Burned Bridges

To Breyette and MacDonald that forlorn cabin was after all nothing new

or disheartening in their experience. They knew how a deserted house

goes to rack and ruin. They knew also how to restore such an abandoned

place to a measure of its original homeliness. And neither the spectacle

of the one nor the labor of the other gave them any qualms. They were

practical-minded men to whom musty, forsaken cabins, isolation, the

hollow emptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the

flies, the deep snows and iron frosts of the long winter, were a part of

their life, the only life they knew.

But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception. They

recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable

things which they accepted as a matter of course. They saw that he was

rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old

native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand

aghast. And so--although their bargain with him was closed when they

deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose--they set to work

with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.

They made short work of the rats' and the swallows' nests. Breyette

quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from

the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile

cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up

the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite

the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and

drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as

if new erected.

The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight

held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe,

and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt

pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man

must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.

That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the

hard floor.

In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to

arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple

enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over

it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so

that there would be some semblance of order instead of an

indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at

the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain

rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the

method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt

pork before cooking, explained to him the otherwise mysterious

expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of

which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing

about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of

these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking,

and Thompson tried to remember.