Read Online Grandpère by Janet Romain - Free Book Online Page B

done school. We would bring the trees to the landing in the morning and in the afternoons we would square them.
    “One day George’s team ran away when he was hooking up and ran over him with the log. He broke both his legs and was screaming. We came to him, and one leg had the bone sticking right out through his clothes. We put him in the wagon and pulled him to town, but he passed out when we moved him. There was a doctor at the town who set his legs. One leg got better, but the bad one never did, and the doctor cut it off right at the top. He could never work in the bush after that, and I finished the winter by myself.
    “Alex came and worked with me, but he didn’t like the horses, and George’s team was too crazy for anyone else to use. We traded them to a guy down south, and they turned out to be good horses after he had them for a while. I think they were wild because George was wild. He was loud and mean with the animals, but he was very good with his axe. His timbers were always good. Alex was not so good at making the timbers, but he was very nice to work with. We finished the contract, but after that I only did logs for firewood. When the boys got bigger, they sawed the wood into lengths. We had a long saw with handles at both ends that two people pulled back and forth between them. It was a very fast way to saw, not as fast as a power saw, but almost.
    “We had a barn for the horses, and they had colts almost every year. The colts would be left in the barn when we worked the team, and by spring every year they would be gentle. None of them grew as big as their mothers because the stud was a saddle horse who was out with the herd in the summers. The people who travelled out in the bush always wanted them for packhorses because they were bigger than an ordinary saddle horse, and almost all of them had a quiet nature from being handled when they were colts.
    “One year I kept two and gelded them for use on the sleigh. They almost looked the same, big red horses with white faces. Clementine used to harness them up and bring your mother and the boys out to the bush. In the summer we would use that team when we travelled out. We had a meadow just north of the town. The railway goes through it now. Every year we would cut that meadow and bring the hay in for the winter. We stacked it behind the barn and covered it. If we didn’t have enough in the spring, we had to struggle to find food for them. No one liked doing that, and it would just be hard to keep them alive, since they can’t do well on willow like the moose can. So we made sure we had enough.
    “No one had equipment to do haying, so we cut it by hand. No tractor could have hayed that meadow anyway — it was soft muskeg — but the wild grasses grew as high as my head. We cut the grass and made loose piles, then when it dried we hauled it home in the wagon and made a stack. It wasn’t hard work; it was kind of fun. We would pick berries lots of the times when we were haying.
    “Things changed very fast as our old way of life disappeared, but the new ways made life easier for us. Many of the old people did not like the changes and tried to keep their traditions, but new laws and new ways made it hard for them. Many of our traditions became against the law. The Mounties had four men in the town and made a jail where many of our people spent a lot of their time.
    “There was work building the railway, and the road south changed from a trail to a highway.”
    His voice fades out here, and I look up at him. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He’s silent for a long time, then he leans forward and tells me that’s all for now.
    He asks me to bring in a couple of the sticks he’d put in the shed in the summertime, as he thinks he will make some more walking sticks. I’m going out anyway to make sure the chickens’ heat lamp is still on, for the bitter cold of the day is sure to be followed by an even colder night. I take the scraps out to