The Red Pirogue: A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian Wilds

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

“Neither would I, myself. But how d’ye figger it, Ben?”

“Well, the little girl has good manners.”

“She sure has! I never saw a little girl with better manners. I’m hoping her pa hasn’t done something they can jail him for—or if he has, that they can’t catch ’im. I’m all for keeping the laws—even the game laws—but maybe if I’d lived on French River along with Louis Balenger instead of at O’Dell’s Point alongside O’Dells all my life, I’d be busy this minute keeping a jump ahead of the wardens instead of hilling potatoes. You never can tell. There’s more to shootin’ a moose in close season nor the twitch of the finger. There’s many an outlaw running the woods who would have been an honest farmer like yer Uncle Jim if only he’d been born a McAllister and been bred alongside the O’Dells.”

“I’ve been thinking that myself,” returned Ben gravely. “Environment, that’s it! The influence of environment.”

“It sure sounds right to me, all right,” said McAllister. “We’ll call it that, anyhow; and we won’t forget that Dick Sherwood taught his little girl good manners and how to read.”

The thought of getting away from the duties of the farm for a few days was a pleasant one to both the honest farmer and his big nephew. Jim McAllister was not an enthusiastic agriculturalist. He loved the country and he didn’t object to an occasional bout of strenuous toil; but the unadventurous round of milking and weeding and hoeing day after day bored him extremely even now in his forty-sixth year. But for the mild excitement of the salmon net in the river and his love for his widowed sister and his nephew and his respect for the memory of the late Captain John O’Dell he would long ago have turned his back on the implements of husbandry and taken to the woods.

Young Ben, on the other hand, was keen about farm work. He preferred it to school work. He was young enough to find excitement where none was perceptible to his uncle. He loved all growing things, but he loved cattle more than crops, horses more than cows. The practical side of farm life was dear to him and he took pleasure in the duties which seemed humdrum to his uncle; but the side issues, the sporting features, were even dearer. He loved the river better than the meadow and he saw eye to eye with McAllister in the matter of the salmon net. A flying duck set his blood flying and the reek of burned powder on the air of a frosty morning was the most delicious scent he knew. He loved wood smoke under trees and the click of an iron-shod canoe pole on pebbles, and the tracks of wild animals in mud and snow. The prospect of a visit to French River was far from unwelcome to him.

That was an unusually warm night, without a breath of air on O’Dell’s Point. Ben went to bed at ten o’clock and somehow let three mosquitoes into his room with him. He undressed, extinguished his lamp and lay sweltering in his pajamas on the outside of his bed. Then the mosquitoes tuned their horns and sounded the charge. They lasted nearly half an hour; by the time they were dead Ben was wider awake than he had been at any time during the day. He went to the window and looked out at the sky of faint stars and the vague dark of the curving river. His glance was straight ahead at first, then eastward downstream.

Ben saw a light, a red light, drifting on the black river. His first thought was that it might be some one with a lantern, but in a moment he saw that the light could not be that of a lantern, for it grew and sparks began to fly from it. A torch, perhaps. The torch of a salmon spearer? Not likely! For years it had been unlawful to kill salmon or bass with the spear and there was no lawbreaker on the river possessed of sufficient hardihood to light his torch within sight of O’Dell’s Point. More than this, the light was running with the current; and it was increasing every moment in height and length far beyond the dimensions of any torch.

Ben groped for his shoes and picked them up, felt his way cautiously out of the room and down the back stairs. In the woodshed he put on his shoes and equipped himself with paddle and pole. Then he ran for the river, ducking under the boughs of the old apple trees and descending the bank in a jump and a slide. Dim as the light was he saw that the big pirogue was gone before he reached the edge of the water. The sixteen-footer was there but nothing was to be seen of the giant from French River. He looked downstream and saw the light which had attracted him from his window vanishing behind the head of the island, out in the channel. It was like a floating camp fire by this time.