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By Root 923 0

became obvious that the lessons in poetry and drawing did not hold his attention the way the columns of numbers in his grandfather’s office did. The old man eventually took over in the matter of Maurice’s schooling, teaching him accounting and bookkeeping. By the age of ten, the boy was a businessman to be reckoned with and knew enough about how to extract money from others that his grandfather determined that he should be sent to board at Upper Canada College in Toronto, the perfect place, the old man knew, for the Badger to become acquainted with the kind of boys who, when grown, would inherit the fortunes he hoped his grandson would find a way to benefit from.

By the time Maurice, uniformed and capped, departed for school a few years later, his mother and father had moved away from Timber Island and, with the help of the elder Woodman, had purchased an inexpensive two-storey clapboard hotel on the sandy beach at the end of the nearby peninsular County. The rafts had dwindled to a trickle by now, Old Woodman had retired, and Cummings had taken over what remained of the much-diminished business, a business in which, to Branwell’s relief, there was no longer any room for him. Annabelle and her father remained in the big house, she eventually nursing the cranky old man. The Badger, still devoted to his grandfather, would make the day trip from the hotel by way of his own sailboat in the summer or an iceboat he had constructed at the Christmas break.

Branwell, who had painted a number of landscapes in the upstairs and downstairs halls of the inn, was being encouraged by the more prosperous families in the County to decorate their homes. He completed these commissions in the winters when the dry heat thrown by the wood stoves would cause the paint to set, and when there were no guests at the inn. The summers brought a number of city families to the shores of the lake and the verandas of the inn, some from Toronto and Montreal, some from as far away as Albany or Chicago. In spite of his father’s annoyance, Branwell had called the inn “The Ballagh Oisin,” after the mountain pass in Ireland, the story of which had given rise to his name. “It’s a mountain pass,” he would tell inquisitive guests, “in Ireland.” At one point he had staged an evening contest to see who among the visitors could pronounce the name properly. Branwell was a jovial host, much given to jesting. His disposition was greatly improved now that he had left the timber business and had in his life almost everything that his sister had known all along he wanted: Marie, the painted hallways, and an open view of the lake uncluttered by islands of commerce.

During their third or fourth year at the hotel a letter arrived for Branwell from a fellow-innkeeper in a distant part of Ontario known as the Huron Tract. This was a portion of Upper Canada that had been considered quite useless by Joseph Woodman in that it was situated too far from the Great Lakes—or any other navigable body of water—to make it suitable for timbering, despite rumours of incredible hardwood trees, many of which were twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. A couple of decades before Woodman Senior had established his island empire in close proximity to the relatively civilized town of Kingston, however, a hundred-mile-long inland trail known as the Huron Road was being hacked, sawed, chopped, and burnt through this forest under the direction of the Canada Company, which comprised a group of British and Scottish entrepreneurs, several of whom were named after the wild animals they had killed in other corners of the Commonwealth. Tiger Dunlop is someone who comes immediately to mind, but likely there were other colourful monikers as well—Rhinoceros Smith, Polar Bear MacLeod, Lion McGillivray. The trail ended at the Lake Huron port of Goderich into which the sorry, fly-bitten, half-starved party of blazers and engineers, axemen and surveyors had staggered in the autumn of 1828 after months of exhausting labour and bouts of swamp fever, only to be bullied by the company into making the trek back