Cedar Creek Part 22

'I thought I never should get fair aim, from the way he was protected by trees,' said the sportsman, reloading with satisfaction. 'And it's cruel to maim a creature, you know;' whence the reader may perceive that Captain Argent was humane.

'Holloa! what's this?' said Arthur, nearly stumbling over a pair of antlers.

'Moose,' replied Ina laconically, as he glanced upwards to see whether the maple twigs had been nipped short.

'He must have been a trifle lighter for the loss of these,' observed Arthur, lifting them. 'Nearly six feet across, and half-a-hundred weight, if an ounce. I'm curious to see the animal that can carry them composedly.'

'The largest beast on the continent,' said Argent. But much as they searched, the shed antlers were all they saw of moose for that day.

CHAPTER XXIV.

LUMBERERS.

Scene, early morning; the sun pouring clear light over the snowy world, and upon Captain Argent in front of the hut, just emerged from his blankets and rugs.

'Why, Arthur, here's an elk walking up to the very hall door!'

Almost at the same minute Ina appeared among the distant trees, and fired. He had gone off on snow-shoes long before daybreak, to run down the moose he knew to be in the neighbourhood, had wounded a fine bull, and driven him towards his camp.

'Why didn't you finish him off on the spot,' asked Arthur, 'instead of taking all that trouble?'

'No cart to send for the flesh,' replied Ina significantly.

There might be a thousand pounds of that, covered with long coa.r.s.e hair, and crested with the ponderous antlers. A hunch on the shoulders seemed arranged as a cushion support to these last; and in the living specimens seen afterwards by Arthur, they carried the huge horns laid back horizontally, as they marched at a long trot, nose in the air, and large sharp eyes looking out on all sides.

'It was a sharp idea to make the elk his own butcher's boy,' quoth Argent.

The ma.s.sive thick lips formed the 'mouffle,' prized in the wilderness as a dainty: Arthur would have been ashamed to state his preference for a civilised mutton chop. Other elks shared the fate of this first; though it seemed a wanton waste of nature's bounties to slay the n.o.ble animals merely for their skins, noses, and tongues. Ina was callous, for he knew that thus perished mult.i.tudes every year in Canada West, and thousands of buffaloes in the Hudson's Bay territory. Arthur could not help recalling little Jay; and many a time her lesson kept his rifle silent, and spared a wound or a life.

One day, while stalking wild turkeys, creeping cautiously from tree to tree, an unwonted sound dissipated their calculations. Coming out on a ridge whence the wood swept down to one of the endless ponds, they heard distant noises as of men and horses drawing a heavy load.

'Lumberers,' explained Ina, p.r.i.c.king his ears. He would have immediately turned in a contrary direction; but the prospect of seeing a new phase of life was a strong temptation to Captain Argent, so they went forward towards a smoke that curled above a knot of pines.

It proceeded from the lumber shanty; a long, windowless log-hut with a door at one end, a perpetual fire in the centre, on a large open hearth of stones; the chimney, a hole in the roof. Along both sides and the farther end was a sort of dais, or low platform of unhewn trees laid close together, and supporting the 'bunks,' or general bed, of spruce boughs and blankets. Pots slung in the smoke and blaze were bubbling merrily, under presidence of a red night-capped French Canadian, who acted as cook, and was as civil, after the manner of his race, as if the new arrivals were expected guests.

'Ah, bon-jour, Messieurs; vous etes les bienvenus. Oui, monsieur--sans doute ce sont des gens de chantier. Dey vork in forest,' he added, with a wave of his hand--plunging into English. 'Nous sommes tous les gens de chantier--vat you call hommes de lumbare: mais pour moi, je suis chef de cuisine pour le present:' and a conversation ensued with Argent, in which Arthur made out little more than an occasional word of the Canadian's--with ease when it was so Anglican as 'le foreman.'

'What a good-looking, merry-faced chap he is!' observed Arthur, when the red nightcap had been pulled off in an obeisance of adieu, as they went to seek for the others, and witness their disforesting operations.

'French Canadians are generally the personifications of good humour and liveliness,' returned Argent; 'the pleasantest possible servants and the best voyagers. Listen to him now, carolling a "chanson" as he manages his s.m.u.tty cookery. That's the way they sing at everything.'

'So the lumberers have a foreman?'

'Curious how the French can't invent words expressive of such things, but must adopt ours. He tells me "le foreman's" duty is to distribute the work properly, allotting to each gang its portion; and also to make a report of conduct to the overseer at the end of the season, for which purpose he keeps a journal of events. I had no idea there was so much organization among them; and it seems the gangs have regular duties--one to fell, one to hew, one to draw to the water's edge with oxen; and each gang has a headman directing its labours.'

Nearing the sound of the axes, they came to where a group of lumber-men were cutting down some tall spruce-firs, having first laid across over the snow a series of logs, called 'bedding timbers,' in the line that each tree would fall. One giant pine slowly swayed downwards, and finally crashed its full length on the prepared sleepers, just as the strangers approached. Immediately on its fall, the 'liner' commenced to chop away the bark for a few inches wide all along the trunk, before marking with charcoal where the axes were to hew, in squaring the timber; meantime another man was lopping the top off the tree, and a third cutting a sort of rough mortise-hole at the base, which he afterwards repeated at the upper end.

So busy were the whole party, that the hewer, a genuine Paddy, who stood leaning on his broad axe until the timber was ready for him, was the first to raise his eyes and notice the new-comers. Arthur asked him what the holes were for.

'Why, then, to raft the trees together when we get 'em into the water,'

was his reply; and in the same breath he jumped on to the trunk, and commenced to notch with his axe as fast as possible along the sides, about two feet apart. Another of his gang followed, splitting off the blocks between the deep notches into the line mark. And this operation, repeated for the four sides, squared the pine into such a beam as we see piled in our English timber yards.

What was Arthur's surprise to recognise, in the ma.s.s of lumberers gathered round a huge mast, the Milesian countenance of Murty Keefe, a discontented emigrant with whom he had picked up a casual acquaintance on the steamboat which took him to Montreal. He was dressing away the knots near the top with his axe, as though he had been used to the implement all his life. When, after infinite trouble and shouting in all tongues, the half-dozen span of strong patient oxen were set in motion, dragging the seventy-feet length of timber along the snow towards the lake, Arthur contrived to get near enough to his countryman for audible speech. Murty's exaggerated expectations had suffered a grievous eclipse; still, if he became an expert hewer, he might look forward to earning more than a curate's salary by his axe. And they were well fed: he had more meat in a week now than in a twelvemonth in Ireland. He was one of half-a-dozen Irishmen in this lumberers' party of French Canadians, headed by a Scotch foreman; for through Canada, where address and administrative ability are required, it is found that Scotchmen work themselves into the highest posts.

During the rude but abundant dinner which followed, this head of the gang gave Argent some further bits of information about the lumber trade.

'We don't go about at random, and fell trees where we like,' said he.

'We've got a double tax to pay: first, ground rent per acre per annum for a licence, and then a duty of a cent for every cubic foot of timber we bring to market. Then, lest we should take land and not work it, we are compelled to produce a certain quant.i.ty of wood from every acre of forest we rent, under pain of forfeiting our licence.'

'And will you not have it all cut down some day? Then what is the country to do for fuel and the world for ships?'

The foreman rubbed his rusty beard with a laugh.

'There's hundreds of years of lumbering in the Bytown district alone,'

said he; 'why, sir, it alone comprehends sixty thousand square miles of forest.'

CHAPTER XXV.

CHILDREN OF THE FOREST.

There could hardly be a wider contrast than between Captain Argent's usual dinner at his regimental mess, and that of which he now partook in the lumbermen's shanty. Tables and chairs were as unknown as forks and dishes among the _gens de chantier_; a large pot of tea, dipped into by everybody's pannikin, served for beer and wine; pork was the _piece de resistance_, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an occasional remark in Irish or Scottish brogue.

'Your men seem to be temperance folk,' observed Argent to the foreman.

'Weel, they must be,' was the laconic reply. 'We've no stores where they could get brandy-smash in the bush, and it's so much the better for them, or I daursay they wad want prisons and juries next. As it is, they're weel behaved lads eneugh.'

'I'm sure it must be good in a moral point of view; but do you find them equal to as much work as if they had beer or spirits?' asked Captain Argent. 'And lumbering seems to me to be particularly laborious.'

'Weel, there's a fact I'll mak a present to the teetotallers,' answered the foreman. 'Our lumberers get nothing in the way of stimulant, and they don't seem to want it. When I came fresh from the auld country, I couldna hardly b'lieve that.'

'Au large, au large!'

At this word of command all hands turned out of the shanty, and went back to work in their several gangs. Again the fellers attacked the hugest pines; the hewers sprang upon the fallen, lining and squaring the living trees into dead beams; and the teamsters yoked afresh their patient oxen, fitting upon each ma.s.sive throat the heavy wooden collar, and attaching to chains the ponderous log which should be moved towards the water highway.

Argent and Arthur found themselves presently at the foot of a colossal Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre in the neighbourhood might travel easily and safely to the water's edge; and forty yards of bedding timbers lay a ready-made couch, for its great length.

'I daursay now, that stick's standing aboot a thousand years: I've counted fourteen hunder rings in the wood of a pine no much bigger. Ou, 'twill mak a gran' mast for a seventy-four--nigh a hunder feet lang, and as straight as a rod.'

Stripping off the bark and dressing the knots was the next work, which would complete its readiness for Devonport dockyards, or perchance for the Cherbourg shipwrights. During this operation the foreman made an excursion to visit his other gangs, and then took his visitors a little aside into the woods to view what he termed a 'regular take-in.' It was a group of fine-looking pines, wearing all the outward semblance of health, but when examined, proving mere tubes of bark, charred and blackened within, and ragged along the seam where the fire had burst out.