Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana

by George Washington Cable

He turned and retreated the way he had come, nothing doubting that only by the virtue of a voodoo charm which he carried in his pocket he had escaped, for the time being, a plot laid for his capture. For the small, neatly-robed form that you may still see disappearing within the court-house door beside the limping figure of the probate clerk is Zoséphine Beausoleil. She will finish the last pressing matter of the Robichaux succession now in an hour or so, and be off on the little branch railway, whose terminus is here, for New Orleans.

When the pot-hunter approached Lake Cataouaché again, he made on foot, under cover of rushes and reeds taller than he, a wide circuit and reconnoissance of his hut. While still a long way off, he saw, lighted by the sunset rays, what he quickly recognized as a canoe drawn half out of the water almost at his door. He warily drew nearer. Presently he stopped, and stood slowly and softly shifting his footing about on the oozy soil, at a little point of shore only some fifty yards away from his cabin. His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances that would soon be hidden in the abrupt fall of the southern night.

The pot-hunter knew him. Not by name, but by face. The day the outlaw saw Bonaventure at the little railway station this man was with him. The name the pot-hunter did not know was St. Pierre.

The ambushed man shrank a step backward into his hiding-place. His rifle was in his hand and he noiselessly cocked it. He had not resolved to shoot; but a rifle is of no use until it is cocked. While he so stood, another man came into view and to the first one’s side. This one, too, he knew, despite the soft hat that had taken the place of the silk one; for this was Tarbox. The Acadian was confirmed in his conviction that the surveyor’s invitation for him to come to Houma was part of a plot to entrap him.

While he still looked the two men got into the canoe and St. Pierre paddled swiftly away. The pot-hunter let down the hammer of his gun, shrank away again, turned and hurried through the tangle, regained his canoe, and paddled off. The men’s departure from the cabin was, in his belief, a ruse. But he knew how by circuits and short cuts to follow after them unseen, and this he did until he became convinced that they were fairly in the Company Canal and gliding up its dark colonnade in the direction whence they had evidently come. Then he returned to his cabin and with rifle cocked and with slow, stealthy step entered it, and in headlong haste began to prepare to leave it for a long hiding-out.

He knew every spot of land and water for leagues around, as a bear or a fox would know the region about his den. He had in mind now a bit of dry ground scarce fifty feet long or wide, deeply hidden in the swamp to the north of this lake. How it had ever happened that this dry spot, lifted two or three feet above the low level around it, had been made, whether by some dumb force of nature or by the hand of men yet more untamable than he, had never crossed his thought. It was beyond measure of more value to him to know, by what he had seen growing on it season after season, that for many a long year no waters had overflowed it. In the lake, close to his hut, lay moored his small centerboard lugger, and into this he presently threw his few appliances and supplies, spread sail, and skimmed away, with his pirogue towing after.

His loaded rifle lay within instant reach. By choice he would not have harmed any living creature that men call it wrong to injure; but to save himself, not only from death, but from any risk of death, rightful or wrongful, he would, not through courage, but in the desperation of frantic cowardice, have killed a hundred men, one by one.

By this time it was night; and when first the lugger and, after it was hidden away, the pirogue, had carried him up a slender bayou as near as they could to the point he wished to reach, he had still to drag the loaded pirogue no small distance through the dark, often wet and almost impenetrable woods. He had taken little rest and less sleep in his late journeyings, and when at length he cast himself down before his fire of dead fagots on the raised spot he had chosen, he slept heavily. He felt safe from man’s world, at least for the night.

Only one thing gave him concern as he lay down. It was the fact that when, with the old woods-habit strong on him, he had approached his selected camping ground, with such wariness of movement as the dragging pirogue would allow, he had got quite in sight of it before a number of deer on it bounded away. He felt an unpleasant wonder to know what their unwilling boldness might signify.

He did not awake to replenish his fire until there were only a few live embers shining dimly at his feet. He rose to a sitting posture; and in that same moment there came a confusion of sound—a trampling through bushes—that froze his blood, and robbed his open throat of power to cry. The next instant he knew it was but those same deer. But the first intelligent thought brought a new fear. These most timid of creatures had made but a few leaps and stopped. He knew what that meant! As he leaped to his feet the deer started again, and he heard, to his horror,—where the ground had been dry and caked when he lay down,—the plash of their feet in water.