By LAURA LEE DAVIDSON “Now there is a rocky isle in the mid          sea, midway between Ithaca and rocky Samos, Asteris, a little isle.” The Odyssey of Homer.  Translated by S. S. Butcher and Andrew Lang Decorate graphic THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK           CINCINNATI Copyright, 1922, by LAURA LEE DAVIDSON Printed in the United States of America To LOUISE The Lady of the Island...

A small , rocky island in a lake, a canoe paddling away across the blue water, a woman standing on a narrow strip of beach, looking after it.  I was the woman left on the shore, the canoe held my companions of the past summer, the island was to be my home until another summer should bring them back again. There is no denying that I was frightened as I turned back along the trail toward the little house among the birches.  It was hard work to keep from jumping into a boat and putting out after th

The Lake of the Many Islands, long, irregular, spring-fed, lies in a cup of the rolling Ontario farmlands.  At the south its waters, passing through a narrow strait, widen into beautiful Blue Bay.  At the north they empty, in a series of cascades, into the little river Eau Claire.  The town of Les Rapides, its sawmill idle, the ten or twelve log houses closed, stands at the outlet, a deserted village.  The eagles soar to and fro over the blue lake; the black bass jump; the doré swim.  There are

The days are still warm, but autumn is surely here.  The wasps are dying everywhere and lie in heaps on all the window-sills; the great water spiders have disappeared, and all day long the yellow leaves drift down silently, steadily, in the forests.  Wreaths of vapor hang over the trees, and every wind brings the pungent fall odor of distant forest fires.  The hillsides are a blaze of color, with basswoods a beautiful butter-yellow, oaks, russet and maroon and sugar maples, a flame of scarlet ag

Wild geese flying over, cold mornings, colder nights, warn me that it is time to lay in supplies of firewood, oil and food against the coming of winter.  Last evening a laden rowboat passed the island, going eastward under the Moon of Travelers.  In the stern were a stove, a chair, a coffeepot, a frying pan, a great pile of bedding, and, surmounting all, a fiddle.  The man at the oars threw me a surly “Good night,” and turning, looked back at me with a scowl.  It was Old Bill Shelly, the hermit

November is the month of mosses.  Every fallen tree, every rotting stump, every rock, the trodden paths, and even the hard face of the cliff, are padded deep with velvet.  The color ranges from clear emerald, out through the tints to silvery, sage green, and back through the shades to an olive brown, almost as dark as the earth itself.  Round the shores the driftwood is piled high on the beach.  It looks like bleached bones of monsters long dead, huge vertebrae, leg bones, skulls and branching a

The time of great winds has come, the heavy November gales that roar down the lakes, lashing the water into white-capped waves, dashing the driftwood against the rocks and decking the beaches with long wreaths of yellow foam.  The swell is so strong and the waves so high that even the men do not care to venture out.  When I must get over to Blake’s farm I hug the shore of the island to the point, then dash across the channel between this land and his, and the wind turns my light skiff round and

Winter has thrown a veil of lace over the islands, a wet, clinging snow that covers every tree-trunk, rock, and stump, and turns the cedars to mounds of fluffy whiteness.  The paths lie under archways of bending, snow-laden branches, and all the underbrush is hidden.  The island wears many jewels, for every ice-incrusted twig flashes a cluster of diamonds, the orange berries of the bittersweet, each encased in clear ice, are like topaz, and the small frozen pools between the stones reflect the s

The Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half the countryside.  They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, Marie John, and so on.  The Little Jack Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the point and three miles away.  The road to Loon Lake Station starts at their landing.  They live in a barn, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot log structure, banked with earth to keep out the cold.  In its one room, along with a double bed, a cooking stove,

We are at the very heart of winter now.  It is “ le grand frête ,” that I have been secretly dreading, and all my ideas of it are changing as the quiet days go on.  Winter in the woods has always seemed to me the dead time—the season of darkness and loneliness and loss.  I find it only the pause before the birth of a new year.  If I break off a twig, it is green at the heart, when I brush away the snow, the moss springs green beneath it.  Close against the breast of the meadow lie the steadfast,

January the twenty-second was a great day in the county.  It was the date of the “Tea Meeting,” given under the auspices of the English Church, for the benefit of the destitute Belgians.  It was also a great day for me, being the first and the last time that I shall appear in Many Islands’ society, when society meets at night.  To drive seven miles in the bitter cold, to return to a stone cold house in the middle of the night, requires a love of foregathering with one’s fellows that I do not pos

We are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I.  We have come through a blizzard.  For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons, bobcats, and bears.  We have melted snow for drinking water, because the drifts cut us off from the lake and buried the waterhole.  We have dug our firewood out from under a pile of wet whiteness.  The mouse came through safely too, although the snow sifted in through the window screen, and covered him, house and all.

How do we know when the turn of the year has come?  The calendar gives March twenty-first as the official birthday of spring, but that has nothing to do with it.  One February day will be all winter, hard frozen and dreary, and on the next, quite suddenly, through some spirit line of sense, a message will reach us that spring, her very self, is on the way.  After that, no matter how many days of sleet and snow may follow, we know that for us the winter is past. So it was yesterday, here on the i

Since the first of December we have not seen the ground—only a great field of white so dazzling that one understands the Indian’s name for the March moon.  Verily, my own eyes tell me why it is the Moon of Snowblindness. The ice is still thick and clear, but the sun on its surface and the moving water beneath are both wearing it away, slowly, surely.  There are clear pools on the lake at noon, and then the crows come down and drink, marching to and fro, like files of small, black-clad soldiers. 

Appropriately enough, on this first day of the calendar spring, I am warned that the ice is unsafe and that I must stay on the island until the lake is open water.  The natives still venture out, but they know the look of the thin spots and even they are very cautious.  Two men started over from mainland this morning, axes on shoulder, hounds at heel, but they turned back at the shore, and the dogs, after stepping daintily on the dark, spongy crust, turned back also.  The middle of the lake is s

Good Friday , a heavy fall of snow and winter come again.  The ground is white, the sky dull gray, the lake a dark, bluish green flecked with windrows of snow.  It is more than a week since I have walked on the ice.  It bids fair to be two weeks before I can cross in a boat.  At this rate the ice will never break—I had to chop out the water hole again this morning.  This waiting for the ice to go out is like waiting for a child to be born, and it seems almost as solemn.  It induces a calm, philo

What is the first wild flower of the spring?  Each of us has his own first flower.  It varies with the locality and the special season.  Here it was the hepatica, that lifted its little faintly blushing face from the edge of a patch of melting snow.  I plucked it, remembering the words of Old Kate, at Les Rapides: “Ef you pluck yer first flower and kill yer first snake, you’ll prevail over yer enemies for the comin’ year.” I did not trouble her poor mind by inquiring: “What if your enemy is also

The mudcat season has come.  After the winter’s diet of salt herring, and before the open season for bass and pickerel, comes the mudcat, alias bullhead, to give us the taste of fresh fish again.  From April fifteenth until the fifteenth of May is the closed season for pickerel, and from April fifteenth to June fifteenth it is forbidden to fish for bass, so now the humble mudcat comes to his own. Over on the Drapeaus’ shore the men are all skinning bullheads for market.  They have rigged up a ma

The May woods are full of color; the crimson of the young maple sprays, the bronze and yellows of the new birch and basswood leaves reflecting the tints of autumn. The brakes are unclenching their little, woolly brown fists, the new ferns are uncurling their furry, pale-green spirals.  The dwarf ginseng’s leaves carpet the damp hollows, from their clusters rise innumerable feathery balls of bloom.  The little wild ginseng holds its treasure safe—the small, edible tuber hidden far underground.  T

November’s moon is said to be the Indian’s Moon of Magic, but here the June moon is the wonder moon and “the moon of my delight.”  It sails resplendent in a luminous sky, pouring its brightness down on a lake that gleams like a silver shield.  Its beams rain down through the leaves in a drenching flood of light, to lie in shining pools on the mossy ground.  It illuminates the hidden nooks of the forest, it makes the stems of the birches look like slender columns of white marble, and the woods ar

It is wild strawberry time in lower Canada.  The fields are carpeted with them and the fern-covered rocks hold each a little garden where the red berries hang over the water like rubies in a setting of clustered leaves.  The birds are feasting royally and I walk along the edges of the meadows, gathering handfuls of the ripe fruit.  No one is at home any more.  When I stop at a house the women have all gone a-berrying.  Thousands of quarts go off to the markets, or are cooked here into jellies an