The Long Traverse by John Buchan - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

John Buchan, Delphi Classics

• Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788773539
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'The Long Traverse by John Buchan - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of John Buchan'.

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CHAPTER I. The Long Traverse

THE thicket of self-sown larches, ringed with a glory of devil’s paint-brushes, ended on the scarp of the hill as if some giant plane had shaved it clean. Donald struggled untidily out of the covert, for he had missed the trail, and with a whoop cantered down the long turf slope, jumping the patches of juniper. In three minutes he had traversed the waterside fringe of birch and poplar and was on a broad beach of shingle, beyond which, like the mane of a wild horse, the white waters of the Manitou swung to the sea-pool.

This year he had come to Bellefleurs alone, and he was very proud. His family would follow in a week, and with two servants he was getting the camp ready for them. It was a tremendous adventure, since for seven days he would be, within limits, his own master. He could go to bed when he was sleepy, and get up when he woke, and swim when he felt inclined. The sailing dinghy was forbidden him, but nothing had been said about the river canoes. He had never yet caught a salmon, and the salmon rods were in his father’s case, but he could try for a monster with his own little greenheart. He might even get as far as the Grand Lac de Manitou, tucked far away in the hills....

There was a swirl at the tail of the pool above the rapids and his heart jumped, for he saw that it was a big fish.

An unpleasing recollection followed on the thrill. The sight of the moving salmon reminded him of an interview which had preceded his departure. His last term’s school reports had been shocking, and his father had had a good deal to say about them.

Donald was not an academic success. He was a keen field naturalist, and for his age cast an uncommonly straight line. Like all his contemporaries, he knew a good deal about radio sets and automobile engines, and would joyfully tinker all day with any machine. He was a master of fluent, ungrammatical French, acquired in his holidays at Bellefleurs. But in orthodox schooling he was a hopeless laggard. His Latin was an outrage, he abhorred the name of mathematics, and what smattering of geography he possessed he owed to his postage-stamp collection. Literature, except for tales of pirates, left him cold. But in the past term it was in history that he had chiefly fallen down. “He seems to be quite unconscious of the past,” his housemaster had written. “The world for him begins with the invention of the internal-combustion engine. All the centuries are telescoped into one hideous jumble. He actually believes that the Romans only left England at the Reformation.” Donald remembered the beastly words, which he had not quite understood when they had been read aloud to him, in a tone of slow disgust.

His father had been very serious on this point, rather to Donald’s surprise, for he had expected him to pounce on his deficiency in Latin. “If you don’t know where you come from.” he had said, “you will never know where you are, or where you are going.” And then he had added something which had stuck in the boy’s memory.

You are a fisherman. Well, you know that if your back cast is not good your forward cast will be a mess.”

Donald would fain have kept his mind on the cruising salmon, but these words of his father’s kept coming back to him. They seemed more convincing than the ordinary talk of parents and schoolmasters. He knew only too well the importance of a back cast and how difficult it was to get a good one when the larches crowded down to the river’s edge.

He turned up the wide gravel shore, facing a gorgeous sunset which made the river flaming gold and the forest a conflagration. It was the most wonderful evening that he ever remembered. Though it was early July there were no black flies or mosquitoes about. That was a queer feature of the Manitou valley, for most of the neighbouring countryside seemed to be in the dominion of Beelzebub the God of Flies, and Petits Capucins, the next parish, was almost uninhabitable in summer.

But the Manitou was like no other river. Most of the neighbouring streams had peat-brown waters, but the Manitou’s were gin-clear, the colour of the grey granite rocks. Also it was not one river, but many. For three miles up from the sea it swung in noble curves through a shallow valley of woods and meadows. That was Donald’s father’s salmon water, and there was no better on the continent. Beyond that was a waterfall, which fish could not climb, and then twenty miles of deep canyons and rapids, which a canoe well handled could descend. After that the Manitou split into feeders, one coming from the Grand Lac de Manitou, which was full of big trout. The main one flowed from a strange tableland of moss and scrub and berries, which only a few hunters had visited, and to which the caribou herds came in the fall. After that, beyond the Height of Land, there was no human dwelling between you and the Pole.

In the glow of the sunset Donald saw three figures in front of him, whose heads, being silhouetted against a shining pool of the river, seemed to be decked with aureoles. One was large and two were small, and they were moving slowly up-stream along the shingle. Donald knew who they were. He broke into a trot, found a patch of sand where his boots were noiseless, and surprised one of the smaller figures by suddenly punching it between the shoulders.

The figure gasped, turned round and crowed with delight. “Donald!” it cried. “You have come back! Oh, I am glad!”

It was a boy about Donald’s age, but half a head shorter, a slim, sunburnt child with sloe-black eyes. His name was Aristide Martel, and with him was his sister Simone, his elder by a year, whose crown of dark hair was on a level with Donald’s sandy thatch. Both in winter would be robed like little Father Christmases in homespun blanket coats and thick stockings and fur caps; but in summer their dress was like a South Sea Islander’s, the minimum required by convention. Face and neck and legs were brown as nuts and plentifully scratched by brambles. They were the children of Celestin Martel, who had a big farm on the mantelpiece of flat land above the beach, and whose forbears had come to Canada from Normandy when Louis XIV was King of France. Aristide was still at the village school, but soon he would go to the city and then to Laval, for he was destined for the law, like his great-uncle the judge. Simone had already gone from Bellefleurs to the Sisters at St. Anne’s, and was now home on her first summer holiday.

The tall figure was the curé of the parish, Father Laflamme, who was the brother of Madame Martel, and the uncle of Simone and Aristide. He was a man nearer sixty than fifty, as lean as a heron, and his face was tanned and furrowed by weather like the bark of an elm. A wonderful face it was, with its high cheek-bones and aquiline nose, very grave in repose, but sometimes breaking into a winning smile, for if the mouth was stern the eyes were merry. Like all Quebec priests he wore the cassock, and, since he had a weakness in his left leg, his movement along the shingle was like the fluttering of a big dark, wounded bird.

Father Laflamme had been only four years in Bellefleurs. All his youth and early middle life had been spent in distant places, as far away as the Mackenzie river and the Barren Lands north of the Churchill. He had been a missionary priest, and his miraculous winter journeys with dog teams had become a legend in the Northland. Often he had coquetted with death, and his lame leg was a memento of an adventure when his canoe capsized and he was carried over a waterfall and dashed on the rocks beneath. No man, it was said, knew the Indians as he did — Plains Crees, Wood Crees, Swamp Crees, Chippewyans, and even remote folk like Dogribs and Yellowknives. Now that he was at home in a civilised place his energy had not abated, for he took an interest in everything from the children’s prayers to the introduction of better milk cows. The parish loved him but was slightly bewildered by his ways, for on a Thursday, which was his holiday in the week, he did not go visiting his brother priests, but limped through the woods, watching birds and flowers, about which he knew enough to fill a library. But all reverenced him, including his Bishop, who, during his annual visits, behaved to him as to a wise superior. Children and dogs adored him, and Simone and Aristide were inordinately proud of their uncle.

He laid a gnarled brown hand on Donald’s head. “Bless you, my son,” he said, “and what is your news from the great world? I will tell you mine. The snow geese this April found a new halting-place. Six miles east of Petits Capucins I saw ten thousand in the air at once.”

This was exciting, but Donald only nodded. He knew what the next question would be. Grown-ups had a sad monotony in their conversation.

“How did you find school? Is there perhaps at last something that interests you?”

“No,” said Donald. “I’m rotten at Latin — and I can’t multiply right — and history! — that’s a bore if you like.”

“A bore!” said the priest. “I am surprised, for last summer I thought you had the makings of an historian. When I told you of the Hudson’s Bay you remembered everything, and, indeed, corrected my memory.”

“That was different. I couldn’t help remembering that. But my goodness! those beastly Greeks and Romans — and the English parliaments — and the Fathers of Confederation!”

The priest laughed. “Why do you dislike the Fathers? They were your own Canadian people.”

How do you mean?” Donald asked, with a puzzled face.

Father Laflamme laughed again. “I don’t think that in your school they teach history very well.”

The children seized upon Donald, one hanging on each arm, and a breathless confabulation began. Simone said little, for she felt that the new world of the Sisters at St. Anne’s needed a good deal of explanation before Donald would understand. But Aristide chattered happily about birds and beasts, and how he had shot the rapids of the Petit Manitou al...