Many years ago I wrote this essay about a friend of my wife Marie's family in Northwest Quebec. I was an outsider, a city boy from the US, emigrated to the far north country 400 miles above Montreal and Toronto. Winters could see temperatures of -40F. The plastic steering wheel of your car could break off in that cold. You had to have an engine block heater plugged in at night on your car, or the engine would not turn over in the morning. In the summer, the black flies would feast on you in the day and the mosquitoes at night. Few people spoke English, but one I clearly recall who did was an old trapper, named Amie Beaubien. Aimé meant 'loved' in French. Aimé was a great raconteur of folk history and a dispenser of bush savvy to me. He was a person who had endured a very hard life like many of the prospectors and miners loggers, and farmers. They built something from nothing, using only hand axes, common sense, endurance, and strong family ties. This is what I remember about Aimé Beaubien.
Aimé Beaubien was sitting hobbled
in a wheelchair when I visited him in his nursing home last summer (1981). His
blue-grey eyes still gleamed as they had ten years before when he was busy
cutting wood at his trapping camp. He was in his mid-seventies then.
He measured about five feet six, and still had a lot of muscle in that aged old body. Bare chested, black flies crawling on his grizzled back.
The lines in the skin told of seventy years living and working in the northern
Ontario and Quebec bush. There were blood streaks running down his back where the black flies were able to penetrate that toughened hide. "You just got to imagine
they’re not there, if ya wanna get along out here." I don’t think the word
‘survival’ could be found in Aimé’s vocabulary, but ‘gettin’ along’ was
definitely in the realm of his phrasing.
Aimé was born near the turn of
the century in Sudbury, Ontario. He is Franco-Ontarian, meaning he is of French Quebec origin but lived in Ontario. He speaks English as well as French, but
cannot read or write either language. Don’t ask him his phone number, he won’t
be able to tell you or even dial it. But ask him how to operate a diamond drill
for a mining company, how to trap beaver, set charges of dynamite, or take a
moose out of season under the nose of the game warden, and Aimé can put you
through a grad school commando course on ‘gettin’ along’. "You get a cut and no doctor around, you put some spruce gum on the wound and sew it up yourself. Pretend it
don’t hurt and it won’t". He had financial wisdom as well.
"As long as I have a thousand dollars in the bank, I'm okay."
In the early 1920’s Aimé and some of his buddies walked the three hundred miles from Sudbury into Northwest Quebec where gold and copper mines were opening. They could have taken a train part way, but they didn’t have the money. Apparently he hadn't yet developed financial savoie faire. He had a team of horses then and often contracted hauling jobs with merchants until one day the horses went through the ice on a river in early spring. He lost a second team another time in a sadder, crueler way. He was working in winter with a drilling company, and they hauled a rig over a frozen lake. Not arriving at their destination before nightfall, they pitched camp on the lake even though slush had formed on the surface. The men slept on cots, slush beneath them, but most of the horses’ feet froze while standing in the slush overnight. "We had to shoot those poor animals next morning", Aimé lamented. "They were as crippled as I am now."
Aimé had plenty of close calls
in the winter. He was once with his brother when he stepped on thin ice and
went through. Fortunately his brother fished him out. "Then he kicked me
in the backside every time I slowed down, just to keep me moving. Had a long
way back to the cabin that time before I could get warm."
Another time he wasn’t so lucky
about getting back to camp. He was hunting in winter when he and a friend both
shot moose. They decided to camp on the spot and carry the meat back the next
morning. They gutted the beasts, put pine boughs in the gaping abdomens and
crawled inside to spend the night.
Well, Aime forgot some of his
hard won bush knowledge and when confronted with rigor mortis (that
of the moose) and freezing weather in those carcasses, he and his
partner soon realized they could not get out of the moose
bellies. They were stuck. Fortunately his buddy was able
to reach his hunting knife strapped on his belt and managed to free himself and
then Aime. Talk about a rough Caesarean delivery.
On another sortie into the bush
in winter, Aime sought out a trapper’s cabin to spend the night. No
one left a cabin in the bush locked just for that reason, or they were likely to find a broken door when they came
out to the cabin the following Spring. Anyway, Aime used someone’s
camp to stay warm one night and built a fire in the stove and warmed up the
room, had his supper, and went to bed. In the middle of the
night he suddenly found that a frozen cadaver that had been sequestered in the
rafters had thawed and fallen on top of him in the bunk. Talk
about a ‘dark and stormy night’ story for his repertoire. Turns out
that a guy had died a few weeks before and the RCMP had investigated, and since
it would be too hard to haul the body into town until Spring, they stashed it in the rafters. That led to Aime Beaubien’s surprise visitor.
One other story of bushwackiness. Aime once was recruited to help a friend move his
cabin across a lake during the winter. The prep work was done in the
Fall with a ramp built to slide it down to the lake shore once the water was
frozen and thick enough to hold the weight. How do you know when it
is thick enough? Do you consult engineering manuals, lake currents,
wind velocities or just spit on your finger and hold it up in the
wind? Well, late into winter when the lads thought conditions were good, they
got the team of horses out of their shed and rigged them up to pull that cabin
to a better location where a new foundation of logs had been built. When they would get to the shore they would rig ‘come
alongs’ and winches to pull it up on shore. Halfway
across the lake, to their chagrin, they found that their calculations about ice
thickness and lake currents were a bit off. Hell, this was a mistake
any well educated engineer from the University of Toronto could have
made. Their route to the new site was blocked by cracking
ice. What to do? They changed course and pulled the
house to the nearest shoreline which looked like low ground only to
realize it was a swamp. But that was their only option. That
cabin remained in the swamp until it crumbled of natural causes.
Aime’s own lakefront property
was on a low outcrop of the Canadian shield on Lac Duprat a few miles north of
Rouyn-Noranda near the old Waite Mine. To walk that last two miles
into the site, you would think that you would need a four-wheel drive pickup
with a winch on the front end in case you got stuck. Not
Aime. He drove a two door Ford Mavrick with low clearance in and out
of there. ‘You just got to go slow. You’ll make
it.” was Aime’s advice and he was right.
Another piece of Aime’s wisdom
passed on to me was, “Don’t ever get in a fair fight. If
you want to get along up here, make sure you don’t give the other
guy a chance. And be ready to use both feet as well as your
fists.” Fortunately I never had to put that advice to good use.
I remember Aime’s
last days. He was dying in the hospital in
Rouyn-Noranda. We went to visit him and he still had a bit of a
twinkle in his eye. We all knew he was dying as did Aimé . My wife Marie asked him if there was anything she could get
him, any last meal he would like. “Yes” he replied. “If I
could just have a nice bowl of soupe de la queue de castor. Beaver
tail soup was a woodsman’s delicacy. Well, we weren’t as bush
savvy as Aimé, but Marie went home and cooked up a strong chicken
broth and brought it to him. Aimé took a few sips and died that
evening. I don’t know if the cause of death was listed as old age or
Marie’s cooking. But the gift of comforting people in their last
days, hours, and minutes eventually led Marie from the
profession of teaching to the profession of chaplaincy and end of life care and
counseling. Thank you, Monsieur Aimé Beaubien.
Great story...the best yet.
ReplyDelete