CHAPTER XV
THE WILDERNESS, AND OUR INDIAN FRIENDS
Man of strange race! stern dweller of the wild! Nature's free-born, untamed, and daring child!
The clouds of the preceding night, instead of dissolving in snow, brought on a rapid thaw. A thaw in the middle of winter is the most disagreeable change that can be imagined. After several weeks of clear, bright, bracing, frosty weather, with a serene atmosphere and cloudless sky, you awake one morning surprised at the change in the temperature; and, upon looking out of the window, behold the woods obscured by a murky haze—not so dense as an English November fog, but more black and lowering—and the heavens shrouded in a uniform covering of leaden-coloured clouds, deepening into a livid indigo at the edge of the horizon. The snow, no longer hard and glittering, has become soft and spongy, and the foot slips into a wet and insidiously-yielding mass at every step. From the roof pours down a continuous stream of water, and the branches of the trees collecting the moisture of the reeking atmosphere, shower it upon the earth from every dripping twig. The cheerless and uncomfortable aspect of things without never fails to produce a corresponding effect upon the minds of those within, and casts such a damp upon the spirits that it appears to destroy for a time all sense of enjoyment. Many persons (and myself among the number) are made aware of the approach of a thunder-storm by an intense pain and weight about the head; and I have heard numbers of Canadians complain that a thaw always made them feel bilious and heavy, and greatly depressed their animal spirits.
I had a great desire to visit our new location, but when I looked
out upon the cheerless waste, I gave up the idea, and contented
myself with hoping for a better day on the morrow; but many morrows
came and went before a frost again hardened the road sufficiently
for me to make the attempt.
The prospect from the windows of my sister's log hut was not very
prepossessing. The small lake in front, which formed such a pretty
object in summer, now looked like an extensive field covered with
snow, hemmed in from the rest of the world by a dark belt of sombre
pine-woods. The clearing round the house was very small, and only
just reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greater part of it
covered with piles of brushwood, to be burnt the first dry days of
spring. The charred and blackened stumps on the few acres that had
been cleared during the preceding year were everything but
picturesque; and I concluded, as I turned, disgusted, from the
prospect before me, that there was very little beauty to be found in
the backwoods. But I came to this decision during a Canadian thaw, be it remembered, when one is wont to view every object with jaundiced eyes.
Moodie had only been able to secure sixty-six acres of his
government grant upon the Upper Katchawanook Lake, which, being
interpreted, means in English, the "Lake of the Waterfalls," a very
poetical meaning, which most Indian names have. He had, however, secured a clergy reserve of two hundred acres adjoining; and he afterwards purchased a fine lot, which likewise formed part of the same block, one hundred acres, for 150 pounds. This was an enormously high price for wild land; but the prospect of opening the Trent and Otonabee for the navigation of steamboats and other small craft, was at that period a favourite speculation, and its practicability, and the great advantages to be derived from it, were so widely believed as to raise the value of the wild lands along these remote waters to an enormous price; and settlers in the vicinity were eager to secure lots, at any sacrifice, along their shores.
Our government grant was upon the lake shore, and Moodie had chosen
for the site of his log house a bank that sloped gradually from the
edge of the water, until it attained to the dignity of a hill. Along
the top of this ridge, the forest road ran, and midway down the
hill, our humble home, already nearly completed, stood, surrounded
by the eternal forest. A few trees had been cleared in its immediate
vicinity, just sufficient to allow the workmen to proceed, and to
prevent the fall of any tree injuring the building, or the danger
of its taking fire during the process of burning the fallow.