Seeds of Pine

by Emily F. Murphy

After awhile, the voyageurs are all rounded up with the exception of Luke. The best the Boss can say for Luke is that he has been given a Christian name. Jake is sent to fetch him. Luke turns up, but Scotty must find Jake. Luke isn't drunk either—not he. It's the scow that's drunk. Who said Luke was "fuller'n a goat," I'd like to know. Ultimately, the Boss starts off to get Scotty and Jake. He gets them, and he sits them down in a highly decisive manner, only to find that Bill, and Jean Baptiste, and One-eyed Pete have gone up town for a dunnage bag they left at the Grand Union Hotel.... The Boss looks eight feet tall when he is angry, but, otherwise, to the unseeing eye, he is only a young factor, or maybe an independent trader, intent on his work like scores of other ordinary, unaccounted workmen. Contrawise, the eye of imagination may see in him an adventuring gentleman launching a craft that is to traverse for hundreds of miles through many and diverse waterways, carrying with it a veritable cargo of blessings to the far and lonely outposts of the North which, as yet, are little else than names.

The rivermen push off from shore with their oars till, in the centre of the stream, the current catches them and carries them along. This is their only method of locomotion, to float and float with the stream. They have a steering-pole in the scow similar to that which may be seen in pictures of old Roman galleys, and when, because of darkness, the voyageurs wish to stay their course, they make to shore by its aid, even as the Romans did more than two thousand years ago. To make the simile complete, I stand on the bank and repeat the invocation of the Roman poet: "Oh ship that conveyest Virgil to Greece, duly deliver up the precious life entrusted to thy care."...

If I hadn't jerked the crown of an old hat out of the river under the impression that it was a fish, Justine would not have laughed out loud and I would not have had an excuse to get acquainted with her. She has been sitting nearby this half-hour. Her name isn't really Justine and I forget what it is. She is the prettiest breed-girl in the country and, by the same token, the frailest. "Believe me, Madam," explained an old officer of the Mounted Police, the other day, "those eyes were never given her for the good of her soul. She is a little worth-nothing person like all the other breed-girls."

This man despises breed-women and he has made a sufficiently intimate study of them to form an opinion. He wishes they were all dead. "For an absolute truth, Madam, listen to me. For years, these women have paddled their canoes up this river with kegs of contraband liquor a-swing from ropes beneath and none of the force ever suspected. They were so monstrously civil, they would even give us 'a lift' if we desired it. I was highly surprised when we found them out, and so disgusted with myself that, for a time, I thought of becoming a type-setter. By Jove! you know; a fellow doesn't expect to find a keg outside a canoe. Now does he?"

But I am not one of those who believe there are good women and bad women. Some are elemental and others are not; that is the only difference. I will maintain this to the very day my tongue wears out.

Justine's white father must have had a head and shoulders of the most perfect classical type. As she sits on the beach with a light shawl drawn down over her head, this girl resembles greatly the Madonna of Bouguereau. I tell her this, and we talk for a long while. She thinks my suggestion that she marry a riverman, or a trapper, and have quite a large family, a wholly foolish suggestion. It causes her to think little of both my discernment and my knowledge of men. Rivermen, she would have me understand, hardly ever come home, and when they do, only to get drunk and beat their wives. A white man won't marry a breed girl, nowadays, and if he should give her his heart, he expects it to be returned sometime. Still, Justine considers his transient affections to be preferable to those of the breed's, in that a white man seldom strikes his girl. Justine gives me a short lesson in Cree, and, among other words, I learn that saky hagen is the equivalent of "one I love," and that nichimoos means "sweetheart." The former is usually applied to a child, the latter to an adult.

When I ask Justine to tell me a story about the North, she complies because she has been educated in a mission school and speaks English well. And then she is not in the least afraid of me since I showed so lamentable a lack of insight about marriage. Now listen to the story.

Once a mallard who was sick of love asked a blackbird to marry him. "Marry me," he said, "and I will give you fish to eat and wild rice. And when the sun is hot, I will hide you in the rushes and keep you under my wings."

And so they lived together as man and wife and the blackbird bore her husband three sons, but soon he tired of her and made believe he was dead so that she went away and left him in peace.

And then the mallard went in search of another wife.... It was a story I craved of Justine, and lo! she has told me a parable.