Part 6 (2/2)
”Wait an' see.” He went to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that week, got him to melt a couple of buckets of snow over the open-air campfire and wash the fruit-jars clean.
”Now, Colonel,” says the Boy, ”bring along that buck-saw o' yours and lend a hand.”
They took off the top log from the south wall of the cabin, measured a two-foot s.p.a.ce in the middle, and the Colonel sawed out the superfluous spruce intervening. While he went on doing the same for the other logs on that side, the Boy roughly chiselled a moderately flat sill. Then one after another he set up six of the tall gla.s.s jars in a row, and showed how, alternating with the other six bottles turned upside down, the thick belly of one accommodating itself to the thin neck of the other, the twelve made a very decent rectangle of gla.s.s. When they had hoisted up, and fixed in place, the logs on each side, and the big fellow that went all across on top; when they had filled the inconsiderable cracks between the bottles with some of the mud-mortar with which the logs were to be c.h.i.n.ked, behold a double gla.s.s window fit for a king!
The Boy was immensely pleased.
”Oh, that's an old dodge,” said Mac depreciatingly. ”Why, they did that at Caribou!”
”Then, why in--Why didn't you suggest it?”
”You wait till you know more about this kind o' life, and you won't go in for fancy touches.”
Nevertheless, the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to feel that some contribution from him was necessary to offset the huge success of that window. He did not feel called upon to help to split logs for the roof of the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a little shelf which he said was to be nailed up at the right of the Big Cabin door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a ”fancy touch,” for Mac was a miner, and had been to Caribou.
When the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of his medicine-chest a bottle of Perry Davis's Pain-killer.
”Now at Caribou,” says he, ”they haven't got any more thermometers kicking round than we have here, but they discovered that when Perry Davis congeals you must keep a sharp look-out for frost-bite, and when Perry Davis freezes solid, you'd better mind your eye and stay in your cabin, if you don't want to die on the trail.” With which he tied a string round Perry Davis's neck, set the bottle up on the shelf, and secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a grand advantage to have been to Caribou!
But Mac knew things that he had probably not learned there, about trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family names. If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament of a very different man, ”I should be a poet if only I knew the names of things,” then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in literature.
From the time he set foot on the volcanic sh.o.r.e of St Michael's Island, Mac had begun his ”collection.”
Nowadays, when he would spend over ”that truck of his” hours that might profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping to fortify the camp against the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use to remonstrate.
By themselves they got on rapidly with work on the roof, very much helped by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the split logs had been marshalled together on each side of the comb, they covered them with dried moss and spruce boughs.
Over all they laid a thick blanket of the earth which had been dug out to make a level foundation. The cracks in the walls were c.h.i.n.ked with moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the naked ground, ”to be carpeted with skins by-and-by,” so Mac said; but n.o.body believed Mac would put a skin to any such sensible use.
The unreasonable mildness of three or four days and the little surface thaw, came to an abrupt end in a cold rain that turned to sleet as it fell. n.o.body felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had ill.u.s.trated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a small wooden pin tied to the snare. A touch at the light end of the suspended pole (where the baited loop dangles) loosens the pin, and the heavy end of the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or partridge in the air.
For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported ”tracks,” Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least resistance straight through the loop.
In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying with dry pleasure:
”Now, with luck, we may get a _Xema Sabinii_,” or some such fearful wildfowl.
”Good to eat?” the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodp.e.c.k.e.r to add, not to the larder, but to the ”collection.”
”No, you don't _eat_ Sabine gulls,” Mac would answer pityingly.
But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for. The first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that fly--Mac's _Lagopus albus_, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at the very least a _Bonasa umbellus_, which, being interpreted, is ruffed ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung in the air next day was a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.
But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which n.o.body actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to know anything that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something disparaging of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.
”Knows a darned sight too much? No, he _don't_, sir; that's just the remarkable thing about Mac. He isn't trying to carry any more than he can swing.”
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