THE WHISTLING OF ZOËTIQUE
THE WHISTLING OF ZOËTIQUE
As when a child shakes a kaleidoscope the bits of colored glass shift from one distinct pattern into another, so when I think of the events which came of Zoëtique Vézina’s gift of whistling, the little story falls into two or three sharply defined pictures, so different from each other, so linked, so filled with life, that, simple as it is, the tale appears to me dramatic enough to tell exactly as it happened.
It is a far cry from the moonlit stillness of an August night on a Canadian lake—a dark amphitheatre of hills guarding the sky-line, a road of light across the water, canoes floating black on silver—from that to the crowded glare of a New York theatre. Yet the span of life reaches easily across such distances, and the stage-settings of the play I am to tell were such. It was the last night of a fortnight’s visit to the Morgans’ camp, and they, as well as I, were going back to civilization next day. There was a ceremony to be celebrated which had become a custom of last nights, they explained to me—the guides gave a concert. It was always clear and always moonlight on a last night in camp—by law, young Bob Morgan gave me to understand. In any case, it was invariable, and here was this cloudless, bright evening to back up his assertion. There were two methods of giving the concert: either the messieurs, which included Mrs. Morgan, stayed in camp and the men paddled about at a picturesque distance, and serenaded them from boats; or else the messieurs went out in the canoes and the guides “howled from the underbrush,” as Bob put it. To-night, the air was so warm and the wet moonlight lay in such thick splashes over the water that no one wanted to stay on land. It gave a man a greedy feeling that he must get “au large” and loot jewelry and broken gold out of the night. So the canvas canoes slid from the quay with musical wooden and liquid noises, and off we drifted, two and two, into the perspective of a dream.
There were six of us, with the two strangers. Fishing down a deep bay of Lac Lumière that afternoon, Walter Morgan and I had dropped suddenly, around a corner, on a camp—two tents, two messieurs, four guides.
“The devil!” said Morgan, and I, though it was not my business to do the swearing, repeated the words.
It is the theory when one gets into camp that one has discovered an earth without inhabitants, and proof to the contrary is accounted a rudeness. We wished not to know that people lived, and it was immaterial and irrelevant—what Bob Morgan would sum up as “fresh”—of these unknown ones to thrust knowledge upon us. All the same, there were tents, guides, and an unmistakable monsieur in aggressive sporting clothes on the shore, and, within ten feet of our boat’s nose, another boat with a bored-looking Montagnais Indian paddling it, and in the bow a man with a rod whose first cast explained the Indian’s expression. A fisherman does not catalogue when he sees another man cast, but he knows the details, and he knows their summary—a greenhorn or an expert. Morgan was a crack, and I had studied under him, and before his slow “Good-day” greeted the stranger we were both aware that the rod weighed at least nine ounces, that the leader was too light for it, that a Yellow Sally for a hand-fly and a Scarlet Ibis for the tail were flies that, in this light, made a blot on a man’s character; that the man was casting from his neck down, and getting the flies in a mess as might be expected; that the thirty feet of line out was all and more than all that he could handle; and that, last and worst, the person who would fish for trout in that spot, at a little outlet, where the water was shallow and warm, in the month of August, was, as a fisherman, beneath contempt. I could hear Walter Morgan’s opinion of the person in that “Good day” when it came.
But I was to see his manner change. The stranger, his back toward us, at my friend’s voice arrested his line half-way through a convulsive recover, and the three flies fell in a heap about his shoulders—one caught in his brand-new corduroy hat, and the hook of another went into his thumb. He whirled about his brilliant tan-leather clad shoulders with a lurch which missed upsetting the boat, Montagnard and all, but neither episode disturbed him.
“Good day,” he returned cordially, with a smile which at once made a difference about an uninhabited earth. He went on quickly. “Am I in your way? I’m a greenhorn, and I don’t know other people’s rights, but I mean well. I’ve never had such fun in all my life,” he confided in us with a rush, like a small boy having too good a time to keep to himself. “I’ve never fished before, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I caught a trout a while ago. Do I do it all right?” he inquired wistfully. “I wish you’d tell me if anything’s wrong.”
A Roman candle exploded inside of Morgan could not have left him more scattered. The outcome was that we landed in a spirit of eager friendliness and partook of other spirits with this attractive débutant and his partner, who seemed a person of equal ignorance and equal, though quieter, enthusiasm. That this latter was a well-known playwright we made out shortly, and there was at once a free exchange of names among us, but our first acquaintance we did not then place. However, it took no time at all to see that two such whole-hearted babes in the woods had probably never before arrived, as such, at the approximate age of fifty. They were wax in the hands of their guides, and their guides were “doing” them without remorse. Morgan, pleased with the virgin soil, began gardening; he sowed seeds of woodcraft and of fishcraft which took root before his eyes, and, charmed with the business, he invited the two to dinner that night. That we were breaking camp next day, while they were just beginning their trip, was a point of genuine regret on both sides.