' asked the father, rather sharply. 'He ha'n't seen nothin' but the bush. One time I took him to Greenock, and he couldn't stop wonderin' what med all the houses come together. For all that, he ha'n't a bad notion of chopping, and can drive a span of oxen, and is growin' up as hardy as my rifle--eh, Benny?'

'He cut all the wood I wanted while you were away last time, Peter,'

chimed in the mother. So the strangers saw that the principle which leads parents to bore their unoffending visitors with copybooks and the 'Battle of Prague,' is applicable to backwood accomplishments also.

As a general rule, conversation does not flourish in the bush. The settler's isolated life is not favourable to exchange of thought, and events are few. Silence had fallen upon the woman in this house to a remarkable degree, and become incorporated with her. She went about her work quietly and quickly, speaking but five sentences in the course of the evening. The last of these was to notify to her husband that 'the skins was ready.'

'We've no beds,' said he, with equal curtness. 'You must try and be snug in a wrap-up on the floor to-night. More logs, Benny;' and additional wood was heaped down, while he brought forward a bundle of bear and buffalo skins, enough to blanket them all. Mary had already picked up the pine-log containing her baby, and taken it into the other room out of sight, whither her husband followed; and Benny crept into a sort of bed-closet in the far corner.

All night long, through the outer darkness, came a sound as of a limitless sea upon a lonely strand. Robert knew it for the wind wandering in the forest, and even in his home dreams it mingled a diapason, until the early sun gleamed through the c.h.i.n.ks of the door, and flung a ray across his face. Simultaneously the poultry outside and the infant within woke up, commencing their several noises; and the farmer, coming out, built up the fire, and hung down the bake-kettle to heat for the breakfast bread. Then he invited his company to 'a wash'

at the spring; and, leading them by a wood path beside the house, they came to a pellucid pool fed by a rivulet, which, after flowing over its basin, ran off rapidly to lower ground. Here Benny was flung in by his father, though the water was quite deep enough to drown him; but he dived, and came out buoyant as a coot.

'Now go fetch the cow, my lad, and help your mother to fix breakfast, while we walk round the clearing.' But this morning she had an efficient coadjutor in the person of Andy Callaghan, who dandled the baby while the cakes were being made, his sharp eye learning a lesson meantime; and milked the cow while the child was being dressed; and cut slices of pork, superintending its frizzling while the room was being set to rights. Three or four attempts to draw the silent woman into conversation were utterly abortive.

'Troth, an' you're a jewil of a wife,' remarked the Irishman, when everything seemed done. 'I'll engage I won't have the good luck to get one wid her tongue in such good ordher.'

Mary Logan laughed. 'It be from having no folk to talk with,' she said.

'An' a sin an' a shame it is for himself to lave you alone,' rejoined Andy, looking complimentary. 'Now I want to know one thing that has been botherin' me ever since I came in here. What's them strings of yallow stuff that are hangin' out of the rafthers, an' are like nothin' I see in all my days, 'cept shavin's?'

'Sarce,' answered Mrs. Logan, looking up; 'them's sarce.'

'I'm as wise as ever,' said Andy. Whereupon she went to the compartment which acted as store-closet, and, bringing out a pie which had a wooden spoon erect in it, proffered him a bit.

'Ah,' quoth Mr. Callaghan with satisfaction, 'that's English talk; I know what that manes well. So ye calls apples "sarce!" I've heerd tell that every counthry has a lingo of its own, an' I partly b'lieve it now.

But throth, that way of savin' 'em would be great news intirely for the childer at home!'

So thought Robert Wynn afterwards, when he found the practice almost universal among the Canadians, and wondered that a domestic expedient so simple and serviceable should be confined to American housekeepers.

'Peter planted an orchard the first thing when we settled, and maples be plenty in the bush,' said Mrs. Logan, with unusual communicativeness.

'Yes, ma'am,' rejoined Andy suavely, and not in the least seeing the connection between maple trees and apple-pie. 'I wondher might I make bould to ax you for one of them sthrings? they're sich a curiosity to me.' And he had the cord of leathern pieces stowed away in one of the provision hampers before the others came in from the fields.

There they had seen the invariable abundance and wastefulness of bush-farming; no trace of the economy of land, which need perforce be practised in older countries, but an extravagance about the very zigzag fences, which unprofitably occupied, with a succession of triangular borderings, as much s.p.a.ce as would make scores of garden beds. 'n.o.body cares for the selvedges when there is a whole continent to cut from,'

remarked Sam Holt, in a sententious way he had.

A yield of from twenty to five-and-twenty bushels per acre of wheat, and two hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes, were mentioned by the farmer as an average crop. His barns and root-house were full to repletion.

Nothing of all this property was locked up: a latch on the door sufficed.

'I suppose, then, you have no rogues in the bush?' said Robert.

'Where everybody's as well off as another, there ain't no thievin',' was the pithy answer. 'A wolf now and then among our sheep, is all the robbers we has.'

After breakfast the bullocks were yoked afresh.

'I guess as how you've stumps before you to-day, a few,' said the farmer, coming out axe on shoulder. ''Tain't only a blaze up beyond your place at the Cedars, and not much better than a track of regulation width from the "Corner" to there. Only for that job of underbrushing I want to get finished, I'd be along with you to-day.'

He and his boy Benny walked with the travellers so far as their way lay together. The wife stood at the door, shading her eyes with her hand, till the lumbering waggon was lost to view round the edge of the woods.

The day's journey was just a repet.i.tion of yesterday's, with the stumps and the mud holes rather worse. The 'Corner' with its single sawmill and store, offered no inducement for a halt; and a tedious two miles farther brought them to 'hum.'

CHAPTER XII.

CAMPING IN THE BUSH.

'Well!' exclaimed Robert Wynn, 'here is my estate; and neither pond, nor swamp, nor yet spring creek do I behold.'

He looked again at the landmark--an elm tree at the junction of the lot line and the concession road, which bore the numbers of each, 'Nine, Fifteen,' in very legible figures on opposite sides. A 'blaze' had been made by chopping away a slice of the bark with an axe about three feet from the ground, and on the white s.p.a.ce the numbers were marked by the surveyor. All roads through the forest, and all farm allotments, are first outlined in this way, before the chopper sets to work.

The new townships in Upper Canada are laid out in parallel lines, running nearly east and west, sixty-six chains apart, and sixty-six feet in width, which are termed concession lines, being conceded by Government as road allowances. These lands thus enclosed are subdivided into lots of two hundred acres by other lines, which strike the concession roads at right angles every thirty chains; and every fifth of these lot lines is also a cross-road. We have all looked at maps of the country, and wondered at the sort of chess-board counties which prevail in the back settlements: the same system of parallelograms extends to the farms.

Robert's face was a little rueful. Twenty yards in any direction he could not see for the overpowering bush, except along the line of road darkened with endless forest. The waggon was being unpacked, for the driver st.u.r.dily declared that his agreement had been only to bring them as far as this post on the concession: he must go back to the 'Corner'

that evening, on his way home.

'An' is it on the road ye'll lave the masther's things?' remonstrated Andy.