Читать книгу Mine Inheritance - Frederick Niven - Страница 18

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These were busy days not only for the labourers but for the clerks, the writers. One of the new buildings had been turned into an administrative office and there I spent great part of my time in making entries regarding the allotments of land to the settlers and the supplies advanced to them, but I had also to be out and about frequently along the stretch of Settlement northward, assisting in the verification of boundary lines with Mr. Fidler’s maps and his pegs. It had been Lord Selkirk’s wish, on hearing of the topography there-away, to have long and narrow allotments; the arable and larger part of each was on the west bank, the clearer bank; the short strips to east of the river, densely wooded, would provide fuel.

It was soon explained to those who had just come that, owing to the lack of a supply of pemican, it would be necessary for most to go to Pembina for the winter.

“That is sixty miles, you say! Why so far as that?” one asked.

“To be near the source of supply of buffalo meat,” the Governor replied, “on which we shall have to rely for sustenance till spring.”

“Couldn’t it be carted here to us while we go on with the building?”

“Some of you will remain here,” said Miles Macdonell, “but you do not realise that the winters are sometimes hard. I cannot run the risk of having everybody sixty miles from the food supply. Winter transport is at times uncertain.”

The Indians were very friendly to the settlers, would stand solemnly watching them at work on their houses and then begin to assist without any comment save occasional grunts and smiles and nods. Despite their friendliness many of the womenfolk were adread of them. Before taking to the boats at York Factory, it appears, they had been served, for the fun of making them apprehensive, with terrifying stories of the natives by Red River. Some of them, therefore, were under the impression that all such acts of friendliness were but cunningly ingratiating to prepare the way for an easy massacre.

A mile from the new buildings on Point Douglas a family named Chisholm soon established themselves, and perhaps because they spoke English as well as Gaelic—which I did not understand—I often stopped to talk to them when commissions carried me along the new road. Hugh Chisholm was a man in his forties then who had been in the Lowlands in some sort of factory work and, hearing of the opportunity to own a piece of the earth, had emigrated with his dubious, questioning wife, and his two daughters: Mairi, eighteen, and Agnes, sixteen.

It was evident to me, practically from first contact with them, that Mrs. Chisholm was definitely assured that they had come to a sorry promised land. There was a look at times in her eyes as of dementia. Apprehension and anger lit them. Her husband, at least for the time being, had seemingly lost his Christian name and she could not find it. He was but “You!” or “Oh you!” The girls had their own gaiety to sustain them; but it was clear to me that in their mother’s estimation (whatever the cause) the elder, Mairi, could do little right and the younger, Agnes, could do no wrong. The two girls were not much alike in appearance. Mairi was slight and fair-skinned, Agnes was plump with roguish eyes and dark brown hair.

After the sea-voyage and inland-voyage, Mrs. Chisholm was ragged. She made no attempt to hide from strangers her belief that her husband was mentally deficient and had proved himself so by coming to such a place. Indeed there were moments, to judge by his face, when she won him to her view of him! The gaiety of the girls was then his only comfort.

These new-comers had been brought across the Atlantic and through the wooded and scented wilderness, where loons called across lonely lakes as I often remembered and the mosquitoes tormented, in the care of one Owen Keveny—under his despotic rule, said some whom he called unruly. With him came John Spencer, the secretary engaged in England for Captain Macdonell, of whom I had been told when appointed temporary secretary. But on the removal of the majority to Pembina, Mr. Spencer was to be left as deputy-governor, or sheriff, as he was styled, at Point Douglas, to look after the welfare of those who would be remaining there. The work of these people would be chiefly the building of houses on the allotments; but the bull and the cow would be tended by them during the winter, and they would also look after the imported Spanish sheep that they had brought with them across the Atlantic, up the rivers, across the portages, down Lake Winnipic, bleating through the wilderness: sixteen ewes and four rams. They would have to see, too, that neither wolves nor dogs got them.

These were busy days. Captain Macdonell had to make frequent visits to Pembina to arrange with those there—chiefly French half-breeds—for pemican to be supplied to him, and to have cabins built for the shelter of his charges. On these expeditions I accompanied him, bumping along beside him in my first efforts in horsemanship. Here and there on the way between Point Douglas and Pembina he saw to the erection of stages, platforms raised high on poles above the prairies on which food could be left beyond the reach of leaping wolves. He knew the possibility—or probability—of blizzard on the prairies. Those whose duty would be to sledge food from Pembina to the workmen at Point Douglas and on the allotments, must have caches of food along the route for themselves lest at any time they were storm-bound on the way.

During this period I was finding that the best way to have relief from the torment of not again seeing that lovely dark-eyed half-breed girl was to go along the new road to see the Chisholms who were living in the temporary shelters that Indians had helped them to build—wigwams of bark. The gentle gaiety of Mairi helped me, the badinage of hoydenish Agnes. Mairi’s high spirits might sometimes, on my arrivals, be at low ebb if she had been recently unjustly reprimanded for this or that by her mother, but always, before my departures, it would be triumphant again. Flashes from her grey eyes, and laughter in Agnes’s, somehow atoned to me for no further encounter with those dark eyes.