Back from the other shore of the harbor, jutting out for some miles into Chedabucto Bay, lies the Cape. You get a view of it if you climb to the crest of the hill—a broad reach of barrens, fretted all day by the sea. Out there it is what the Acadians call a bad country. About the sluice-like coves that have been eaten into its rocky shore are scrambling groups of fishermen's houses; but aside from these and the lighthouse on the spit of rocks to southward, the region is uninhabited—a waste of rock and swamp-alder and scrub-balsam, across which a single thread of a road takes its circuitous way, dipping over steep low hills, turning out for gnarls of rock and patches of gleaming marsh, losing itself amid dense thickets of alder, then emerging upon some bare hilltop, where the whole measureless sweep of sea and sky fills the vision.
When the dusk begins to fall of an autumn afternoon—between dog and wolf, as the saying goes—you could almost believe in the strange noises—the rumblings, clankings, shrill voices—that are to be heard above the dull roar of the sea by belated passers on the barrens. Some people have seen death-fires too, and a headless creature, much like a horse, galloping through the darkness; and over there at Fougère's Cove, the most remote settlement of the Cape, there were knockings at doors through all one winter from hands not human. The Fougères—they were mostly of one tribe there—were driven to desperation; they consulted a priest; they protected themselves with blessed images, with prayers and holy water; and no harm came to them, though poor Marcelle, who was a jeune fille of marriageable age, was prostrated for a year with the fright of it.
This barren territory, where nothing grows above the height of a man's shoulder, still goes by the name of "the woods"—les bois—among the Acadians. "Once the forest was magnificent here," they tell you—"trees as tall as the church tower; but the great fire swept it all away; and never has there been a good growth since. For one thing, you see, we must get our firewood from it somehow."
This fact accounts for a curious look in the ubiquitous stubby evergreens: their lower branches spread flat and wide close on the ground,—that is where the snow in winter protects them,—and above reaches a thin, spire-like stem, trimmed close, except for new growth at the top, of all its branches. It gives suggestion of a harsh, misshapen, all but defeated existence; the adverse forces are so tyrannical out here on the Cape, the material of life so sparse.
I remember once meeting a little funeral train crossing the barrens. They were bearing the body of a young girl, Anna Béjean, to its last rest, five miles away by the road, in the yard of the parish church amongst the wooden crosses. The long box of pine lay on the bottom of a country wagon, and a wreath of artificial flowers and another of home-dyed immortelles were fastened to the cover. A young fisherman, sunburned and muscular, was leading the horse along the rough road, and behind followed three or four carts, carrying persons in black, all of middle age or beyond, and silent.
Yet in the full tide of summer the barrens have a beauty in which this characteristic melancholy is only a persistent undertone. Then the marshes flush rose-pink with lovely multitudes of calopogons that cluster like poising butterflies amongst the dark grasses; here too the canary-yellow bladderwort flecks the black pools, and the red, leathery pitcher-plant springs in sturdy clumps from the moss-hummocks. And the wealth of color over all the country!—gray rock touched into life with sky-reflections; rusty green of alder thickets, glistening silver-green of balsam and juniper; and to the sky-line, wherever it can keep its hold, the thin, variegated carpet of close-cropped grass, where creeping berries of many kinds grow in profusion. Flocks of sheep scamper untended over the barrens all day, and groups of horses, turned out to shift for themselves while the fishing season keeps their owners occupied, look for a moment, nose in the air, at the passer, kick up their heels, and race off.
As you turn back again toward Arichat you catch a glimpse of its glistening white church, miles distant in reality, but looking curiously near, across a landscape where none of the familiar standards of measure exist. You lose it on the next decline; then it flashes in sight again, and the blue, sun-burnished expanse of water between. It occurs to you that the whole life of of the country finds its focus there: christenings and first communions, marriages and burials—how wonderfully the church holds them all in her keeping; how she sends out her comfort and her exhortation, her reproach and her eternal hope across even this bad country, where the circumstances of human life are so ungracious.
But it is on a Sunday morning, when, in response to the quavering summons of the chapel bell, the whole countryside gives up its population, that you get the clearest notion of what religion means in the life of the Acadians. From the doorway of our house, which was close to the road at the upper end of the harbor, we could see the whole church-going procession from the outlying districts. The passing would be almost unbroken from eight o'clock on for more than an hour and a half: a varied, vivacious, friendly human stream. They came in hundreds from the scattered villages and hamlets of the parish—from Petit de Grat and Little Anse and Pig Cove and Gros Nez and Point Rouge and Cap au Guet, eight or nine miles often enough.
First, those who went afoot and must allow plenty of time on account of age: bent old fishermen, whose yellowed and shiny coats had been made for more robust shoulders; old women, invariably in short black capes, and black bonnets tied tight under the chin, and in their hands a rosary and perhaps a thumb-worn missal. Then troops of children, much endimanché,—one would like to say "Sundayfied,"—trotting along noisily, stopping to examine every object of interest by the way, extracting all the excitement possible out of the weekly pilgrimage.