The Heart of the Ancient Wood

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Sir Charles G. D. Roberts. The Heart of the Ancient Wood

Chapter I. The Watchers of the Trail

Chapter II. The Cabin in the Clearing

Chapter III. The Exiles from the Settlement

Chapter IV. Miranda and the Furtive Folk

Chapter V. Kroof, the She-bear

Chapter VI. The Initiation of Miranda

Chapter VII. The Intimates

Chapter VIII. Axe and Antler

Chapter IX. The Pax Mirandæ

Chapter X. The Routing of the Philistines

Chapter XI. Miranda and Young Dave

Chapter XII. Young Dave at the Clearing

Chapter XIII. Milking-time

Chapter XIV. Moonlight and Moose-call

Chapter XV. A Venison Steak

Chapter XVI. Death for a Little Life

Chapter XVII. In the Roar of the Rapids

Chapter XVIII. The Forfeit of the Alien

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Though a spur of black, uncompromising spruce woods gave it near shelter on the north, the harshly naked clearing fell away from it on the other three sides, and left the cabin bleak. Not a shrub nor a sapling broke the bareness of the massive log walls, whence the peeling bark hung in strips that fluttered desolately to every wind. Only a few tall and ragged weeds, pale green, and with sparse, whitish grey seed-heads, straggled against the foundation logs. The rough deal door sagged on its hinges, half open. The door-sill gaped with a wide crack, rotted along the edges; and along the crack grew a little fringe of grass, ruthlessly crushed down by old Dave’s gaudy bundle. The two small windows still held fragments of glass in their sashes, – glass thick with spiders’ webs, and captive dust, and the débris of withered insects. The wide-eaved roof, well built of split cedar-slabs, with a double overlay of bark, seemed to have turned a brave front to the assault of the seasons, and showed few casualties. Some thirty paces to one side stood another cabin, lower and more roughly built, whose roof had partly fallen in. This had been the barn, – this, with a battered lean-to of poles and interwoven spruce boughs against its southerly wall. The barn was set down at haphazard, in no calculated or contenting relation to the main building, but just as the lay of the hillocks had made it simplest to find a level for the foundations. All about it grew a tall, coarse grass, now grey and drily rustling, the brood of seeds which in past years had sifted through the chinks from the hay stored in the loft. The space between the two buildings, and for many square yards about the cabin door, was strewn thick with decaying chips, through which the dock and plantain leaves, hardy strangers from the Settlement, pushed up their broad, obtuse intrusion. Over toward the barn lay the bleached skeleton of a bob-sled, the rusted iron shoe partly twisted from one runner; and in the centre of the space, where the chips gathered thickest and the plantains had gained least ground, lay a split chopping-log, whose scars bore witness to the vigour of a vanished axe.

The old lumberman fetched a deep breath, depressed by the immeasurable desolation. His eye wandered over the weedy fields, long fallow, and the rugged stump lots aflame here and there with patches of golden-rod and crimson fire-weed. To him these misplaced flares of colour seemed only to make the loneliness more forlorn, perhaps by their association with homelier and kindlier scenes. He leaned on his axe, and pointed indefinitely with his thumb.

.....

All that day Dave Titus worked about the cabin and the barn. He mended the roof, patched the windows, rehung the door, filled the bunk – and the two similar ones in the smaller room – with aromatic fresh green spruce tips, and worked a miracle of rejuvenation upon the barn. He also cleaned out the spring, and chopped a handy pile of firewood. An old sheep-pen behind the barn he left in its ruins, saying to himself: —

“What with the b’ars, an’ the painters, Kirstie ain’t goin’ to want to mess with sheep, I reckon. She’ll have lots to do to look after her critters!”

.....