Читать книгу Canadian Battlefields, and Other Poems - J. R. Wilkinson - Страница 20

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The stern victors, too, are mourning

Over their dauntless slain;

Full twoscore of death-stilled heroes,

Relieved of life’s care and pain,

After the battle was over,

Lone Wolf and good Pontgravé

Were found in the grasp of each other,

And were laid in one grave away.

Then in the cut through the Narrows

The slain were buried deep,

And a requiem mass sung o’er them,

And forever there they sleep.

The Frenchmen then turned eastward,

Over the wide lagoon,

By the domes of busy muskrat

And affrighted mallard and loon,

And disappeared in the distance,

By the eastern shore afar;

While a truce for a space is given

To exterminating war.

But a hundred years of despoiling

Ruined the Ojibways,

And dwindled away the nation,

And miserable grew their days.

Their rights were all unregarded

When the dominant white man came;

Then the red man grew degenerate,

And his sun went down in shame.

To-day by the Narrows dreaming,

No vestige or relic we trace

Of the once proud Indian nation,

Save their bones at the Carrying Place.[A]

Uncovered by the storms of centuries,

That drift the sands away,

White and ghastly they are mouldering

Remorselessly to decay.

But beyond the northern marshlands,

In regions far away,

Wander two quaint, lonely relics,

Poor Joe and Bill Chippewa.

To-day, where the south winds murmur

By Pelee’s lovely shores,

I pause in sad meditation,

And the mind in fancy soars

Backward through time’s dim corridors;

Dreamily thoughts will flow

To the palmy days of the Ojibways

Three hundred years ago.

[A] Indian tradition goes to show that a fierce battle occurred at the Carrying Place between the Ojibways and Voyageurs. Proof of this seems to be furnished in the fact that the “cut” there is full of human bones.