CHAPTER XXVI
In the Manacles of Winter
That night winter came and gripped the bush-world, and now as far as the eye could span distance she held the Wild in her white embrace, and all the life of nature’s wood, marsh, and water seemed chilled to deep mysterious silence.
Between the scrag-line of Point Aux Pins forest and the hardwood of the mainland, Rond Eau Bay lay patched with shingly ice-scale and frozen snow-drifts. Here and there a strip of white-blue gleamed from her dead bosom like a smear of slate on white, and sheets of powdery snow whirled and scudded before the fierce winds that swept her. Along the forest aisles the snow lay deep—deeper than any of the things of the Wild had ever before seen it.
Winter had swept down almost without warning, gripping the waters in its clutch and breathing into the very marrow of the trees, numbing them to drowsy forgetfulness. They stood in the blue-cold winter morning with still arms uplifted toward the chill skies, great, silent, unprotesting. And with each shortening day the frost bit deeper and their sleep became heavier. Sometimes a dream of golden summer came to bestir the soul of giant beech or tall maple, and its heart, waking to life, would shiver its icy manacles with a mighty crash, only to leave it wounded and shivering, a maimed thing into which spring would breathe her healing balm after a little while. From the dead face of the bay the creek twisted, a blue vein betwixt gray lifeless rushes, and all of nature’s great playground rested lonely and forsaken. On Totherside, Hallibut’s mill squatted, a white mound upon white, and the schoolhouse against the hill—its bell always silent now—seemed to sink toward the valley as though longing to snuggle down and rest in the soft blanket that lay below it.
Adown the cloaked vista of Bushwhackers’ Place drab smoke-spirals, like inverted tree-shadows, twisted above the forest. But there were no sounds—not even the chug of axes biting into the wood. The fiercest winter this new country had ever experienced had been reigning for three long months. The snows lay waist-deep throughout the forest, and through the long nights the wolf-packs howled and protested hungrily to the cold, low-hanging stars. In the log-stables of the woodmen the cattle munched their fodder and rested. There was no work for them with the snows choking the trails and the frost menacing life, neither was there necessity for the easygoing Bushwhackers to risk life in the wintry frost. They had plenty of fuel at their command; also meat in plenty. There was not even an occasion for them to kill the animals and game-birds that had sought the protection of man when Nature seemed to have forgotten them in sleep. Food for the Wild in the deep swales and low-timbers was scarce and growing scarcer. The deer, accustomed to brouse on the low-hanging branches, found it difficult to secure sufficient sustenance to keep their blood warm, and they crept nearer and nearer to the little settlement of man. One morning a Bushwhacker surprised two of them, a buck and a doe, ravenously devouring the dry cornstalks that had been cast from the cattle-stalls into the yard. Broods of quail crept from the thickets across to the fodder-stacks. Hunger-fearless and defiant, they took up their homes about the out-buildings, mingling with the tame fowl and roosting in huddling bunches beneath the warm, protecting stacks at night. Nor were they molested. The Bushwhackers scattered corn among the straw so that the birds might understand that a truce was established, and not until the amber fall dawned again would they have cause for alarm. But the gray timber-wolves neither asked nor sought favors from man. They held aloof from him, hating him and suspicious of him. Born to starve, their vitality outlasted that of the other forest wild things, and they trailed, tore down, and devoured. For three months of unprecedented winter no trapping had been done; no more loggin’-bees had been arranged. But the Bushwhackers had managed to get together by chiseling paths through the drifts between their homes. However, of their more remote neighbors, such as the Broadcrooks, who lived some miles west of Lee Creek, the French trapper, and the Indians on Point Aux Pins, they had seen or heard nothing for many weeks. It was a risk to go even a short distance in the benumbing frost. No man could hope to break his way through the frozen drifts of snow piled mountain-high.
Oftentimes the Bushwhackers met together at the home of a neighbor, and perhaps Big McTavish would have his old fiddle along, and there would be long talks over the cracking of hickory-nuts and walnuts, and as the evening progressed “Mac” would strike up some of the old jig-tunes, and if the party was a particularly jovial one, there would be a clog-dance or two.
The deadly winter had put a stop to further encroachment of their enemies, but of course the one general query among the bushmen was: “How long before they will come again?” There was something pathetic in the question these simple-hearted men asked among themselves, as, in their evening talks together, they discussed how best to meet the big man with the great power. Directly they connected Colonel Hallibut with the attempt to kidnap Gloss from her home, and they debated how best to act when the man capable of planning such a dastardly deed should come again.
So the Bushwhackers talked and waited, and the long, cold weeks dragged onward, and it began to look as though the fierce cold would never moderate. After half the winter had passed without a single thaw they knew that the impregnable barriers of snow would hold their enemy in leash until spring had cleared the trail.
But by and by the deadly cold relaxed its grip and for the first time during Winter’s reign her orange sun dipped through the frost-mist and, touching the drooping snow-clad trees, painted a picture of a still bush-world sleeping beneath a blanket of blue-white diamond dust.
“The cold snap’s over,” said Declute, late one night as he sat with Jim Peeler, Boy McTavish, and Bill Paisley before the great fireplace in the McTavish home. “Never see it fail yet but when we’ve had three days sun and no snow the mild weather stays.”