The Cursed Patois | Page 4

to be given to bass or pickerel
fishing, and he learned great lessons of water-lore from the two men. If
they trusted a troll line to his baby hands, he was in a state of beatitude.
His object in life was to possess a bear cub, and many a porcupine
creeping along the beach he mistook for that desirable property, until
taught to distinguish quills from fur. Gougou heard, and he believed,
that all porcupines were old lumbermen, who never died, but simply
contracted to that shape. He furtively stoned them when he could,
reflecting that they were tough, and delighting to see the quills fly.

Françoise would sit in the camp like a picture of still life, glowing and
silent at her appointed labor. She sewed for all of them, looking
womanly and unhurried, with a pink-veined moccasin-flower in her
hair; while Brown, cooking and baking, rushed from tent to wood-pile,
his sleeves turned back from his white, muscular arms. He lived more
intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes
shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common
man, blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd
spirit seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly
or not at all.
Puttany and the child were often together in one long play, broken only
by the man's periods of labor. They basked in a boat near rushes,
waiting for pickerel to strike, or waded a bog to a trout stream at the
other end of the lake, hid in a forest full of windfalls and hoary moss
and tropical growths of brake and fern. Gougou had new strong clothes
and buckskin shoes. For the patois had not been a week in camp before
Brown went to St. Ignace and brought back denim and white and black
calico, which he presented to Françoise.
"She ought to have a kind of second mourning," he explained to
Puttany, who received his word on any matter as law. "Joe La France
wasn't worth wearing first mourning for, but second mourning is decent
for her, and it won't show in the camp like bright colors would."
The world of city-maddened people who swarmed to this lake for their
annual immersion in nature did not often intrude on the camp. Yet the
fact of a woman's presence there could not be concealed, and Puttany
was disciplined to say to strangers, "Dot vas my sister and her little
poy."
A tiny cabin was built for Françoise, with the luxuries of a puncheon
floor and one glazed window. She inhabited it in primitive gladness, as
a child adorns a play-house, and was careful to keep it in that trim,
military state which Brown demanded. Françoise had a regard for
M'sieu' Put-tanee, who was neat and ladylike in all his doings, and
smiled amiably at her over her boy's head; but her veneration of M'sieu'
Brownee extended beyond the reach of humor. If he had been a priest

he could have had no more authority. She used to watch him secretly
from her window at dawn, as he put himself through a morning drill to
limber his muscles. Some spectators might have laughed, but she heard
as seriously as if they were the motions of her own soul his tactics with
a stick:
"Straight out--across the shoulder--under the arm--down on the turf!"
There were days when the misty gray lake, dim and delicious, lay
veiled within its irregular shores. Then the lowering sun stood on
tree-tops, a pale red wraith like the ghost of an Indian. And there were
days of sharp, clear shine, when Black Point seemed to approach across
the water, and any moving object could be seen in the Burning--a
growth of green springing where the woods had been swept by fire. The
men were often away, guiding fishing parties from dawn until sunset,
or hunting parties from sunset half the night. Françoise and Gou-gou
dwelt in the camp, having the dogs as their protectors, though neither
primitive nor civilized life menaced them there with any danger. Some
evenings, when few affairs had crowded the day, Brown sat like a
patriarch in the midst of his family, and took Gougou on his knee to
hear bear stories. He supervised the youngster's manners like a mother,
and Gougou learned to go down to the washing-place and use soap
when the signs were strong for bear-dens and deer-stalking.
"I saw a bear come out on the beach once," Brown would tell him,
"when I was stalking for deer and had a doe and fawn in the lake. I
smelt him, but couldn't get him to turn his eyes towards me. I killed
both deer, and skinned them, and cut up