Chapter 4

That evening, I stalked through the reeds and shot a goose. I had feared that I might miss and lose the arrow, or that the big bird might take flight if I only winged it, perhaps taking my arrow with it, but we had to eat. Luckily, it was a clean kill and I waded forward, wet to the waist, to claim my prize. It made a welcome change from eating rats and chewing spruce-heart and all the other marvelous things Mataoka could prepare from that versatile tree. I returned to the clearing at the foot of the lake and found she had already tugged some dry wood from the back of the dam to make a fire with and was now out with my hatchet to gather thick saplings to start on a wigwam.

We were waiting for the goose to roast on the spit when Mataoka suddenly started picking up stones and lobbing them behind me! I turned in alarm, fearful of a bear. But it was that Mataoka had seen the beavers coming to repair the damage she’d caused collecting firewood and she’d seized the opportunity to do some hunting of her own!

She brained one, and proudly collected her prize. We sank back around the fire, saving the beaver for the morning, and stuffed our bellies full on succulent, greasy, roast goose.

We spent the morning reciting the route back to our villages again and again to each other, to ensure we’d remember how many valleys to cross, where to get across the gorges, which way to turn on the ridges and so on. It seemed important to commit it to memory as surely as we ever had the gospels. And then we rested, content, our tummies content and a feeling of safety in this, our sanctuary.

“Where do we build the house?” Mataoka asked, looking about intently. At first I was confused, for we were steadily thatching the wigwam and would be spending the next night in it instead of under a conifer. Slowly it dawned on me that she expected us to build a proper farm here, out in the backcountry. I had thought we were building a simple camp so we could forage locally for a while before having to move on, but she wanted to clear and plant crops and have a proper plank house just like Eliza and I had grown up in! She even wanted to dress in English clothes. I couldn’t get used to calling her Martha, though.

I looked around thoughtfully. I couldn’t really imagine us foraging here all year. If we just foraged, we’d have to keep moving on, at least twice before the snow came. Winters without stores would be hard. The summer was starting, and it was a bit late to plant a crop now, and we had nothing with us, but we could settle here if we stored enough for just the first winter, and make a proper go of farming next year.

I looked at the land, trying to assess how easy it would be to clear with just a small hatchet. True, the land was like much I’d helped pa clear on the farm, but then we’d had the big two-man saw and oxen. Here, alone, with the hatchet, I saw only an impossible task. Yet I really didn’t want to disappoint Mataoka. Dispirited but scared to show it, I threw myself into hunting while Mataoka hummed as she tied the frame of the wigwam with bark twine.

It was whilst wading through the reeds in the beaver pool on a luckless hunt the next evening that inspiration struck! If we broke the dam, the lake would drain and return to being just a stream, and the lake water had long since killed the trees and cleared the land for us already. The reeds all over the lake showed how shallow and flat the bottom was, and the mud on my legs was testament to just how good the soil was here. Draining the pond would make a good field and there was no easier way!

So we talked it over and I broke the dam and we stoned all the beavers dead as they came to repair it. Then we even broke into their lodge for the young ones and we ate well enough on that for days as the water slowly seeped away, leaving a wide, muddy clearing.

We let the water drain away very slowly so as to not wash away the muddy bottom. As the water level dropped to our ankles we could see the fins of large fish stranded in the puddles and I waded in to grab some. But they were too slippery! Mataoka had fun watching me struggle, and then spent some time weaving together a crude fishing net of bark sinew with stones to weigh down the edges. That afternoon a lot of fish were still out there, struggling, easy to see, and her time had not been wasted. She just threw the net out over the wriggling fish so she could easily reach under and grab them and heave the fish up onto a rock so I could clobber them dead.

It was the first crop we harvested from our field, and we ate carp and catfish until we were heartily sick of it. The single turtle was a particularly tasty prize, though.

Mataoka was as good at building dams like the beavers as she was at pulling them down, and she built several along our bit of river so we could regulate the water level. This allowed us to leave a large basin, about an acre, in the deepest heart of the former beaver pond. This had been the only part of the pond too deep for the reeds, rushes and lilies. Now Mataoka waded around in it, pulling up the dead branches and debris, her buckskin dress tugged up to keep dry. She declared it just the right depth for rice. She found some plants growing on the fringes of the old extent of the pond and transplanted them. Hopefully there would be enough this year to give us seed to plant the next.

I found a good fork in a tree and, with lots of blows of the hatchet, managed to fell it and trim it into a passable hand plough. I dragged it through the drying lake bottom, dragging up and breaking up the roots of the lilies and reeds and leaving rough furrows behind me. It was backbreaking work in the searing sun. But Mataoka gathered up lots of dried reed leaves and wove hats for us to keep the sun off so we could carry on.

Mataoka surprised me by spreading some ears of wild corn around. It wasn’t going to give the yield we were used to, but it was a big, fresh field and we’d survive the winter on it. It was late to sow, and she had to go far and wide to find enough of last year’s heads with any seeds left, but it would make all the difference. I spent the time hunting, finding the forests around thick with game and even some turkeys which were easy hunting and good eating.

I surveyed our new farm: the field was a good five acres, split in two by the bubbling stream, in a basin with slopes up on all sides and then higher, flat, wooded land around.

The morning after, I heard Mataoka wailing and I came a running. She was trying to scare away some wild turkey, a mother and a dozen chicks, or poults as we called them, and these kept rushing from her but pausing to continue eating the corn she’d spread.

In the end I managed to scare them away, but it got us thinking. Did I have to fence in our field? And if I were fencing turkeys out, could I also fence them in? Could we keep them like chickens?

I set about fencing in a boggy patch under the trees for the turkeys, first. There was lots of willow, which I used to make a wattle fence, planting all the stakes diagonally so each had an end in the soggy soil, knowing that many would sprout and grow. A small beck crossed one corner of the pen, giving them something to drink. Now it was just to wait for the turkeys to be lured back to the seed on the field.

We didn’t have to wait long. The next day, I spent all morning trying to herd a hen and her poults into our new corral. I have never seen a turkey fly, and a hen wouldn’t leave her chicks anyhow, but they sure can hop and change direction fast! Again, after enjoying watching my antics for a while, Mataoka came out with her fishing net and gathered up the hen with ease. We slowly carried the hen to the corral and all the poults followed obediently. Mataoka slashed at the hen’s wing joints with the flint she used for scraping skins to make sure the hen couldn’t fly away. She leaned some sticks against low-hanging branches so they could clamber up to roost at night. Those poults would feed us all winter if we could just feed them up fat enough, first.

Once we had cleared and ploughed the field, we were free to scout further about, becoming even surer that this was the best spot for miles around. We had picked it, at first, because of how hard it would be for anyone to find us, but now I looked at it for its farming and living potential, too. With the pond drained, we could see where the source fed in, and I followed that river up further a way and found lots of smaller brooks feeding into it.

The valley was narrower up there, and the hill quickly became mountainside as the trees and soil thinned and it headed up the mountain where the snow still lay. I trekked back down, more to the side this time, until I reached the cliff that cut this high valley from the wider, bigger valley below. The cliff extended to the treeless high ridge on both sides, and you’d have to climb right above the trees to move around it if you couldn’t climb it. To protect ourselves, Mataoka would have me make a ladder so we could clear the leaning tree from the cliff so as to not give anyone an easy way to follow us up to our sanctuary.

There were a few caves and holes around and I was keen to explore but Mataoka pulled me away from them, fearing bears and snakes and bad spirits.

Walking right across the cliff top up to the the other side to satisfy myself that there was no easy way up or down I made the hard hike back up towards the top of the valley. It puzzled me how there was so much game here, but I guess they all came over the side ridges, even though there were no trees. Anyone who knew we were here would have no trouble getting to us, but hopefully nobody would think to come here and chance upon us.