Mackinac and Lake StoriesCatherwood, Mary Hartwell
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Mackinac and Lake Stories
Catherwood, Mary Hartwell
Mackinac Island (Mich. : Island) -- Fiction; Michigan -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The sun went low like a scarlet egg, probing the mother-of-pearl lake
with a long red line of shadow, until it wasted into grayness and so
disappeared. Then home-returning sails became spiritualized, and moved
in mist as in a dream—foggy lake and sky, as one body, seeming to push
in upon the land.
Françoise slept the sleep of a healthy woman, with her child on her
arm, until at dawn the closed flap of the tent yielded to a bounding
shape. She opened her startled eyes to see Jim the blood-hound at
the foot of the bed, jerking the mosquito-netting. He growled at the
interlopers, not being able in his canine mind to reconcile their
presence with his customary duty of waking his masters in that tent.
A call and a whistle at the other side of the camp drew him away
doubting. But in a day both he and Jess had adopted the new members of
the family and walked at Gougou's heels.
Gougou existed in wonderland. He regarded the men as great and amiable
powers, who could do what they pleased with the elements and with the
creatures of the earth. They had a fawn, which had followed Brown home
along the beach, feeding on leaves from his hand. They had built it a
sylvan home of cedar boughs behind the camp, from which it wandered
at will. And though at first shy of Gougou, the pretty thing was soon
induced to stand upon its hind feet and dance for bits of cake. His
Indian blood yearned towards the fawn; but Methuselah, the mighty
turtle, was more exciting. Methuselah lived a prisoner in one side of
the bait-tank, from which he was lifted by a rope around his tail.
He was so enormous that it required both Brown and Puttany to carry
him up the bank, and as he hung from the pole the sudden projection
of his snapping head was a danger. When he fastened his teeth into a
stick, the stick was hopelessly his as long as he chose to keep it. He
was like an elephant cased in mottled shell, and the serrated ridge
on his tail resembled a row of huge brown teeth. Methuselah was a
many-wrinkled turtle. When he contracted, imbedding head in shoulders
and legs in body, revealing all his claws and showing wicked little
eyes near the point of his nose, his helpless rage stirred all the
Indian; he was the most deliciously devilish thing that Gougou had
ever seen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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