Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [51]
As the days lengthened, and the ice on Lake Katchewanooka turned grey and rotten, Catharine wrote home to tell their mother that, “My dear sister and her husband are comfortably settled in their new abode … we often see them.” The two women spent a lot of time reminiscing about Suffolk. They liked to chat about “sweet, never-to-beforgotten home, and cheat ourselves into the fond belief that, at no very distant time we may again retrace its fertile fields and flowery dales.”
By the first week in May, the maples, oaks and birches around the Moodies’ and Traills’ cabins were in leaf. Soon there was a carpet of trilliums and lady’s-slippers on the forest floor. At the lake’s edge, the pale spikes of wild rice waved gently in the breeze. John Moodie bought a canoe, to which (ever the Orkney lad) he attached a keel and sail. Whenever possible, he and Susanna would skim across the lake’s surface. Susanna’s letters home were now almost as chirpy as Catharine’s, as she began to see the landscape through her sister’s eyes. There was no more talk of “gloomy woods.” Susanna rhapsodized about “the august grandeur of the vast forest” which cast “a magic spell upon our spirits.” Her poetry reflected her happiness:
Come, launch the light canoe;
The breeze is fresh and strong;
The summer skies are blue,
And ’tis joy to float along.”
One of the most memorable expeditions the Moodies ever made was up Lake Katchewanooka into Clear Lake and from there to Stony Lake (or Stoney Lake, as it is still sometimes spelled). John, Susanna and their two little girls set off at dawn and arrived after a couple of hours at Young’s Point Falls, where the jovial Irish miller, Mr. Young, invited them to dine with his family. To Susanna’s amazement, his two daughters produced a lavish feast of “bush dainties,” including “an indescribable variety of roast and boiled, of fish, flesh and fowl,” plus “pumpkin, raspberry, cherry and currant pies, with fresh butter and green cheese (as the new cream-cheese is called), molasses, preserves and pickled cucumber.” The Moodies left their daughters with the Young family and paddled on through Clear Lake, an “unrivalled brightness of water [which] spread out its azure mirror before us.” At length, the Moodies reached Stony Lake—a dramatic piece of water lodged in a geological fold, where the stark granite of the Canadian Shield meets the soft sandstone of the St. Lawrence Valley. “Oh, what a magnificent scene of wild and lonely grandeur burst upon us as we swept round the little peninsula, and the whole majesty of Stony Lake broke upon us at once,” Susanna wrote later in Roughing It in the Bush. “Imagine a large sheet of water some fifteen miles in breadth and twenty-five in length, taken up by islands of every size and shape, from the lofty naked rock of red granite to the rounded hill, covered with oak-trees to its summit: while others were level with the waters, and of a rich emerald green, only fringed with a growth of aquatic shrubs and flowers. Never did my eyes rest on a more lovely or beautiful scene. Not a vestige of man, or of his works, was there.”
Susanna was right: Stony Lake was almost pristine wilderness. Its shores were still untouched by loggers, and only a handful of settlers had ever paddled across its surface, threading their way through its picturesque isles. The local Chippewa treasured the lake as a source of birchbark, wampum grass, wild onions and game. They venerated its tranquillity and tried to keep Europeans away by telling them stories about rattlesnakes and wild beasts. Now Susanna stared around her at the landscape, “savage and grand in its primeval beauty.” She admitted to herself that, “filled with the love of Nature, my heart forgot for the time the love of home.”
Susanna was already expecting her third child when she arrived at Lake Katchewanooka. Encouraged by the good reports of immigrant life that reached England from both of her sisters, Agnes Strickland composed some cheerful verses in