The late start from Fort Douglas made getting to Pembina that day impossible. After plodding along the prairie track and crossing several small streams, the cart train passed a cold and stormy night in the open beyond the wooded bank of a muddy creek that Louis called Rivière aux Marais. Pembina was reached next day in a driving storm of rain, sleet and snow.
The Pembina River took its name from anepeminan, the Ojibwa term for the shrub we call highbush cranberry. The junction of the Pembina with the Red was an old trading place. The Northwest men had established themselves there before the close of the eighteenth century, and in the early years of the nineteenth all three rival companies, the Northwest, the Hudson Bay, and the New Northwest or X. Y. Company, as it was called by the old Northwesters, maintained posts a short distance from one another. Those old posts were gone,—burned or torn down,—long before the time of this story. The two forts then standing had been built at a later date. Fort Daer, the Selkirk Colony post, dated from the autumn of 1812, when the first of the colonists, under the leadership of Miles McDonnell, had come to the Pembina to winter. It stood on the south bank of that river near where it empties into the Red. Just opposite, across the Pembina, was a former Northwest fort, which had become, since the uniting of the companies, a Hudson Bay trading post.
Some of the Scotch settlers and all of the Swiss except Walter were to be lodged at Fort Daer until they could build cabins of their own. Louis had asked Walter to be his guest. The cart he was driving, which was not his own, was loaded with the household goods of some of the settlers, and had to be taken to Fort Daer. After leaving the fort, the two boys, carrying their scanty belongings in packs, made their way to Louis’ home. The little village of log cabins was not actually on the Pembina, but near the bank of the Red a mile or more from the junction point. The arrival at Fort Daer of a cart train from down river was an important event, but the abominable weather curbed curiosity, and the boys saw few people as they made their way against the storm to the Brabant cabin.
Louis’ mother, hoping that he might have come with the party from Fort Douglas, was on the lookout for him. Before he could reach the door, it flew open. Followed by the younger children and three shaggy-haired sled dogs, Mrs. Brabant ran out into the sleet and snow. Very heartily Louis hugged and kissed her. When he presented his companion, she welcomed Walter warmly. The children greeted him shyly. The dogs, inclined at first to resent his presence, concluded, after a curt command and a kick or two from the moccasined toe of Louis’ younger brother, to accept the newcomer as one of the family.
To the Swiss lad, weary, soaked, and chilled through, the rude but snug cabin with a fire blazing in the rough stone fireplace, promised a comfort that seemed almost heavenly. He had not spent a night or even eaten a meal inside a building for many weeks. The warmth was so grateful, the smell from the steaming kettle that hung above the blaze so appetizing, that for a few minutes he could do nothing but stand before the fire, speechless, half dazed by the sudden transition from the wet and the bitter cold.
He was roused by Mrs. Brabant who offered him dry moccasins and one of the shirts she had been making for Louis during his absence. Walter had a dry shirt in his pack, but he accepted the moccasins gratefully. His shoes were not only soaked, but so worn from the long journey that they scarcely held together. The cabin, one of the best in the settlement, boasted two rooms, and Louis’ mother and sisters retired to the other one while the boys changed their clothes. As soon as they were warm and partly dry, supper was served.
The household sat on stools and floor in front of the fire, each with his cup and wooden platter. From the bubbling pot standing on the hearth Madame Brabant ladled out generous portions. The rich and savory stew was made up of buffalo meat, wild goose, potatoes, carrots, onions, and other ingredients that Walter did not recognize but enjoyed nevertheless. It was the best meal he had tasted in months, and he ate until he could hold no more.
The hunters had returned only a few days before from the great fall buffalo chase, and there was abundance of meat in the settlement. It was during the autumn hunt two years before that Louis’ father had been accidentally killed, and the Brabant family had not accompanied the hunters since that time, but Mrs. Brabant’s brother had brought her a supply of fresh and dried meat and pemmican. The goose thirteen-year-old Raoul had shot, and the potatoes and other vegetables were from the Brabant garden. The grasshopper hordes had missed Pembina. Mrs. Brabant expressed sympathy for the poor Selkirk colonists who had lost all their crops. She listened with lively interest to the boys’ account of the trip from Fort York, and asked the Swiss lad many questions about his own people.
Walter was so grateful for shelter, warmth, food, and the kindly welcome he was receiving that he could not have been critical of the Brabant family whatever they had been. As it happened, he liked them all heartily. He was to discover, within the next few days, that this household was considerably superior to most of those in Pembina. The interior of the cabin was neat and clean, differing markedly in this respect from many of the bois brulé dwellings. Her straight black hair, smoothly arranged in braids hanging over her shoulders, her dark skin, and high cheek-bones betrayed the Ojibwa in Louis’ mother, but in every other way, especially in her ready smile, lively speech, and alert movements, she seemed wholly French. She wore deerskin leggings with moccasins, but her dark blue calico dress, belted with a strip of bright beadwork, was fresh and clean. Her little daughters were dressed in the same fashion, except that Marie, the elder, who was about ten years old, wore skirt and tunic of soft, fringed doeskin, instead of calico. The dark eyes of both little girls sparkled when Louis, unknotting a small bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief, handed each one a length of bright-colored ribbon, one red, the other orange, to tie in their long black braids. For his mother he brought a silk handkerchief, a gilt locket, and a packet of good tea, the kind, he had been told, the Chief Factor at Fort York drank. Raoul was made happy with a shiny new knife.
Louis and Walter were tired enough to take to their blankets early. Mrs. Brabant and the girls slept in a great box bed, made of hand-hewn boards painted bright blue, that stood in the corner of the room where the fireplace was. In the smaller room, which was nothing but a lean-to shed with a dirt floor, was a curious couch for the boys. It was made of strips of rawhide stretched tightly on a frame of poles, and was covered with buffalo robe and blankets. This cot Louis shared with Walter, who found the rawhide straps not nearly so hard as bare ground. Raoul rolled himself in a robe and lay down in front of the fire.