Tom Akerley / His Adventures in the Tall Timber and at Gaspard's Clearing on the Indian River

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

“We have both read of this in books, and I have often seen it done on the stage,” he said, in a wooden tone of voice; and he raised her hand, bowed his head and touched his lips to the backs of her fingers. Releasing her hand swiftly he turned, went out by the back door, took two pails from the bench against the wall and started for the cow-yard.

The young woman ran after him and called from the porch that she and her grandfather had already attended to the milking. He returned and replaced the milk-pails.

“It is just as well,” he said. “I could only use one hand, anyway, for that big rube caught me one smasher on my lame shoulder.”

She advised him to bathe the shoulder and put arnica on it. She gave him the arnica along with the advice; and he accepted both. After that he helped her with the work about the house; and then they sat on the porch and she told him a great deal about her parentage and herself while they awaited the reappearance of Gaspard Javet.

Catherine MacKim had been born twenty-one years ago, in this very house in this clearing. She could not remember anything of her mother, Gaspard’s daughter, for she had been left motherless at two years of age; but her father, a son of the Crimean veteran, had often talked to her about Catherine Javet, whom he had met and married, cherished and buried in this wilderness. Hugh MacKim had been utterly lacking in worldly ambition; and though not a weakling in mind or body, he had possessed none of that particular blunt yet narrow variety of strength by which thousands of men force themselves successfully through life. He had been born in a big house in a prosperous farming district in Ontario. His father, Major Ian MacKim, who had been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his services before Sevastopol when an ensign in an infantry regiment of the line, had moved to Canada soon after his retirement from the active list of the army. Whatever the major may have been when operating against the enemies of his King and Country, he had proved himself an extraordinarily violent, stupid and difficult person in civil life. As a farmer he had made himself an object of terror and dislike to his neighbors and of fear and distress to his family. The fact that he had contracted the causes of that bitter and unreasoning temper while serving his country at the risk of his life excused it to those of his connections and acquaintances who were so fortunate as never to come into contact with it; but the truth is that rheumatism from Russia and a liver whose action had been dulled and deranged in India had made that valiant old soldier a terror to his own children.

Under the circumstances young Hugh MacKim, (who was later Catherine’s father), had been glad to leave the farm and go to school in Montreal; and when his school years had come to an end and he had been ordered to return to the farm, he had taken to the woods instead. That life had suited him. He had given up, without regret, most of the things to which he had been born and bred; and of all that collection of inherited and acquired tastes and habits, only his mild affection for books, his good manners and his sense of fair play had survived. From one point and another of the northern fringe of settlement he had written occasionally to his mother.

After the major’s death the widow had sent the Cross of the Legion of Honor to her strayed son Hugh, hoping that it might act as a spur to hereditary pride and ambitions. It had pleased him mildly, that was all. So the widow had turned to her younger son for an acknowledgment of family and class responsibilities. Then Hugh had come into the Indian River country, “cruising timber” for a big firm of Quebec operators; and here he had discovered Gaspard Javet and his secluded clearings and his beautiful daughter. Hugh had not gone farther. He had even neglected to retrace his steps to Quebec and submit his report on the timber of the lands which he had gone forth to explore. He had simply fallen in love with Catherine Javet and thrown in his lot with her father.

Hugh MacKim had known happiness and contentment in his height-of-land for seven years—until his wife’s death; and after that—after time had dulled the cutting edge of his loneliness for her—he had known contentment for the remaining years of his life. His appetite for the woods, and for those dexterities of hand and eye which life in the wilderness called for, had never failed him. He had been a poet in his appreciation of nature. His eye for the weather had never been as knowing as Gaspard’s, but always more loving. He had always seen more in dawns and sunsets than promises of rain or wind or frost. And his had been the knowledge and skill, but never the ruthlessness, of a first-rate trapper and hunter. He had delighted in the companionship of his father-in-law from the first; and admiration and affection had been mutual in the friendship of those two. His love for his daughter had been tender and unfaltering. He had taught her the delight of books and of the life around her. He had taught her to read two languages from printed pages and the hundred tongues and signs of wood, water and sky. He had died two winters ago.

“I should like to have known your father,” said Akerley. “I believe he was right about himself, his own life—but didn’t he ever look ahead? Did he picture you here in the woods always?”

“There was no place in the big world for him,” she replied. “We belonged to these woods, he and I; and, of course, he did not know that he was to die so soon. His health was good. He was ill only a few days.”