Born to Wander: A Boy's Book of Nomadic Adventures
Captain Lyle. “Hear that, darling! Now, bustle about, Effie, and get us some nice brown tea and brown toast, while we sit here and chat.”
Captain Fitzroy, looking seaward. The ocean is a sheet of blue, with patches of green here and there, where cloud shadows fall, and sails like sea-birds far away towards the horizon.
“What a heavenly day, to be sure! Why, there is health in every breath one inhales on this delightful coast. Don’t you feel cosy now and happy in this sweet little cottage? Nothing to do. Nothing to think about except the absent ones. No care, no worry except that of making war upon the weeds in your little garden. I declare to you, Lyle, my lad, I consider such a life as you now lead in a manner quite idyllic.”
Lyle, looking thoughtfully for a moment or two on the ground, then up at his friend’s cheerful face.
“One of the chief pleasures of my present existence, dear Fitzroy, lies in the fact that I have you for a neighbour. But to tell you the truth, I do feel happier since I let the lauds of Glen Lyle and got rid of an incubus. I feel, and know now, I am retrenching, and that in a few years I shall recover myself.”
Fitzroy. “And don’t you think you ought to have let the house as well?”
Lyle. “No, no, no; I could not bear to think of a footstep crossing my father’s hall. Old Peter will see to the gardens with the help of a lad, and the ancient cook, who is indeed one of the family, and whom I could not have dismissed, will keep on peat fires enough to defy the damp.”
Fitzroy. “And how does your little gipsy lass Zella suit as a housekeeper?”
Lyle. “Excellently well. There she comes with the tea; judge for yourself.”
Zella, tall, handsome, and neatly attired, comes upon the scene to place a little table near the two friends and lay the tea. What a change from the wild waif! We last saw her springing up at the end of the Gothic bridge, and startling the horse of Bland’s emissary. She is still a gipsy, but a very civilised one.
Captain Lyle. “I am expecting old Peter every minute.”
Fitzroy. “Talk of angels, and they appear. Lo! yonder comes your Peter, or your Peter’s ghost.”
Old Peter opens the gate at the sea-beach as he speaks, and comes slowly up the walk.
Lyle. “Come away, Peter. Why, you pant. Sit down and have a cup of tea. How goes all at the dear old house?”
Peter, smoothing the head of Ossian the old deerhound, who has arisen from his corner to bid him welcome. “Bravely, sir, bravely and well. But would you believe it, though it’s no a month since you left, they will have it that the hoose is haunted? Heard you ever the like?”
Lyle. “No, Peter, it is strange.”
Peter. “And they will have it, sir, that the pike wasna canny, and they say that, dead though he be, his ghost still haunts the auld loch.”
Fitzroy, laughing. “The ghost of a pike, Peter? Well, well, well; we live to learn.”
Peter. “And what for no, sir?”
Fitzroy. “Did you bury him, Peter?”
Peter. “No, sir, no, on land. I put him cannily back into the loch again. He lay on his side for a whole day, then sank to the bottom afore ma ain een. Dead as a door nail.”
Fitzroy. “I doubt it, Peter.”
Peter. “Sir?”
Fitzroy. “Nothing, Peter, nothing. By the way, Lyle, how came this uncanny fish, that seems so strangely connected with the fortunes of Glen Lyle, into your possession.”
Lyle. “Peter can tell you better than I. He is old, and remembers.”
Peter. “When the auld laird lived, nane kenned o’ the whereabouts o’ that bonnie fish except himsel’ and me and the gipsy Faas. They gipsies, sir, were part and parcel o’ the estate; they would have died for the auld laird, or for ony o’ his folk or kin. Goodness only kens how auld the fish was himsel’. He was, they say, as big as a grilse when first ta’en in the Tweed and brought up to the river that runs through bonnie Glen Lyle. And woe is me, they tell me that was an awfu’ day, for bonnie Prince Charlie was in full retreat from England. He stayed and slept a night at Glen Lyle, and next week but one the foremost o’ Cumberland’s rievers were there. The old Lyles were out. They were wi’ Charlie, but not a thing living, my father told me, did they leave about the place, and they would have fired the hoose itself had they not been obleeged to hurry on, for Charlie’s men were ahead. But things settled down after that; Cumberland’s rievers were quieter coming back. The beasts they were killed or gone, so they left the auld hoose of Glen Lyle alone. The laird was pardoned, and peace and plenty reigned ance mair in the land.
“Time flew on, sirs. The auld laird was fond o’ fishing. There were poachers in plenty in those days, and the laird was kind to them. Let them only leave his ’45 pike alane, and they might take a’ the trouts in the stream. But in later times, when the auld laird got aulder still, cockneys came, and they were no sae particular, and one day an English body hooked and brought the pike on shore. He had the gaff raised to hit him on the head, when all of a sudden the gaff was knocked out of his hand, and he found himsel’ just where the pike had come frae, wallowin’ in the middle o’ the pot. (A large pool in a river is so called in Scotland.)
“That same nicht, lang past, the shortest hour o’t, when everybody was fast asleep but mysel’, two o’ the Faas came to the auld hoose. They had the half-dead fish, with the bonnie gowden band around his tail, in a pot. And together we went to the loch and ploupit him in. The owlets were cryin’ and the branches o’ the pine trees creakin’ in the wind, and if I live to be as auld as Methuselah, I’m no likely to forget that eerie-some nicht. But, heigho! Joe is dead and awa’, and the hoose o’ Glen Lyle is tottering near its fall. Wae’s me that I should hae lived to see the like!”
Captain Fitzroy. “Drink that China tea, Peter, and things will look far more cheerful.”
Long before the major’s departure things do look more cheerful.
Ethel, hope in her heart now, has brought out her harp, and is bending over it while she sings a plaintive old Scotch ballad, while the rest sit listening round. The setting sun is throwing tall rock shadows over the blue sea. The waves seem to form a drowsy accompaniment to the harp’s wild notes, and the sea-birds are shrieking their good-night song. Let us leave them, and hie us away to the far north and west.
Scene Two: Summer in the Arctic seas. A little Indian village to the north of Cumberland Gulf. Yet not all Indian, for then; are houses here now as well as Eskimo huts, and white men are moving about busy at work, in company with the little brown-skinned, skin-clad natives.
Had the shipwrecked crew of the Fairy Queen landed on the south side of the Cumberland Gulf or Sound, it is probable they would have made an attempt to find their way through Labrador to some English or other foreign settlement. But this gulf is a sea in itself, and they had no boats, while the kayaks of the natives were far too frail, even if they had been numerous enough, to be of much use.
They had to be content, therefore, to remain prisoners where they were until the long night of winter set in.
They were not idle. Indeed, the life they now led was far from unpleasant while summer lasted. It was a very wild one. There were deer and game on the hills, and every stream teemed with fish, to say nothing of the strange creations that inhabited the sea-shore.
Among other things saved from the wreck of the Fairy Queen, and safely landed by Captain Blunt’s party, were guns and a goodly store of ammunition, which they had managed to keep dry.
What with fishing and hunting, manufacturing sledges and training the dogs, the time fled very quickly indeed.
The days flew quickly by, and autumn came; then they got shorter and shorter, till at length the sun showed his face for the last time, and after this all was night.
In a month more everything was ready for the journey south.
So memorable a march, too, has seldom been made. Some of my readers may ask why they chose the winter season for their departure. For this reason: they could go straight along the coast, winding only round the mountains. In summer the gulfs and streams would have formed an insurmountable barrier, but now these were hard as adamant.
All being ready, and the friendly Indians accompanying them to the number of twenty or more, to act as guides and see to the care of the dogs, they left the Esquimo village about the end of October, and were soon far away on the silent, lonely midst of the Cumberland Gulf.
Luckily Captain Blunt had saved his compass, else even the almost unerring instinct of the natives would have failed to steer them across the ice. Had it been clear weather all the time the stars would have been sufficient to keep them right, but storms came on long before they had got over the gulf. And such storms! Nothing in this country could ever equal them in fury and confusion. Not the wildest winter’s day that ever raged among the lone Grampian Hills could be compared to them. The winds seem to meet and unite in and from all directions. The snow filled the air. It did not only fall; it rose, and the darkness was intense. To proceed in the face of such terrible weather was of course impossible. Dogs and men huddled together in the lee of an iceberg; it was found at times almost impossible to breathe.
They encountered more than one of these fearful storms; but at last the sky cleared, the stars and the radiant aurora-bow danced and flickered in the air above them, and after a week of toil they had crossed the gulf, and stood on terra firma on the shores of Labrador.
But their trials were only beginning. They found they could not make so straight a way as they had at first imagined, owing to the mountains and rough state of the country.
These men, however, were British – their hearts were hearts of oak – so they struggled on and on, happy, when each day was over, to think they were a step nearer their native land. The dogs were staunch and true, and the natives simple, honest, and kind.
To recount all the hardships of this journey, which occupied in all four long months, would take a volume in itself. Let me give a brief sketch of just One Day’s March.
They are well down in the middle of Labrador. Hardened as Leonard and Douglas now are, and almost as much inured to the cold as the Indian guides themselves, the bitterness of the night just gone has almost killed them.
All the camp, however, is astir hours before the stars have given place to the glaring light of a short, crisp winter’s day. Dogs are barking and howling for their breakfast, and the men are busy preparing their own and that of their officers. It is indeed a meagre one – sun-dried fish and meat, with snow to eat instead of tea or coffee, that is all. But they have appetites; it is enough, and they are thankful.
Then sledges are got ready, and the dogs having been fed and harnessed, Captain Blunt and his young friends put on their snowshoes, and all in camp follow his example.
Then the start is made. The pace is slow, though the dogs would go more quickly if allowed. Their path winds through a rough and broken glen at first, and at sunrise scouts are sent on ahead to spy out the land from a mountain top. They can see but little, however; only hill piled o’er hill and crag o’er crag.
They cross a wild frozen stream, and at sunrise rejoice to find themselves on the borders of a broad lake. It will be all plain sailing now for some hours to come.
But, alas! the wind gets up, and there is no shelter of any kind here. On a calm day one can walk and keep warm with the thermometer far below zero. But with a cutting wind the cold and the suffering are a terrible punishment.
The wind blows higher and higher. It tears across the frozen lake – a bitter, biting, cutting blast; there is hardly any facing it. Even dogs and Indians bend their heads downwards, and present their shoulders to the wind.
The skin garments of the Esquimos, the coats of the dogs, and beards and hair of the sailors are massed and lumped with frozen snow, and cheeks and ears are coated with ice as if they had been glazed.
Struggling on thus for hours, they cross the lake at last, and gain the shelter of a pine wood. Here wood is gathered, and after much ado a fire is lighted. They dare only look at it at first, for well they know the danger that would accrue from going too near it. But this in itself is something, so they begin to talk, and even to laugh, though the laugh hangs fire on their frozen lips, and sounds half idiotic.
On again, keeping more into shelter; and so on and on all the day, till, despite all dangers and difficulties, they have put fifteen miles betwixt them and the camp-fire of the previous evening.
They find themselves in the shelter of some ice-clad rocks at last, with ice-clad pine trees nodding over them, and here determine to bivouac for the night.
The wind has gone down. The sun is setting – a glorious sunset it is – amidst clouds of crimson, gold, and copper.
How delightful is this supper of dried fish and broiled deer now! They almost feel as if they had dined off roast beef and plum pudding. So beds are prepared with boughs and blankets and skins, a prayer is said, a hymn is sung, and soon our heroes forget the weary day’s journey, their aching, blistered feet, and stiff and painful joints.
Ah! but the cold – the cold! No, they cannot forget that. They are conscious of it all the night, and awake in the morning stiffer almost than when they lay down.
During all their long and toilsome march our heroes never saw a single bear nor met a hostile Indian. But the country now, I am told, is peopled by nomadic tribes.
Civilisation at long, long last. Only a little fisher village, but men dwell there who speak the English tongue, and a right hearty welcome do they accord to the wanderers.
Book Two – Chapter Seven
A Saturday Night at Sea
“Meanwhile some rude Arion’s restless hand Wakes the brisk harmony that sailors love; A circle there of merry listeners stand, Or to some well-known measure featly move,Thoughtless as if on shore they still were free to rove.”Scene: The upper deck of a barque in mid-Atlantic, homeward bound. Sailors dancing amidships to the music of flute and fiddle. Aft, under an awning, a table is spread, at which sit Leonard, Douglas, Captain Blunt, with the skipper of the vessel, and one of his officers.
Skipper James, of the timber barque Black-eyed Susan, was a sailor of the good old school. He was homeward bound, and happening to call at a village on the west shore of Newfoundland, he heard that a shipwrecked crew of his countrymen were residing at a small fishing station on the Labrador coast. He did not hesitate a moment. He put about, and sailed back right away to the nor’ard and west and took every soul on board. Men like Skipper James, I fear, are, nowadays, like angels’ visits, few and far between. Ah! and they are angels, too, when you find them; rough enough to all outward appearance, perhaps, but good in the main, and men, too, who carry their hearts upon their sleeves.
Skipper James and our heroes got friendly at once. And before they were three days on board they felt as if they had known this kindly skipper all their lives.
“My ship’s only a rough one,” he had told them frankly; “and your fare may not be first-class; but by my song, gentlemen, you are right welcome to the best I have.”
It was a Saturday night. They had been three weeks at sea, with fine weather nearly all the time, so no wonder all hands were happy, fore and aft.
Now I have said that this skipper was an old-fashioned sailor, and so he was; and this being Saturday night, he determined, as he always did, that his men should enjoy themselves forward as much as the officers aft. There was singing, therefore, and dancing, and sea-pie. A glorious sea-pie steamed on the table of the quarter-deck, and a dozen of the same sort aft.
Rory O’Reilly was the mate’s name; the life and soul of the mess he was. He could sing a song or tell a story with any one.
“Dear Captain James,” he said to-night, “do tell us a story. Do you believe in the sarpint, sorr?”
Captain James quietly finished his second plate of sea-pie, and put the plate in a corner so stayed up that the ship’s motion could not displace it. For this skipper was a most methodical man. Then he took his old brown clay with its tin lid, and proceeded to fill it. He shook out the “dottle,” as the unburned portion of tobacco in the bottom was called, and put it carefully on Rory O’Reilly’s open palm, held out in a friendly and obliging way for James’s benefit. Then he loaded up to near the top with fresh cut, broke up the dottle and put that above, then pinched up the dust and put that over all, then slowly and solemnly lit up. When he had blown a few blasts of such density of volume that further proofs of the pipe’s being well lit up were needless, the skipper cleared his throat and commenced —
A Strange, Strange Story“Rory asked me,” he said, “if I believed in the great sea-serpent. He asked me with a kind of incredulous smile on his face, which spoke volumes as to his own disbelief. Well, I am not sitting here to-night to lay proof before you as to the actual existence of sea-serpents of a monstrous size, but I beg to remind my friend here, that not only one or two officers of the mercantile and fighting navies of the world, but dozens have come forward, and given their oath, that such monsters were seen by them, or by their whole crew, at certain times and in certain latitudes and longitudes. And these men, both at the times of the awful visitations, and at the times of their swearing to what they considered facts, were neither intoxicated nor otherwise out of their minds.
“But my story is not about sea-serpents altogether, though it may throw a new light on those submarine monsters.
“It is a strange, strange story – one told me years and years ago by my gallant old grandfather. I remember, as though it were but yester evening, the first time I heard him tell it.
“Grandfather, mates, had at this time retired from the army. He was of an old Scottish family, that had been crushed at Culloden, so that with the exception of the half-pay a stingy government granted him, he had little else to live upon. He resided in a pretty little cottage about a quarter of a mile from our house, and it used to be my delight to visit him in the gloaming. I would go quietly in, and seat myself on a stool in a corner, and wait to be recognised. By-and-bye I would lead him to speak of the olden times, and of the battles and sieges by sea and land he had taken part in.
“But this story I am going to tell you he has repeated to me again and again, in different words maybe, but the facts were always the same.
“It was in the days of the American war, the war of freedom and independence, which, to my way of thinking, are the birthrights of every man born, and of every nation as well. England, mates, did not fight in an over-gentlemanly fashion in those days, and I think it is a stain on our country’s escutcheon that the Indians of the Far West were armed and employed at all.
“But this is not what I am sitting here to discuss, only my grandfather and Tom Turner, a junior of his, both belonged in those days to Pontius Pilate’s guards (the 1st, or Royal Scots Regiment), and were stationed at the same place.
“Though Tom was a few years younger than grand-dad, they were inseparables, so to speak, and always in the same ’ploy, whatever that ’ploy might be. To say that they were both Highlanders is equivalent to telling you they were both fond of field sports; and when one day Wild Eye, Chief of the Cheebuk Indians, promised them some first-rate hunting if they could get leave for a few days, you may be sure they were not long in applying for it – ay, and obtaining it, too; for young Tom Turner had a wonderful tongue for getting round his colonel, and, as the troops were in garrison, the services of these officers wouldn’t be much missed.
“It was a lovely morning when they set out on their journey west, mounted on three half-bred horses, as fleet as the wind, and just as independent.
“Now it would seem that hiring Indians was a game that in those days two could play at; and though the honour of the idea should be awarded to the British, as having been the inventors, as it were, still tit-for-tat, you know, and everything is fair in war, so the Yankees were not far behind.
“There were, in reality, two different sets of Indians on the warpath, both bent upon getting as many scalps as possible for the decoration of their wigwams, for the Christmas season, as one might say.
“This fact made travelling a very risky kind of a business.
“The first day passed over without almost any kind of adventure, only it was summer on the prairie they were passing over, and there was no shade of bush nor tree, and the insects were almost as much of a torture as the sun’s rays.
“Old Wild Eye, the chief, must have been a clever fellow, indeed, for on this rolling plain there was neither road nor track, except the trails of wild animals; to have followed those would have led my grand-dad a queer dance.
“When the sun went down at last, glaring red through the haze of blue, it got almost cold, but they dared not think of lighting a fire, because of the hostile Indians, so they hobbled their nags, ate their supper, and sat huddled up in their blankets beneath the stars till long past twelve. They were listening to Wild Eye’s adventures on the warpath.
“Wild Eye was a border chief, and friendly with the British; in fact, he had been once to Quebec, and so considered himself about half a Christian. Wild Eye was as bald as the back of my watch, and had no more teeth than a tin whistle. He had scars innumerable, only one ear, and about half a nose, for he had been twice put to the torture, and saved as if by a miracle.
“His scalp, he told my grand-dad, hung in many wigwams. The fact is, Wild Eye wore a wig, and when he lost one in warfare, he wore a morsel of buffalo hide until he was able to negotiate with his barber in Ontario. Each wig was paid for not in coin but in land. Each wig cost Wild Eye twenty acres of territory, and they say that the descendants of his barber are millionaires to-day.
“But my grand-dad and his friend fell sound asleep at last, and not even the presence of a grizzly bear, who came round to snuff after the remains of the supper, awoke them until the sun was so high that it nearly hardened the whites of their eyes, as heat does the white of an egg.
“‘I say, John,’ said Tom Turner to my grand-dad, ‘we’ve got five days’ leave. I feel so happy, that I think we ought to make it a fortnight.’
“But grand-dad laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that wouldn’t be fair, Tom. Let us stick to our furlough, and be back in five days if we can.’
“About evening on the second day they bade farewell to the rolling prairie, and plunged into a deep ravine, and bivouacked in a pine-clad gorge near the banks of a stream. This river was teeming with fish of the most delicate flavour. They caught enough for supper, and once more settled themselves to listen to the tales of the Indian chief.
“There were strange, unearthly noises in the forest that night which my grand-dad could not Understand – shrieks and yells and awful howlings, but he dozed off at last and dreamt he was head keeper in a kind of pandemonium.
“Next morning sport began in earnest, for they found they were near the head-quarters of the grizzly and wilder cinnamon bear.
“Next to our friend the Arctic Bruin, there is no creature in the world with which a man has less chance in a fair stand-up fight than with the cinnamon. I don’t say, mates, but that any bear will prefer shuffling off to coming to close quarters, but don’t you catch a grizzly or cinnamon unawares behind a rock or a bush. I tell you that the only comfort you can have at that awful moment is the memory that you’ve made your will, and don’t owe your tailor anything to signify.
“Tom Turner was following up a grizzly, who was well on ahead, so he had eyes for nothing else; but on rounding a point on the hill-top, he was startled with a roar that went through him like a rip-saw, and found himself face to jowl with a cinnamon bear. Tom sprang back so suddenly that he burst his waistcoat buttons. His musket went off at the same moment, and Bruin made a spring to hug Tom Turner. The bullet found a billet in the beast’s neck, but didn’t stop his way, and next moment the bear and Tom both were tumbling down, down, down over a precipice. The bear fell on the top of a rock, and was killed. Tom alighted on the top of a juniper tree, and wasn’t a bit the worse, for Tom was a tough lad.
