Dick's Desertion: A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests Read online

  Produced by Al Haines

  Cover art]

  [Frontispiece: "The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple toldall the tale."--_p._ 20]

  DICK'S DESERTION

  A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests

  A TALE OF THE EARLY SETTLEMENT OF ONTARIO

  By

  MARJORIE L. C. PICKTHALL

  WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

  Toronto:

  The Musson Book Company, Limited.

  1905

  CONTENTS.

  CHAP.

  I. IN THE HEART OF THE WOODS II. THE FALL OF THE TREE III. FRIENDS INDEED IV. A DAY IN THE WOODS V. A BACKWOODS CHRISTMAS VI. THE CALL OF THE FOREST VII. A MESSAGE FROM THE WANDERER VIII. A WOOD'S ADVENTURE IX. ON THE PRAIRIE X. IN THE GRIP OF THE STORM XI. BACK TO STEPHANIE XII. TO A GOODLY HERITAGE

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  "The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple told all the tale." . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

  "'If I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes, I could not leave Stephanie.'"

  "They began to sing the old carols their mother had taught them longbefore."

  "He flung out his arm, circled with savage ornaments--flung it out witha wild gesture, and began to speak."

  "He held out a tiny package, wrapped in birch-bark, with an inquiringglance towards her."

  "'For pity's sake, let me alone!' Dick pleaded. 'Go on and leave me.'"

  "'Dick! Dick! Where are you?'"

  DICK'S DESERTION:

  A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests.

  CHAPTER I.

  In the Heart of the Woods.

  It was early fall, and all the world was golden. Golden seemed thehazy warmth of the sky; golden were the willow leaves and the delicatefoliage of the birches; even the grass, pale from the long heat of thesummer, had taken on a tinge of the all-pervading colour. Far as theeye could reach, the woods and uplands were bright with gold, relievedonly by the deep sombre green of pines and hemlocks. Save for these,it seemed a country that some gracious Midas had touched, turningeverything to ethereal, elfin gold.

  The Midas-touch had even included the little log-cabin and its untidyclearing, for broad-disced sunflowers were scattered over the neglectedgarden, and between them bloomed late goldenrod, which had crept infrom the wilds outside; and a small patch of ground was covered withshocks of Indian corn, roughly bound together, yellowing also beneaththe influence of sun and frost.

  The land was beautiful to look upon--Ontario scenery, marred little bythe works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious MajestyGeorge IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing werepicturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lackof skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even thegarden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed upinto the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed andseeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrelswould flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which thebirds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and leftthrough their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulusvines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and thefew shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few ofthese fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother andkill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of thewoman who had cherished them.

  In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees,heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a littlehollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy waslying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of theforests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim hisEnglish birth. His clothes were of very coarse homespun, and he wore apair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudyIndian-work of beads and dyed grasses. The whole clearing was cryingout for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from theencroaching wilderness; but this sturdy lad lay there with all the busyidleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark.He seemed a fit occupant for the tangled garden and the half-cultivatedfields.

  Five years before, a certain Captain Underwood, flying from financialdisaster in England, had come to Canada with his wife and his twochildren, Dick and Stephanie. There was roving blood in theUnderwoods, so perhaps it was not surprising that the unfortunatecaptain should have ranged farther afield in Ontario than others hadthen done; for he left the settlements and the surveyed townshipsbehind him, and struck farther north, wishing to get as far away aspossible from the world that had brought him ruin. In the friendlyforests, a little beyond the region where the white settlers hadpenetrated, but not entirely out of touch with them, he found a naturalclearing, and here he had built his tiny cabin and roughly marked outhis small fields. Here, perhaps, the poor man, knowing nothing of thecountry, had thought to live a sort of idyllic hermit existence. Buthe found it very different. It was a terrible life to which he hadbrought his wife and children; and when Mrs. Underwood died, threeyears after leaving England, he blamed himself for her death. Most ofhis heart he buried with her in that lonely grave under the mightymaples on the hill; and afterwards he turned to the wild life aroundhim as to his only help and comfort.

  But he had no longer the courage to fight the farmer's fight, theprimitive conflict between man's skill and nature's strength. Soon thegarden that his wife had loved became overgrown with native flowers andweeds. Soon the bushes and the grass crept inwards over his fields.Soon his son and daughter shot up from childhood to youth, perfectlyhealthy in their hard life. Stephanie was fifteen years old, and beingas strong as a young lynx, she did all the work of the log-cabin. Shemade a rough sort of corn cake which served for bread, she prepared theendless pea-soup and pork, she washed and mended and even made theclothes. Dick helped his father, or idled away on little huntingexpeditions of his own, from which he returned happy and rarelyempty-handed.

  It was a strange life for a boy and girl, carefully and lovinglybrought up amid English comforts and ease, to lead. Their nearestneighbours, the Collinsons, with whom Captain Underwood did most of hislittle trading, were twenty miles distant. Kindly Mrs. Collinson hadoffered Stephanie a home when Mrs. Underwood died, but the girl hadchosen to stay with her father and Dick, and be the one influence whichrestrained that little household in the woods from lapsing into thehappy-go-lucky sort of savagery to which even the most cultivated areliable in a new land.

  I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the lifewhich was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swampand bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thrivingtowns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those firstsettlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to whichthe land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon itrather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living,than as a goodly country given them that they and their children andtheir children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoyit--and fight and die for it if need were. All their love andremembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but,willy-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada.They fought against hardships and privations that were almostincredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the NewWorld to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly ofmaking provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil wentto the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wroughtindeed better than they knew.

  No prophetic vision
of the mighty future came to Dick Underwood as helay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety yearsago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capableto his fading memories of his English home, even as his fatherdid--laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place.But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward invast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of hisadoption--not the possibilities of trade and agriculture, which seldomattract youth--but to the more alluring chances of those great UnknownLands, to the wonder and mystery of the Indian-haunted North.

  He did not put this feeling into words. Indeed, he did not know how todescribe it, or what it was. But it is written in the history booksthat in Talon's time the welfare of the French colony was endangered bythe number of young men who took to the woods, obeying the "call of thewild." It was this that moved Dick Underwood. It moved him then as helay lazily in the sweet, new-fallen leaves, so deftly shaping thatlittle canoe of birch bark; and he wished, with a half smile athimself, that it might turn out to be a fairy canoe, suddenly growingto full size, and bearing him away on some new risen fairy river, intothe land of his dreams. "But if I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes,"he said to himself with a sigh, "I could not leave Stephanie."

  "'IF I HAD FIFTY RIVERS AND FIFTY CANOES, I COULD NOTLEAVE STEPHANIE.'"]

  It was the old struggle, though he did not know it--the voice of thewilderness striving against the voice of the home ties. This time thevoice of the home ties sang in triumph at thought of Stephanie; butthere comes a time occasionally in a man's life when his mother thewoman may mean less to him for a space than his mother the earth.

  But with Dick the crisis had not yet come; and he scrambled to his feetvery contentedly, and proceeded to a little marsh close at hand, whereall sorts of fair swamp plants grew--feathery green things, andjewelled touch-me-not, and jacks-in-the-pulpit, and long-stemmedviolets in season. For the tiny canoe was to be filled with littleferns and soft mosses as a gift for Stephanie, and that thought of thefairy river was forgotten.

  This important business attended to, he turned slowly and reluctantlytowards home. But the woods were full of sights and sounds thatappealed to every half-awakened instinct in the boy's soul.

  A small, brown, hawk-faced owl lay stupidly at the mouth of a sort oftunnel it had made for itself in the long, bleached grasses. Soperfectly did it resemble a piece of decayed and mottled wood that evenDick's keen eye almost passed it over, until it sprang up from thiscosy day-time retreat, and blundered away among the trees.Dragon-flies, unlike their brethren of the earlier year, in that theywere clad in crimson and russet plush, and not in green and pink andsapphire mail, took their flashing flights among the faded undergrowth.The air was warm and golden still, but a keen nose might detect in it athreatening of frost; and the fallen leaves yielded a delicatefragrance as of damp earth and new mown hay.

  A chipmunk ran down a tree trunk and scolded him viciously, and thenfled before him to another tree, where it awaited him angrily,evidently under the impression that he was following it with evildesigns upon its winter stores. In this way it preceded him to theedge of the corn-field, and finally vanished into a hole in a half-deadpine that stood near the clearing, putting out its head once more witha last outpouring of abuse. "Oh! little fellow," said Dick, "I amafraid your nuts will be wasted, for to-morrow we chop the tree down.But I 've promised Stephanie that first I 'll climb up and poke you outwith a stick--and get bitten for my pains, I suppose, you littlespitfire. So you need not be afraid you 'll be killed." He ran a handover the smooth bark, blue-black, mottled with fragile green lichens,with no thought of its beauty. "Half rotten," he said to himself, "andit ought to go down as easily as a bulrush." And he turned away, hismind full of the fascinating way in which the bright blades of the axeswould bite deep through that beautiful dark bark into thesweet-smelling white wood beneath; of how the chips would scatter andfly, and lie like creamy shreds of ivory underfoot; of the tremor thatwould seem to shake the neighbouring woods at the sound of the fallingof the tree.