Fifteen years ago,—it was on the seventeenth of August, 1845,—I made my first pilgrimage to Lorette, in company with a friend. We wandered at large through the village, talking patois to the swarthy damsels, and picking up Indian knick-knacks, as we went. At last, fired with the ambition of doing a distinguished thing, we proposed calling upon the head chief of the village, whose name, I think, was Simon, but might possibly have been Peter,—for I regret to say that my memory is rather misty upon that important point. That personage was absent from home; but we were hospitably received by his father, who also appeared to be his butler, as he was engaged in bottling off some root-beer into stone blacking-jars, when we entered. I suppose the chief's father must once have been a chief himself, and that his menial position arose from the fact of his appearance being rather disreputable. He was a decrepit and very dirty old man, in a tight blue frock-coat, and swathed as to his spindle shanks with scarlet leggings. Sitting by a small window at the farther end of the large, bare room, was the prettiest little Huronite damsel I ever saw, rather fair than dark, and very neatly attired in a costume partly Indian. This little girl—a granddaughter of the dirty old man, as that person informed us—was occupied in tying up some small bundles of what the Canadians call racine—a sweet-smelling kind of rush-grass, sold by them in the Quebec market, and used like sachets, for imparting a pleasant odor to linen garments. After some conversation of a general character, the old man requested us to write our names in his visitors' book, which was a long, dirty volume, similar in form to those usually seen upon bar-counters. In this book we were delighted to find the autographs of many dear friends, of whom we little expected to meet with traces in this nook of the North. Mark Tapley and Oliver Twist, for instance, had visited the place in company some two years before. There could be no mistake about it; for there were the two names, in characteristic, but different manuscript, bound together by the mystic circumflex that indicated them to be friends and travelling-companions. The record covered a period of ten years; but was that sufficient to account for the appearance of Shakspeare on its pages? And yet there he was; and in merry mood he must have been, when he came to Lorette,—for he wrote himself down "Bill," and dashed off a little picture of himself after the signature, in a bold, if not artistic manner. Our friend Titmouse was there, too, represented by his famous declaration commencing, "Tittlebat Titmouse is my name." He seemed to have taken particularly fast hold of the memory of the old Huron, who described him as a tremendous-looking, big person, with large black whiskers, and remembered having enjoyed a long pull at a brandy-flask carried by him. Of course there can be no doubt about that man being the real Tittlebat of our affections. Of the other signatures in the Huronite album, I chiefly remember that of M.F. Tupper, which I looked upon at the time as a base forgery, and do aver my belief now that it was nothing else: for the aged sagamore described the writer of that signature as a young, cheerful, and communicative man, who smoked a short, black pipe, and had spaniels with him. Could my friend, could I, venture to inscribe our humble names among this galaxy of the good and great? Not so: and yet, to pacify the Huronite patriarch's thirst for autographs, we wrote signatures in his brown old book; and if that curious volume is still in existence, the names of Don Caesar de Bazan and Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Bart., will be found closely linked together on a particular page with the circumflex of friendship.
And now the old man, delighted with the addition to his autographs, proposed to treat us to an exhibition of several medals gained by him for deeds of valor when he was a warrior, and previously to his having entered upon the career of a bottler of root-beverages. He had silver disks presented to him by at least two of Thackeray's Georges, a couple from William IV., and I think one from her present Majesty, Queen Victoria. All of these he touched with reverence, and not until he had purified his hands upon a dirty towel. After we had duly admired these decorations, and listened with patience to the old man's garrulous talk about them, he told us that he had yet another to show,—one presented to him many years ago by a great man of that day,—a man embalmed for all posterity on account of his unrivalled performances upon the tight-rope,—a man of whom he reduced all description to mendicancy in designating him as un danseur très-renommé sur la corde tendue. The medal was a small silver one, and it bore the following inscription:—
FROM EDMUND KEAN, THE BRITISH ACTOR,
TO TOUSSAHISSA, CHIEF OF THE HURON INDIANS. 1826.
And such is fame! It appears that Kean, always fond of excitement, had organized a tremendous pow-wow among these poor specimens of the red man, on his visit to Quebec. They adopted him,—constituted him a chief of their tribe. It would be interesting to have a full account of the great passionist's demeanor upon that solemn occasion. Did he harrow up his hearers with a burst from "Othello" or a deep-sea groan from "Hamlet," and then create a revulsion of feeling by somersaulting over the centre-fire of the circle and standing on his head before it, grinning diabolically at the incensed pot? Or did he, foreshadowing the coming Blondin, then unplanned, stretch his tight-rope across the small Niagara that flashes down into the chasm of the St. Charles, and, kicking his boots off, carry some "mute, inglorious" Colcord over in an Indian bark basket? If he did such things, the old Huronite was foggy upon the subject and reserved, limiting his assertions to the statement, that "the British actor" was a farceur, and likewise un danseur très-renommé sur la corde tendue.
Long afterwards, when I resided at Quebec, my visits to Lorette were very frequent. Once, as I passed along the street, or road, between the straggling log-houses, I was accosted, in good English, by a fat and very jovial old squaw, who was attired in a green silk dress, sported a turban, and appeared to be altogether a superior kind of person. On inquiry, I learned from her that she was the widow of a former chief of the tribe, and came originally from Upper Canada, where she learned to speak English. Her husband had been presented with many medals, she said;—would I like to see them? I followed the old lady into her dwelling, where she showed me several silver medals, which I thought I recognized as the same exhibited by the aged Huronite with the red legs. But the Kean medal was not among them; nor could I, by any system of description in my power, recall the features of the relic to the memory of the old squaw.
Subsequently, I tried many times to trace it, but without success. Many strangers visit Lorette during the summer season, and it is possible that some virtuoso, struck by the associative value of the relic, may have prevailed on its owner to part with it for a consideration. There are people who would have possessed themselves of it without the exchange of a consideration. Should this meet the eye of its present possessor, and if so be that the medal came into his hands on the consideration principle, so that he need not be ashamed of it, he will confer a favor by giving the correct reading of the Indian name. For "Toussahissa," as I have rendered it, is not exact, but only as near as I can make it out from my pencil-memoranda, which, written in a note-book that did occasional duty as a fly-book, have been partially obliterated in that spot by the contact of a large and remarkably gaudy salmon-fly, whose repose between the leaves is disturbed, perhaps, by aquatic nightmares of salmon gaping at him from whirling eddies.
Between Lorette and the unexplored wilderness that stretches away to polar desolation there is but a narrow selvage of civilization. Looking toward it from my windows at Quebec, I could see the blue, serrated ridge of highlands beyond which the surveyor has never yet run his lines,—beyond which the surveyor's lines would be superfluous, indeed, and futile; for the soil is of the barren, rocky kind, and the timber of the scrubby. Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the shaggy bison at his window, or the incursion of the redoubtable "grizzly" into his wood-shed where the elk-meat hung. But, in the clear, cold nights that precede the punctual and distinct winter of these regions, the black bears often come down from their fastnesses amid the wild ridges, and astonish the drowsy habitant and his household by their pranks among his pigs and calves: also in the spring.
In a small settlement of this wild tract, a few miles to the north-east of Lorette, there dwelt, some six or seven years ago, a poor farmer named Cantin, who added to the meagre fare afforded by his sterile acres such stray birds and hares as he could get within range of his old musket, without risking himself very far away from the isolated clearing. One night in the early part of May, when the snow had disappeared from the open grounds, but lingered yet in the ravines and rocky thickets, a dreadful tumult among the cattle of the settlement indicated the presence of bear. Cantin had the old firelock ready, but the night was dark and unfavorable for active measures. At gray morning, traces of the nocturnal intruder were visible, and that close by the cabane in which Cantin lived, in the little inclosure near which a struggle had evidently taken place, resulting in the discomfiture of a yearling calf, portions of which were discovered in the thickets a short distance from the clearing. Here the patches of snow gave ample evidence of the passage of a very large bear. When the sun was well up, Cantin sallied forth alone, with his gun and a small supply of ammunition,—unluckily for him, a very small supply. He did not return to dinner. Shots were heard in the course of the day, at a considerable distance in the hills; and when the afternoon was far advanced, and Cantin had not made his appearance, several of his neighbors—all the men of the settlement, indeed, and they made but a small party—set out in search of him. The snow-patches facilitated their search; and, having tracked him a good way, they suddenly saw him kneeling by a tree at the end of an open glade, with his hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. He was a frightful spectacle when they raised his bonnet-bleu, which had fallen down over his face. The entire facial mask had been torn clean from the skull by a fearful sweep of the bear's paw, and hung from his collar-bone by a strip of skin. He must have been dead for some hours. Fifty yards from where he knelt, the bear was found lying under some bushes, quite dead, and with two bullet-holes through its carcass. Cantin, it appeared, had expended all his ammunition, and the wounded beast had executed a terrible vengeance on him while the life-blood was welling through the last bullet-hole. I saw this bear brought into Quebec, in a cart, on the following day; and it is to be seen yet, I believe, or at least the taxidermal presentment of it is, in the shop of a furrier in John Street of that city. An enterprising druggist bought up the little fat left in the animal after its long winter's fast; and such was the demand among sensational people for gallipots of "grease of the bear that killed Cantin," that it seemed as if fashion had ordained the wearing of hair "on end."
Of the other wild beasts of this hill-district, the commonest is that known to the inhabitants as the loup-cervier,—a name oddly enough misconstructed by a writer on Canadian sports into "Lucifer." This is the true lynx,—a huge cat with long and remarkably thick legs, paws in which dangerous claws are sheathed, and short tail. Its principal prey is the common or Northern hare, which abounds in these regions: but at times the loup-cervier will invade the poultry-yards; and he is even held to account, now and then, for the murder of innocent lambs, and the disappearance of tender piglings whose mothers were so negligent as to let them stray alone into the brushwood. These fierce cats have been killed, occasionally, quite close to Quebec. When thus driven to approach populous districts, it must be from scarcity of their accustomed food; for they are usually very savage and ravenous, when found in such places. I know an instance, myself, in which a gentleman of Quebec, riding a little way from the town, was suddenly pounced upon and attacked by a loup-cervier, near the Plains of Abraham. He struck the animal with his whip several times, but it persisted in following him, and he got rid of it only by putting spurs to his horse and beating it in speed. The animal was killed soon afterwards, near the same place.