Cedar Creek Part 24

'That's a statement of a fact, but not an explanation,' said the cavilling Arthur. 'Why should a hot sun put sugar in the sap?'

Robert had no answer, nor has philosophy either.

The Indians had already tapped their trees, and placed underneath each orifice a sort of rough bowl, for catching the precious juice as it trickled along a stick inserted to guide its flow. These bowls, made of the semicircular excrescences on a species of maple, serve various uses in the cooking line, in a squaw's menage, along with basins and boxes of the universally useful birchen bark. When the sap has been boiled down into syrup, and clarified, it is again transferred to them to crystallize, and become solid in their keeping.

An Indian girl was making what is called gum-sugar, near the kettles: cutting moulds of various shapes in the snow, and dropping therein small quant.i.ties of the boiling mola.s.ses, which cooled rapidly into a tough yellowish substance, which could be drawn out with the fingers like toffy. Arthur much approved of the specimen he tasted; and without doubt the sugar-making was a sweetmeat saturnalia for all the 'papooses' in the camp. They sat about on the snow in various att.i.tudes, consuming whole handfuls and cakes of the hot sweet stuff, with rather more gravity, but quite as much relish, as English children would display if gifted with the run of a comfit establishment.

'Did you ever see anything like their solemnity, the young monkeys!'

said Arthur. 'Certainly the risible faculties were left out in the composition of the Indian. I wonder whether they know how to laugh if they tried?'

'Do you know,' said Robert, 'Holt says that Indian mythology has a sort of Prometheus, one Menabojo, who conferred useful arts upon men; amongst others, this art of making maple-sugar; also canoe-building, fishing, and hunting.'

'A valuable and original genius,' rejoined Arthur; 'but I wonder what everybody could have been doing before his advent, without those sources of occupation.'

Zack and his team arrived two mornings subsequently.

'Wal, Robert, I hope you've been a clearin' yer sugar-bush, an' choppin'

yer firewood, all ready. Last night was sharp frosty, an' the sun's glorious bright to-day--the wind west, too. I hain't seen a better day for a good run o' sap this season. Jump on the sled, Arthur--there's room by the troughs.'

'No, thank you,' said the young man haughtily, marching on before with his auger. He detested Zack's familiar manner, and could hardly avoid resenting it.

'We're worth some punkins this mornin', I guess,' observed Zack, glancing after him. 'He'll run his auger down instead of up, out o' pure Britisher pride an' contrariness, if we don't overtake him.'

Arthur was just applying the tool to the first tree, when he heard Zack's shout.

'The sunny side! Fix yer spile the sunny side, you goney.'

Which term of contempt did not contribute to Arthur's good humour. He persisted in continuing this bore where he had begun; and one result was that, at the close of the day, the trough underneath did not contain by a third as much as those situate on the south side of the trees.

'It ain't no matter o' use to tap maples less than a foot across. They hain't no sugar in 'em,' said Zack, among his other practical hints.

'The older the tree, the richer the sap. This 'ere sugar bush is as fine as I'd wish to tap: mostly hard maple, an' the right age. Soft maple don't make nothing but mola.s.ses, hardly--them with whitish skin; so you are safe to chop 'em down.'

The little hollow spouts drained, and the seventy troughs slowly filled, all that livelong day in the sunny air; until freezing night came down, and the chilled sap shrank back, waiting for persuasive sunbeams to draw its sweetness forth again. Zack came round with his team next afternoon, emptied all the troughs into one big barrel on his sled, and further emptied the barrel into the huge kettle and pot which were swung over a fire near the shanty, and which he superintended with great devotion for some time.

'I could not have believed that the trees could spare so much juice,'

observed Robert. 'Are they injured by it, Bunting?'

'I ha' known a single maple yield a matter o' fifty gallons, an' that not so big a one neither,' was the reply. 'An' what's more, they grow the better for the bleedin'. I guess you hadn't none of this sort o'

sugar to hum in England?'

'Not a grain: all cane sugar imported.'

'Wal, you Britishers must be everlastin' rich,' was Zack's reply. 'An'

I reckon you don't never barter, but pays hard cash down? I wish I'd a good store somewhar in your country, Robert: I guess I'd turn a profit.'

CHAPTER XXVII.

A BUSY BEE.

'We'd ha' best sugar off the whole lot _al_together,' Zack had said, and being the only one of the makers who knew anything about the manufacture, he was permitted to prescribe the procedure. The dark amber-coloured mola.s.ses had stood and settled for some days in deep wooden troughs, before his other avocations, of farmer and general storekeeper at the 'Corner,' allowed him to come up to the Cedars and give the finishing touch.

A breathless young Bunting--familiarly known as Ged, and the veriest miniature of his father--burst into the shanty one day during dinner--a usual visiting hour for members of his family.

'Well, Ged, what do you want?'

'Uncle Zack'll be here first thing in the mornin' to sugar the syrup, and he says yo're to have a powerful lot o' logs ready chopped for the fires,' was the message. 'I guess I thought I'd be late for dinner,'

the boy added, with a sort of chuckle, 'but I ain't;' and he winked knowingly.

'Well,' observed Arthur, laughing, 'you Yankees beat all the world for cool impudence.'

'I rayther guess we do, an' fur most things else teu,' was the lad's reply, with his eyes fixed on the trencher of bear's meat which Andy was serving up for him. 'Don't you be sparing of the pritters--I'm rael hungry:' and with his national celerity, the viands disappeared.

When the meal was ended, Robert, as always, returned thanks to G.o.d for His mercies, in a few reverent words. The boy stared.

'I guess I hain't never heerd the like of that 'afore,' he remarked.

'Sure, G.o.d ain't nowhar hereabouts?'

Robert was surprised to find how totally ignorant he was of the very rudiments of the Christian faith. The name of G.o.d had reached his ear chiefly in oaths; heaven and h.e.l.l were words with little meaning to his darkened mind.

'I thought a Methodist minister preached in your father's big room once or twice a year,' observed Robert, after some conversation.

'So he do; but I guess we boys makes tracks for the woods; an' besides, there ain't no room for us nowhar,' said Ged.

Here I may just be permitted to indicate the wide and promising field for missionary labour that lies open in Canada West. No fetters of a foreign tongue need cramp the ardent thought of the evangelist, but in his native English he may tell the story of salvation through a land large as half a dozen European kingdoms, where thousands of his brethren according to the flesh are perishing for want of knowledge. A few stray Methodists alone have pushed into the moral wilderness of the backwoods; and what are they among so many? Look at the ma.s.ses of lumberers: it is computed that on the Ottawa and its tributaries alone they number thirty thousand men; spending their Sabbaths, as a late observer has told us, in mending their clothes and tools, smoking and sleeping, and utterly without religion. Why should not the gospel be preached to these our brothers, and souls won for Christ from among them?

And in outlying germs of settlements like the 'Corner,' which are the centre of districts of spa.r.s.e population, such ignorance as this of young Bunting's, though rare elsewhere in Canada or the States, is far from uncommon among the rising generation.

Zack arrived with the ox-sled at the time appointed, and Ged perched on it.

'Just look at the pile of vessels the fellow has brought to carry away his share of the mola.s.ses and sugar,' said Arthur, as the clumsy vehicle came lumbering up. ''Twas a great stroke of business to give us all the trouble, and take all the advantage to himself--our trees, our fires, nothing but the use of his oxen as a set-off.'

The advantage was less than Arthur supposed; for maples are not impoverished by drainage of sap, and firewood is so abundant as to be a nuisance. But for Zack's innate love of even the semblance of overreaching, he might have discerned that his gain in this transaction was hardly worth the pains.

'Wal, Robert, you ha' poured off the mola.s.ses into the kettles; an' now fur the clarifyin'. I knowed as how ye had nothen' fit--milk, nor calf's blood, nor eggs, nor nothen'--so I brought up the eggs, an' when we're settlin' shares they kin be considered.'

'The old sharper!' muttered Arthur.

'I'm afeerd like they're beat up already,' said Mr. Bunting, picking them gingerly out of his pockets, 'though I made Ged drive a purpose.

But that near ox has a trick of stickin' over stumps, an' I had obliged to cut a handspike to him. I declar' if they ain't all whole arter all, 'cept one.' He smashed them into a wooden bowl half full of mola.s.ses, and beat them up with a chip, then emptied the contents into the kettles, stirring well. Hung over a slow fire, from a pole resting on two notched posts, the slight simmering sound soon began; and on the top of the heated fluid gathered a sc.u.m, which Zack removed. After some repet.i.tions of this skimming, and when the mola.s.ses looked bright and clear, Mr.

Bunting asked for a bit of fat bacon.

'Which can be considered when we're dividing shares,' said Arthur, handing it to him a few minutes afterwards. A glance was Zack's reply, as he strung the bacon on a cord, and hung it below the rim, within two inches of the boiling surface.

'Indeed,' quoth Robert, looking on at the operation of this expedient for preventing the spilling over of the mola.s.ses, 'I wonder some cleaner mode of keeping the boiling within bounds has not been invented.'