The Laurentians, the hills of the habitant

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

XIX La Reine du Saguenay 292

XX The Realm Villeneuvb 306

Epilogue

Some Practicali Addenda 447

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A Montagnais JMother Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Habitant Home, Old Style 24

Deep in the Bush 120

Montmorency Falls 136

Pulp 17T

Hudson's Bay Co., Pointe Bleue 192

Monastere de Notre Dame du Mistassini . . . 225

Lac aux Rats — and North 240

The Wandering Mistassibi 258

''Where the Ouananiche Is Waiting" . . . .289

Shanty-closing for the Spring 304

Le Saguenay 337

Cape Trinity 352

Forest Fire from Five Thousand Feet .... 369

The Indian Chapel, Tadousac, 1747 .... 384

MAPS

Mt. Tremblant and Environs 40

The Saguenay and Lake St. John 248

St. Maurice Watershed 440

CHAPTER I THOSE ALLURING LAURENTLiNS

THEEE are those who travel carefully, with forethought and porters, with guide-books and account-books and insurance papers. They proceed from place to place without fatigue, are prudent -as to companions land long-sighted in regard to their three meals a day, their eight hours ' sleep. Events lie orderly down their calendar, and their conclusions are as predictable as an astronomer's eclipses. Where the hotels are not starred they do not go.

I have no quarrel with such, being myself not the first to eschew comfort ; but they, I am afraid, will be thrown into a simmer of exasperation by this book. For it is a record of things that should not be allowed to happen to the accurate tourist. It is an account, as truthful as I can remember and as frank as I dare say, of a roving commission tendered by me to myself over a country lying just beyond my imagination.

This country's boundaries are the St. Lawrence

Eiver on the south, the Ottawa on the west, and the SagTienay toward the east, with an arrangement of mystery and mountains, called the Height of Land, for northern limit. Within these selfset borders I was to be free — free to roam or ruminate, to fly or float or foot it as I chose, to parley with natives or meditate about them in cautious silence. This book is the echo of that meditation. Its narrative of meals missed and unpremeditated friendships made, of new territories seen and happy sufferings muddled through, will doubtless seem but one long process of unnecessary pain to those who live by itineraries alone. For, during those months in my haphazard Eden, I knew about as much of the morrow as a fortune-teller; and cared less, having no one, not even myself, to deceive.

Of course, even in Eden, one must obey the laws, such as the law of gravitation and the rules for taking trout. And, even in -Eden, happiness is enhanced by the gentle practice of one's vocation; not to the degree of that hopeless disease, busyness — but to the extent of clothing naked time with what truths and beauty become it easily.

The tirst truth learned was this :

Three hours' progress north from Montreal discloses an unobstructed out-path to the Pole. Further, three days' search in Canada's finest library had not disclosed a single book describing

THOSE ALLURING LAURENTIANS 5

this great wonderland of the Laurentian Mountains. So it seemed an alluring thing to stick a note-book in my hip-pocket and a duflBe bag on my back and explore this terra non confirmata. I took care not to travel with the note-book in hand. I had no desire to tabulate all the places that a tourist should accomplish in order to say that he has done the thing with a clear conscience ; neither did I desire that the natives should feel honorbound to perjure themselves for advertisement's sake. What I wanted was the double elation of nibbling at new lands, and then numbing my hearers with tales of exploit in them. But rest easy ; I more than nibbled, and I shall less than numb. Sincerity is the soul of truth. If I have journeyed skiphazardly, seen superficially, and reported but a part, yet I have not committed Munchausen herein. There was too much of true dehght, too much delicious mishap, to require the spice of unveracity : But enough of prologue.

Canada had always been to me, the suburbanborn, the epitome of all promised lands. From the first time that I had looked on her map of sparsely named territories stretching north into the invisible, and particularly from the time that I had first stood on the walls of Quebec and stared into the blue passes of the distant Laurentians, Canada had beckoned. In those exquisitely erratic moments, when every man stands on Ms Darien, I had imagined Hudson's Bay my exploringgromid. During the moie prosaic residue of time, Canada remained an inexhaustible feedingground for my imagination.

Finally, when the stubborn dream stood in the doorway of possibility and beckoned to me, as dreams will, I recalled that vision of the blue Laurentians from Quebec. It seemed luck enough to penetrate those passes. When I looked up the subject and found that, geologically, the Laurentian formation covered two million square miles, it seemed more than enough. I determined to limit my wanderings to the Province of Quebec. But even this proved unnecessarily spacious, being somewhat larger than the combined area of the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Belgium.

In dismay I wrote to Ottawa, asking the kind officials of the Geological Survey for help in reducing their Laurentians to tourist size. They offered me the Ottawa-St. Lawrence-Saguenay- Height of Land enclosure in which to do my roaming, together with the maps of those parts of the region which had been surveyed.

These maps stated the proposition from which I was to prove my pleasure. For practical purposes it seemed best to devote myself to a triangle whose base was nearly parallel to the St. Law-

THOSE ALLURING LAURENTIANS 7

rence from Ottawa to Tadousac at the mouth of the Saguenay, roughly four hundred miles long. The eastern limit of the triangle, the Saguenay, extended up that river and across Lake St. John into the wilderness toward Mistassini, say three hundred miles, to be intersected by the western side of the triangle running northeastward up the valley of the Gatineau and across the Transcontinental at Parent Station and on toward Mistassini, another three hundred miles. This area of say 45,000 square miles, trifling as it was compared with the total of explorability, seemed sufficiently generous for one summer. The next thing needed was a tentative route, if only for the pleasure of abandoning it.

It had been much easier for Caesar to divide Gaul into three parts than to conquer it; and I, too, found dividing easier than connecting. My triangle fell apart with great facility, into an obvious western third (which comprised the country between the Ottawa and the waters of the St. Maurice), with the watershed of the St. Maurice for the middle and with the Laurentide, Lake St. John, and Saguenay waters for final third. But to join these scattered objectives into a practicable procession of places was a Baedeker-like job which made me giddy with map-gazing. Here lay a magnanimous land before me. Why should 1 reduce it to an ignoble system of station-stops?

I had a few hundred days, and a few hundred dollars. I had also a great desire to put Montreal to the south of me. To do this logically I must take the train north. So I did.

Chapter II

THE train had vacated the Place Viger Station of the C. P. R. and had crossed the first few rivers which make Montreal so very much an island before I had aroused myself from the coma of disappointment which had enveloped me at the disruption of some dreams. For I was being launched on the wilderness alone, and that after having been enticed into it by one of its denizens on promise of expert accompaniment.

It had come about this way : Last summer, I had determined not to write another travel-book until I could afford to, nor make any more friends for the same period. These earnest resolutions took place in May. In June my plans for the new travel-book with a new friend were not only hatched, but chirping all over the place. This is told to show that woman can still produce her effects at will.

The lady was one of the busy maternal sort at our club who resented the large frequent gaps in my education. I did too, but in nothing like the way I resented her wise and Christian attemps to fill them in. foolish me ! Had I only spent the time trying to learn, that I wasted endeavoring to elude, I should by now have been well advanced in knitting and French conversation and other domestic matters.

But, anyway, she did me an invaluable turn one day by running up and saying; ''Morris dear, I have found just the person you ought to know. You'll like him."

*'I 've just resolved not to like anybody for a year," I replied.

''Come, silly. He 's waiting for us with the canoe. He 's an Indian, the nicest, most refined, attractive Indian you have ever seen. Please drop those things and hurry."

I followed, of course, expecting to see the usual thing in grease and gravity, which is termed an Indian, squatting in the sand. Instead I saw a man of medium height, standing in a canoe and taming it for the benefit of some youngsters. His mastery of it was as complete and agile as a cowboy's control of his pony. When he saw us he wheeled the shell with three or four caresses of the paddle ; and I saw that he was greaseless, and, barring an aboriginal profile, which Greek sculpture never compassed, scarcely savage. His hair was dark and his eyes shone as inscrutably as the sons' of the Sphinx should. But a West Pointer could not have tempered his manners to the occasion more courteously, nor have helped our adoptive mama into the canoe with a better grace, I was interested ; she was triumphant.

"Say your Indian name, Fred," the lady commanded.

' ' Kaiantanoron, ' ' with a half-smile that showed teeth, white and regular.

"And now tell us about the North," she begged enthusiastically; "tell us about your people, about everything. ' '

We hadn't been out twenty minutes before my heart began to sink. I felt that I was going to hke this person, this educated savage, in whose veins ran the old fire of the Iroquois tempered with the blood of France. Forty minutes and I thought "the region that breeds the like of him is worth exploring. ' ' When we came to the carry he swung the canoe upon his shoulders as a man puts on a hat.

To cut a long summer short, I came to like and admire this man from the land of my imaginings, whose talk was as a persistent breeze from the North. We spent evenings together before autumn camp-fires, evenings that brought forth shadowy plans running to the accompaniment of wilderness waters and the drip of paddles. Fred Beauvais' youth had been circled by the calls of wolves and hghted by the northern lights. As he talked of ouananiche and rapids and strange

Indian ways the toxin of travel fermented in my blood. And during the winter it finally boiled over and hardened into this proposition:

**You guide me there beyond the thought of things and I '11 pay our paddlefare with a book. Is that a go?"

' ' Sure, ' ' said he.

''Sure" was Beauvais' great word, the French- Canadian in him coming out.

Now I was on the train, and he was hopelessly detained in town. He had said good-by at the gate, trying not to see my flannel shirt and the white waters ahead of me and the freedom of days unharried by the telephone. But I saw their reflection in his eyes, and could only make up lies about expecting him next week. The future, which had appeared so exhilarating as divided between us, showed heavy enough ahead when it had to be survived alone. The train was tearing through fields glad with May, but I could not see them glad. I was out of sympathy with Providence.

Later I came to see the wisdom of Providence which was concerned more with my future than with my feelings of the moment. I see now that had I journeyed with Fred all the way, equipped with his companionship, i should have but grazed the surtaces of others mat I met, should merely have culled their superficial eccentricities and difference and left the heart unlearned.

For now I know this : The medium of travel for a person on my errand is loneliness. The secret of successful travel is not to go from place to place but from person to person. The corrugations on our planet are much alike and it matters little whether a waterfall be fifty feet higher than the last. But to pass from man to woman, from girl to fellow, each native in his proper niche, meeting them as strangers but leaving them as friends by virtue of some news, some affinity, some hardship, or even some turn of weather shared — this is travel, and on a road where perennial freshness lies. But to travel thus the stem condition exists that one must go alone, face dark arrivals in strange villages, dare uncompanioned distances. Then only will the genius of the neighborhood be apprehended. Then strangerly kindnesses take on a deep significance and one becomes newly aware of humanity, and also learns the peculiar flavor of each environment. So, in the end, the lonely are blessed for they see the brotherhood of man.

But that is in the end. In the beginning it is the loneliness that is chiefly apparent. On my train (a week-end train full of girls in khaki and brokers in fishing-kits, with a sprinkling of golfers in their usual rapt discussion), I felt that a sight of Lake Erie falling over a comer of the Himalayas could scarcely repay me for the sensation of infantile frustration which was accompanying me into this futility, this slipping of the noose of isolation over my head. Had it not been for boasts at home, I think I should have crawled from the cars and slunk back. The train was now entering the foot-hills of the Laurentians, just in time.

This branch of the C. P. E., Montreal to Mont Laurier, is 150 miles long and in that distance offers all things to anybody. Suburbs, fields, hills, mountains, wilderness, the Wilderness! One can breakfast regally at the Ritz and dine divinely with the red gods four hours later in virgin dells. A mile from the rails on either side one can find places never before employed by picnickers for a tin-can holiday. Running out on this railroad spur is like climbing back up one's family tree; at the end is the primeval.

Nor do you have to go the whole way, either. Beyond Ste. Marguerite you can drop off at any station, drive a few miles on roads that taper into trails, and there you are with nothing but wilderness and white sunlight betwixt you and the Pole. That, in my opinion, is the supreme claim of the Laurentians. For scenery I choose their sisters, my Adirondacks ; and for peculiar animals I suppose that Africa still leads. But for contiguous opportunities of freedom in a land, lake-set and limitless, and incredibly near at hand, Laurentian-land has no rival nowadays.

There was one very exasperating thing about all these merry people on the train; they all looked as if they knew where they were going. I thought I had brought the necessaries — a duffle-bag containing tent for two, blanket, cook-kit, and Corona, with a lot of odds and ends and a few other things. But I had neglected a destination. In a general way Fred and I had discussed the places ahead, but we had left the exact point of ingress to inspiration. Now it looked as if the conductor would get to me ahead of the inspiration. Beginnings are notoriously difficult, whether one is tackling a continent or only a cracked egg. And I sat there hunting down the names of stations, like Sentimental Tommy seeking the right word, when the conductor arrived. Luckily his uniform had not chilled the humanity out of him, and we had a chat.

"If I was you," he said, "I 'd get off at Ste. Marguerite. There ^s a golflinJk there, and a swell hotel on Lac Masson, just new. We 're near there now."

He pointed out the window across a prodigious horseshoe-curve with a huge up-grade at which the engine was puffing egotistically.

''They 're good ski hills," said I," but — "

''I know what you 're going to say — too summer-boarder-like. Now at Ste. Agathe, or anywheres on from there, it 's wilder. There 's lots of time to think it over. Excuse me, sir. ' '

He left me to expedite the Ste. Marguerites from the train, and I began thinking it over again. But the process helped me no more than it had Hamlet. We were soon passing through country that had become definitely upland, a forested plateau with here and there a lake, and near and beyond a mountain-ridge, low and bulgy but not precipitous. I longed to begin my exploration. Once more I unrolled the map. Lakes of every shape and dimension curved and wriggled across its face, each lake tagged with an alluring name — Lac Sauvage, Lac Manitou, Lac Ouareau. I had only to descend, to leave the railroad, make the plunge, and the trip would be started. With a sudden reflex of the cerebellum I gathered up my bale of household gods and bolted from the train. The station happened to be Ste. Agathe.

Now, I am sorry if all this gives a wrong impression, I am a fatalist ; I prefer life a la carte. I admit that, so far, the trip had been managed with about the push and positiveness of a jelly-fish, though I defy a jelly-fish to shoulder that duffle-bag. But with my initiative drugged by disappointment it seemed quite the sensible thing to let things happen to me as they would, or until I disagreed with the way in which they were happcning and should again assume management. As a matter of just due to Providence I must say that my day of events table d'hote, apparently strung on the slightest chain of chance, introduced me to the Laurentians more satisfyingly than days of the most exhausting inquiry and preparation would have done.

It was now four o'clock of a bright afternoon. The Ste. Agathians had deserted the train platform, and the little town was sinking back into its summeriness. In the center of the place there rose a hilly pasture with some pleasant cows upon it. I decided to go ruminate with them, left my dufifle, and started up.

The cows had chosen an appetizing situation. At our feet lay a cottage-fringed lake on the sunset side of the hill and a neat little town on the other. It was almost a village-sized town, but it possessed a city-sized church, from which metropolitan-tongued bells began to rock the trees around us. The catholic cows, long used to such hubbubs, did not cease to chew, though I should think the cream would have curdled in their udders. The celebration went on. ''Mercy!" thought I, "this is driving rehgion home!" and I wondered how the sensitive sick in the sanatorium on the distant hills felt about it. When the jangling stopped and sudden peace swam about us I felt almost sympathetic with the poor nit-wit in the story, who liked to bang himself on the head with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped.

The cows and I were enjoying an altitude of about a thousand feet, and the mountains which girdled the horizon appeared to rise that much more. The near-by sanatorium looked picturesque and as if Canada was treating her returned soldiers well. I imagined that these graceful hillcontours made the most restful sort of scenery for daily needs, and I remembered that essay of Stevenson's beginning, ''By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful." Ste. Agathe is not singularly beautiful, exactly. But one cannot look into the outreaching valleys wdthout visualizing the breadth and freedom of the land beyond, and that idea must be singularly beautiful to men strapped to beds. What pasts were tucked in those beds, what tales roofed by those gray tiles! As I looked down on the shining tin of the church I hoped that prayers were being said for those soldiers' peace. Such a roomy church should inspire great prayers, or else much stonework were wasted.

Since I could not hope that any one was praying for my future I opened the map to have a go at it myself. I decided to arrive at my destination scientifically by flipping a coin. It came down King Edward! 1 was destined to sleep on the other, the north, side of the railroad. About the same time a gentlemen of middle age, who was looking either for four-leaf clovers or a text for a sermon, hove over the hill and began to thread his pensive way among the kine.

''Sir," I said, as sylvanly as I could, ''where would you begin, if you were starting out to see the Laurentians, on the north side of the railroad?"

The gentleman rose handsomely to my needs. We spread the map over the hill, and on hands and knees, with the cows looking over our shoulders, reached the conclusion that Lac Archambault ought to be my starting-point. "Furthermore," continued Mr. Clifford, "I believe that the brothers Thibault, who drive a truck thither, have had some mechanical trouble this morning and have not left town. Gome with me and we '11 see."

The brothers Thibault, it was true, had not left town, and it did not look as if they ever would. The Ford truck in which they conveyed groceries and passengers to St. Donat, the village on Lac Archambault, was being treated to repairs. I was introduced to Paul, who was hanging over the front with his head lost in its midst, and to Bmest, whcJ was somewhere beneath the car. The boys assured me that they would start in an hour. I doubted it, for the car's most sensitive parts were still strewn around tlie yard; but T did n 't care. Now tliat I was equipped with a destination, nothing else mattered. So I engaged passage, and continued with Mr. Clifford to see Ste. Agathe.

''They call Ste. Agathe the Saranac Lake of Canada," he«said, in reference to those hospitals, ''but it is doing the place an injustice to imagine that only the sick come here. There are many beautiful lakes in the neighborhood, and wealthy Montrealers have built by them charming homes for winter as well as summer. Many skiing parties, many skating parties take place here. But since the soldiers have come we lack a large hotel."

I did not lack good food, however, because Mr. Clifford has a little inn of his own, and his genial helpfulness included a meal against my long ride into the unknown. On my way back to the repair yards I passed that bell-possessed church and saw a sight. It was a handsome, masculine-looking young priest playing tennis in his long black robes. I stopped and watched in wonderment. He had the suppleness of an aspen and the agility of a gopher. But when he served, the broad-brimmed black hat got in his way, and when he met a return his robes wrapped themselves around his legs with the effectiveness of a shroud. The evening was warm.

All this would have had an immensely anti-religious effect upon my temper, and I '11 confess I listened for some sign. But not one un-cleric word did he utter, not even when he missed an important point by six inches of skirt. He had such an honest, fine, perspiring face that I longed to ask him why he wore the robes, why he should try to serve an ace and the Kingdom of Heaven at the same time. As I left I heard a loud rending, as of a petticoat, but I did not laugh. Sincerity, somehow, is rarely funny.

Nor are the agonies of youth. Paul had emerged from the truck's belly, and I saw a boy, not yet eighteen, fine-looking despite the fact that most of his complexion was lost beneath fresh grease, smiling before me. His optimism did not falter when I asked him how soon the truck would be ready. ''Quinze minutes. Monsieur. Avez-vous une cigarette?"

Two hours later we left the tool-cluttered courtyard and set forth upon our odyssey, Paul and Ernest and I. There were yet some errands the boys told me, before the final beginning of our trip. Mon Dieu, there were ! Those errands • — and may I be stricken like Ananias if I exaggerate — consisted of hoisting some bags of feed upon our rear, of arranging a mound of furniture upon the feed, of packing some bales of bread into the crevices, of calling at a tailor-shop, the post-office, and some odd shops on sundry commissions. I did not see how the invalid truck was going to wobble under this load, when, by way of flourish, we swung up in front of a hotel to pick up a family who had come down from St. Donat for a day's shopping. I was, later, to learn much about the size of French-Canadian families. A commencement of this education was now made, for out of the hotel came a slight little mother with some parcels and a baby in her arms, followed by a queue of children, a graduated series of infants, six in all, all young and infinitely grave. Paul rearranged the bread, and they defiled into the seat behind, sat down, like a Sunday-school, and we were conclusively off.

Once clear of Ste. Agathe I had scope to admire the evening. Twilight had begun to improvise some serene variations on her eternal theme, and far ahead I watched range after range of rounded mountains glow and die. The children were preternaturally quiet; but not so the truck. It coughed and choked and sputtered until my disquietude overcame the inertia of my French.

"Do you mean to say, Paul,*' I asked the boy, "that you are going to risk twenty-seven mountain miles in a sick truck, loaded like a movingvan, and with a nursery aboard?"

"Ah, oui!"

"But what if we 're stuck for the night?"

*'Nous y arriverons," he said simply.

To have met the brothers Thibault first was the happiest possible introduction to the French of Canada. To be able to love, while laughing at, a people is surely a sound proof of their worth. And that night I was to laugh all over my body at those boys and admire them truly. Remember they had driven that horrible vehicle twenty-seven miles that morning, had operated on its insides from noon till dusk, had had an ice-cream cone apiece for supper with some cigarettes, and were now confronting those twenty-seven miles again with gaiety. You can depend upon the Saxon for his spunk, upon the Celt for his spirits.

The slopes now grew intenser, and the old boat only crawled as she neared their tops. My anticipations were covered with gooseflesh until I looked on Paul. In his face there was no feature of despair. He had a good chin, like most Canadian French, and in the dim light he made a shadow-picture of young courage that warmed the heart. It was impossible not to like him, impossible to refuse to throw in one's lot with a fellow so brave and gay. I did away with doubts and resolved to deserve the smile in Paul's eyes, resolved to live in the very immediate present.

My philosophy was soon put to proof, for as night fell we failed to make the apex of a hill. We began to slide backward. Paul guided the leviathan skilfully hindwards to a stream, during which manoeuver the woman made no sound. One prejudges French femininity as being nervous and excitable ; but three centuries of Canada have calmed her. And those children were a revelation to me. They had been waiting hours for this most questionable passage; they were now being racked in a machine that came nearer being a churn than a cradle; they were getting momentarily colder. But with the exception of the one in arms they sat bolt upright like robins in a nest, offering no complaint. I was indeed in a new country.

From the gurgling brook into which we had subsided we obtained water for the radiator. Ernest did up some wires so that the lights might light; Paul leaned beneath the beast to regulate something, and not to be outdone I tried to fix the horn. Then, after re-roping some of the more active furniture, we again essayed the hill. It was a breath-paralyzing moment. If we should not make it, I foresaw the rest of the night there beside the ravening roadside, to be spent in endeavoring to keep those children warm. Ernest and I leapt and pushed. The little woman uttered no word. Paul manipulated the monster scientifically, and we topped the eminence by a chug. But it was as close as Tophet.

''Are there more like that?^' I asked.

''Plusieurs, Monsieur," Paul replied, smiling handsomely as he lit a cigarette.