Читать книгу A Northern Countryside - Rosalind Richards - Страница 5

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The river-bank boys pick up, as easily as they breathe, knowledge as miscellaneous as the drift piled on the shores. They know all the shoals and principal eddies, without the aid of buoys. They know the ways and seasons of the different fish. They learn to recognize the owner’s marks on the logs, and they know the times and ways of all the humbler as well as the larger river craft, the scows and smacks, and the “gundalows” which spend mysterious month after month hauled up among the sedges at the mouths of the streams. Their own row-boats are heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to row, but as I have said, they are out in them in the spring before the floating ice is out of the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lumber from between the ice-cakes.

There is a good deal to the business of picking up logs. The price for returning “strays” to the right owners is ten cents a log (the rate increasing as you go down stream), and a good many can be towed at once by a small boat. The price per log rises to twenty-five cents, near the sea. In times of high freshet, the up-river booms often break, and then there is a tremendous to-do at the mouth of the river: men, women, and children, all who can handle or half-handle a dory, are at work at log-rescuing. Incoming ships have found the surface of the ocean brown with logs at these times, and have a great work to get through them.

Logs that have lost their marks are called “scalawags,” and these are sold for the benefit of the log-driving company. Hollow-hearted pine logs are known by the curious term “concussy,” or “conquassy.” To show the immense change in the prices of lumber, the best pine lumber, which in 1870 was worth ten dollars a thousand feet, is now one hundred dollars a thousand.

Now and then a boy takes to the river so strongly that he makes his life work out of its teachings. The captains and engineers of most of our river and harbor steamers, and of bigger craft, too, began life as riverbank boys. Some of them take to fishing in earnest, some become lumbermen, or go into the Coast-Survey service, or the Rivers and Harbors; and the winter work on the ice leads to an interesting life for a good many others. Once in a while one of these boys goes far from home. We have had word of one and another, serving as pilot or engineer in Japanese, Brazilian, and East Indian waters.

The three Tucker brothers, Joel, Reuel, and Amos, three finely-built men, all worked up to be registered pilots. Joel, the eldest, was pilot of an ocean-going steamer all his life. He grew very stout, and had a fine nautical presence, in blue cloth and brass buttons. Reuel was lazy. He never went higher than small raft-towing tugs, and he often gave up his work and loafed about, fishing. He was the man who swam five miles down river, and stopped then because he was bored, not because he was tired. Amos, the finest of them, a gallant looking fellow, with very bright blue eyes, was a pilot for a good many years, and then a foreman in the ice business. He was a man of such shining kindness that he was always up to the handle in work in the heart of his town, as selectman, honorary and volunteer overseer of the poor, and helper-out in general. In a case of all-night nursing, in a poor family, where a man’s strength was needed, Amos was on hand, rubbing his eyes, but watchful and ready. Once, when a neighbor’s wife had to be taken to the Insane Hospital, Amos undertook the sad task, and his gentleness made it just bearable. Parents looked to him for help in the care of a bad or unruly boy.

Then there were the Tracys, who ran—and still run—a queer little ferry at Jonestown, “according to seasons.” When the ice begins to break up they row the passengers across, somehow, in a heavy flat-boat, between the ice cakes. Their regular boat, in which they embark wagons and even a motor, is a large scow pulled across by a chain, with a sail to help when the wind serves. The Tracys’ ferry is, I think, unique for one regulation; man and wife go as one fare.

Some of the river bank people are mere squatters. The squatter, as we called him, par excellence, pulled the logs and bits for his dwelling actually out of the river, as a muskrat collects bits of drift for his house. He was a Frenchman, and such a house as he built! Part tar-paper, part bark, part clay bank, the rest logs, barrel-staves, and a few railroad sleepers. But there he lived, on a tiny level plot under the railroad bank, so near the river that each spring freshet threatened entire destruction. He made or acquired a boat that matched his house, and presently he brought not only his wife and children, but two brothers and an old mother to live with him. The women contrived some tiny garden patches on the slopes of the river bank, and with the rich silt of the stream these throve wonderfully. The men fished, and “odd-jobbed” about.

Then came the Great Freshet. Dear me! shall we ever forget it? We woke one March night to hear every bell in town ringing, while a long ominous whistle repeated the terrifying signal of the freshet alarm.

There was a confusion of sounds from the river, wild crashings and grindings and thunders, as the ice broke up in its full strength, with a noise almost like cannon.

The water rose and rose. By daybreak it was up to the shop-counters in the street, and people paddled in and out of the shops in canoes, rescuing their goods. The ice-cakes were piled ten feet high on our unfortunate railroad. Then a great holding-boom broke, a mile up river. A twenty-foot wall of logs swept round the bend, and the watchers on the roofs and raised platforms saw it splinter and carry out the Town Bridge as if it had been kindlings.

Sheds and boat-houses and wharfing were whirled past all day in the tumble of ice cakes. Like other people in danger, the Squatter carried out his gipsy household goods, and moved up town with his family; all but the old French mother. She would not be moved, but sat in the middle of the road on a backless chair, watching her dwelling. She could have done nothing to save it, but nothing could tear her away. The rain poured all that day and the next. Some one lent her a big broken umbrella, and there she sat. I could think of nothing but a forlorn old eaves swallow, watching the place where her mud dwelling was being torn off.

By some miracle of the eddy, however, the house stayed intact; but soon after they all moved away, to safer, and, I believe, more comfortable quarters.

The Lamont family lived a mile north of the Town. They had a ramshackle house and barn, in a bit of open meadow by the mouth of one of the brooks. You might say of the Lamonts that they were so steeped in river mud that every bone of them was lazy and easy and slack. There were the father and mother, and seven children. They were as unkempt and ragged as could be, but they always seemed cheerful and smiling, and the younger children were fat as little dumplings. The three eldest were shambling young men; they and the father seemed perfectly content with a little fishing and odd-jobbing, and now and then one of them took a turn as deck-hand or stevedore, or—as a last resort—as farm-hand. The girls and the mother dug and sold dandelion greens, dock, and thoroughwort and other old-fashioned simples.

None of them had ever gone to school a day beyond the time required by law, and they kept the truant officer busy at that; then all of a sudden the youngest and fattest Lamont, whose incongruous name was Hernaldo, appeared at the High School. He was an imperturbable child, and quite dull, but he worked with a cheerful slow patience. He only held on for a year, but no one had imagined he could keep on for so long, and he did not do badly.

The elders died before the younger children were quite grown, and the family scattered; one night, after it had been empty a year or two, the ramshackle house burned, leaving the barn standing.

One morning about ten years afterwards a radiant being appeared at the High School, a fat young man in frock coat and tall hat, who came forward and shook hands effusively. It was Hernaldo Lamont! He was now chef, it appeared, at one of the great California hotels through the winters, and in Vancouver in summer, at a very large salary. A pretty girl, charmingly dressed, whom he introduced as his wife, waited modestly at the door.

His clothes were quite wonderful. He was shining with soap and with fashion, and so full of warmth and of pleasure. He brought out colored photographs of his two fat little children, told of his staff and his patrons, beamed upon everyone, and showed his pretty wife all about our plain High School, admiring and reverent. I think that if it had been Oxford he could not have been prouder, and indeed Oxford could never be to the average student a place of higher achievement than High School to a Lamont!

He was so simple and kindly that I believe he would have taken his wife to the Lamont shanty as happily. The Lamont barn is still standing, grown up with tall nettles and dandelions. A farmer uses it for his extra hay, mowed in the low rich patches of river meadow. Tramps sleep in the hay, and quantities of barn-swallows flash in and out of the empty windows.

Long ago our River was one of the great salmon streams of the country. In my great grandfather’s time agreements between apprentices and servants, and their employers, held the stipulation that the employees should not have to eat salmon above five times in the week; and the fish were used for fertilizing the fields. There are none now at all, and the sturgeon fishing, which in my father’s boyhood used to make summer nights on the River a time of torchlit adventure, is over too, though still late on a summer afternoon you may see now and then a silver flash, and hear a crash, as the huge creature jumps; and only last week two sturgeon of over eight hundred pounds weight each were brought in right near the Town Bridge. They were caught by two hard-working lads, and brought them a little fortune, for they were sold in New York for over $250.

Not even the flight of the birds from the south, unbelievable in wonder as this is, is more miraculous than the run of the fish, from the vast spaces of ocean up all our fresh-water streams for hundreds of miles. Their bright thousands find their way unerringly, up into the heart of the country. No one knows whence they come, and save for an occasional straggler, no one has ever taken salmon or shad or ale-wife in deep water. We know their passage up-stream, but no one knows when they take their way down again.

The smelts run up, when winter is still at its height. They are caught through holes in the ice. The men build huts of boards or of boughs, each round his own smelt hole. They build a fire on the ice, or have a kerosene lantern or lamp, and fish thus all day in fair comfort. They catch smelts by thousands, so that our town’s people, who can eat them not two hours out of the water, are spoiled for the smelts which are called fresh in cities. Tom-cod come up a little ahead of the smelts.

Soon after the ice goes out, while the water is still very rapid and turgid, the alewives run up, and they are as good eating as smelts, though too full of bones. They are smoked slightly, but not salted. About this time, too, the smaller boys begin catching yellow-perch at the mouths of the brooks. These, and tom-cod, are not thought worth putting on the market, but they are crisp little fish, and a string of them, thirteen for twelve cents, makes a good supper.^[2]

Suckers also come with the opening of the brooks. The discovery has been made lately, that these fish, which New Englanders despise (quite wrongly, for if well cooked they are firm and good), are prized by the Jewish population of some of the bigger cities, and bring a good price. A ton and a half of suckers were shipped from our river this season.

Our royal fish are the shad, which arrive in the middle of May, when the woods are all blossoming. The May river is full of their great silvery squadrons. They are caught at night, in drift nets, by hundreds. Most of them are shipped away, but our Town must and does eat as many as possible. One family, who know what they like, practically abjure all other solid food for the shad season!

Of all our fish, eels are the most mysterious; for they go down river to the ocean (out of the fresh water streams and lakes) to spawn, instead of coming up. No one knows what mysterious depths they penetrate, but it is said that baby eels are found in one and two thousand fathoms of water. By midsummer they are about six inches long, and are running home up the brooks. They wriggle up waterfalls and scale the sheer faces of dams. They stay three or four years in their inland home, growing to full size, and in September, the fat grown-up eels run down the streams again, to spawn in the sea. This is the time when they are caught at dams and in mill streams, and shipped to the big cities in quantities. Our biggest paper mill, not long ago, was shut down entirely because of the eels, which got in through the flumes by hundreds, and stopped the water wheels.

The taking of the Acushticook eels is now a regular industry, and this came about rather sadly. Stephen Mitchell, the millwright of the Acushticook paper mill, was a fine man, with a turn for inventing. His ideas were sound and a good many of his mechanical devices turned out excellently. He became interested in explosives, and worked for a long time at a new method for capping torpedoes. He had been warned time and again, and such an intelligent man must have realized perfectly the danger of work with explosive materials, but one day an accident happened. There was an explosion which took not only both hands, but his eyes.

I think everyone in the town felt sickened by the accident, and by the prospect of helpless invalidism ahead of a fine active man. But Stephen, as soon as his wounds healed, began looking for something to do.

The Acushticook eels had always been fished for in a desultory fashion, and Stephen cast about for a way to make the fishing amount to more. The mill owners did all in their power to help him. They gladly gave him the sole right of the use of the stream, and helped him in building his dam. He had also a grant from the Legislature. He hired good workers, and for many years he and his wife, who was a master hand, lived happily and successfully on their fishery. Sometimes two tons of eels were shipped in the course of the autumn.

Stephen always was cheerful. He could see enough difference between light and darkness to find his way about town, and he was so quick to recognize voices that you forgot his blindness. He kept among people a great deal, and was an animated talker at town gatherings. He was an opinionated man, but a fine and upright one. After his death his widow kept on with the fishery, and she still runs it with profit.