Mattie Mitchell (14 page)

HE ENTERED THE COLD WATER OF THE
slow-moving stream
to his knees. When Worcester offered to help, Mattie told him, “I
fin' clams. You shuck 'em.” Worcester agreed. He did not relish
wading in cold water.

Twice Mattie brought his big hands above the water, filled with
what he called freshwater mussels. He inspected them carefully
and threw them back. The next time he brought only two, which
were bigger than the others, their shells stained brown. They
looked very old. These he tossed ashore to an excited Worcester,
who broke them open. Inside one he found nothing, but deep
inside the mucous body of the second one he found a white pearl
as big around as the top of his finger. Mattie had found the clam
bed and the pearls, as promised.

They stayed on that river for more than a week. Mattie
retrieved clams from the cold water and never once complained.
Nor did he appear to suffer from the frigid task. Every day,
they spotted muskrat swimming toward them. Upon seeing the
tall man throwing handfuls of clams upon the grassy bank, the
animals turned back, disappointed, and quickly dived again, not
breaking the surface again until they were much farther away.

They collected no less than 490 pearls of varying sizes and
colours, only a few of which could compare with the first one
they had found. Worcester deemed all of the dull-coloured, non-circular ones useless and threw them away. It was a big mistake.
Months later, while meeting with a pearl merchant in New York
City, Worcester learned much more about pearls.

The jeweller told him that the pearls sometimes kept growing
in the clam long after it had become a threat to its body. The
mollusk kept layering the pearl like an onion. Often inside the
seemingly useless covering is the finest pearl of all. Further to
this, during a trip to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington
D. C., he learned that Mattie Mitchell had indeed been right about
the relationship between muskrat and pearls. The muskrat, he was
told by a knowledgeable curator, considers the clam a delicacy.

The muskrat is also the carrier of a water-borne parasite that
is deadly to the freshwater mollusk. Diving among the sharp-edged open clams, there are times when the parasite is torn from
the muskrat's sodden fur as it rips and tears the clams from
their riverbeds. The rodent's parasite then sometimes becomes
embedded inside the body of the clam. Unable to dislodge the
invasion, the animal entombs and isolates the virus with its
natural secretions, thus suffocating it. The resulting build-up of
nacreous fluids hardens and holds the louse a prisoner forever.
Without ever knowing the scientific reason why, Mattie Mitchell
was intelligent enough to make the correlation.

The two men made their way down the river and out of the
wilderness on a warm summer evening. They paddled in the
gloaming to where the
Danny Boy
still waited. No one had been
aboard during their absence. The day was just about spent, so,
rather than sail out the bay in the dark, they spent the night aboard
the schooner.

After sailing back to Bay of Islands and paying Mattie for his
admirable services, Worcester set a date for an extended caribou
hunt early in the autumn, hired two crewmen, and set sail for
Labrador.

AS PROMISED
,
ONE DAY IN THE LATTER PART
of summer,
the little
Danny Boy
came reaching up the bay and tied up at
Frank's wharf. And Mattie Mitchell was waiting. They made
arrangements for an extended stay, which would be spent on
Mattie's favourite hunting grounds far inland. This time they
would leave the schooner at Frank's wharf and paddle away from
the community in the canoe.

On the last evening before their departure, Worcester was
having his evening draw and was quietly walking the deck of
his schooner, studying the heavens and remembering the lesson
Mattie had taught him about the North Star. He was bending
down to knock the dottle out of his pipe when he thought he saw
a movement on the inside of the wharf. He waited for his night
visitor to walk out over the wharf. But after several minutes, no
one came.

Then he heard the sound of someone running along the
narrow lane that paralleled the quiet cove. Glancing toward the
sound, he caught only a glimpse of a fleeting shadow. The man's
feet sounded hard on the gravel path as he ran. For some reason
Worcester thought the runner had big feet. The shadow he saw
was a tall one. Going below, he opened his portmanteau and
counted out all of his remaining cash. Along with the money in
his purse, he still had more than $500 in American bills. He put
all of the money in his purse, stuffed it deep inside his duffle bag,
and tied the mouth tight. The following morning he and Mattie
paddled across the calm bay. Worcester said nothing about the
money he carried and remained quiet about his unknown night
visitor.

For three days they paddled up river and lake and finally
reached the place where Mattie hunted. Mattie and Worcester
successfully hunted and lived off the bountiful land for several
days. Worcester had never seen a place like it. He would never
have believed such a paradise existed if not for the fact that he
had seen it with his own eyes.

Day after day they hunted and fished. Worcester killed
several caribou, one of them a magnificent stag with more than
forty points. Mattie made use of all of every carcass. He cooked
the cleaned intestines, stuffed with meat, and roasted the stomach
linings. He relished the entire viscera of each animal and took a
particular liking to the kidneys. The Indian skinned the tongues
and fried them in an iron pan. He heated the bones and ate the
nourishing marrow inside.

Mattie dried and smoked the tender flesh of every doe and
informed Worcester—after he had taken his trophy bull—that the
stag meat “tasted ronky when 'orny.” He cleaned and dried the
caribou's bladders and used them as leak-proof containers. He
scraped and flensed the best of the hides and then dried them
in the cool autumn wind with their long hairs intact. Others he
soaked in a mixture of ashes and water and then hung them to dry
before working them into rawhide.

They took from the autumn rivers thin, spawning salmon.
Their flesh was without fat and almost tasteless until Mattie
smoked them over dried alder. Snowshoe hares, in their thick
brown hides, Mattie snared and cooked regularly. Canada geese
Worcester shot with his fancy new Browning shotgun. And
Mattie killed, unerringly with his bow and deadly arrows, ducks
and what had become Worcester's favourite-tasting game of
all—muskrat.

Mattie snared snowshoe hare—or, as he called them, rabbits.
Both men ate them regularly, but here once again Mattie showed
Worcester a different way. They were walking back to their
camp, along a valley overgrown with alder where they had set
rabbit snares two days before. They had caught several rabbits
and expected to get a few more before they reached their camp.
Although the animals were, for the most part, less than five
pounds, a dozen or so of them, along with their other gear, made
for a heavy pack.

Mattie stopped without explanation and said, “We lighten our
load, maybe.”

Shrugging the pack from his broad shoulders and without
saying another word, he began cleaning the rabbits. Grabbing
one by the head with his left hand, he pressed the entire area
below the rabbit's rib cage downward. He repeated this until he
was satisfied, and Worcester could see a significant lump in the
rabbit's lower abdomen. He now grabbed the animal by its front
paws in both hands. Then he flung the rabbit back over his left
shoulder while still holding it by its paws. He jerked the rabbit a
few times in a rapid motion, then yanked the rabbit back over his
shoulder with an amazing speed. When the rabbit reached the full
downward swing of Mattie's arms, he stopped it between his legs
with a violent whiplash motion, and in the same instant yanked
it back.

Worcester stared as the entire contents of the animal's
abdomen spewed out onto the ground while the organs inside
the rib cage remained intact. Mattie repeated this unique field
dressing again and again. When Worcester tried it, and failed
repeatedly, he asked Mattie how he made it look so easy.

Mattie said, “Ol' Indian trick.” It was a saying Worcester
would hear him say many times.

It was the most enjoyable and productive outdoors expedition
of Worcester's life. He would never forget the time he spent with
Mattie Mitchell. The American clergyman-sportsman shot and
killed a black bear that wasn't as big as he thought when they
came up to it. Mattie brought the meat back to camp, skinned
it out, and that very night got Worcester to try another trapline
treat—bear paws. Worcester was a man with the ability to eat
anything, or so he thought. He just couldn't bring the bony hands
of the bear to his mouth. They looked too much like human hands.

They ate the flesh of fried beaver tail. Mattie told Worcester
about the rite among his people to drink the foul-tasting gall of
the very first beaver of the season. It ensured a good trapping
season, he said. Worcester would not try that either.

They were camped beside a shallow stream late one evening
when Mattie told Worcester he was going to catch
elnekat
—
eels—for their supper. His people had invented an ingenious tool
for this purpose, he said. The
sunkuti
was a pole several feet in
length. One end of the pole was cut away to a sharp spear point
of a few inches. Whipped securely around the spear and fastened
to the pole with thin strips of rawhide were two more wide,
wooden, hook-shaped spear points, their edges turned in toward
the spear point. When the
sunkuti
was forced down over the eel,
the pointed spear pierced its body while the other two points kept
its wriggling body in place.

But Mattie had another way of catching them. Worcester,
who had come to relish the taste of fried eel—though not as much
as Mattie—had seen his guide catch them using his bare hands.
He had watched in amazement as the Indian felt under rocks
with his long, brown fingers for the snake-like fish. Then Mattie
had calmly walked ashore with a struggling, biting eel gripped
between his fingers. Mattie's inescapable grip on the slimy fish
simply fascinated Worcester. Mattie pointed his long middle
finger straight out. The two adjacent fingers were bent toward the
palm of his hand. When his probing finger came in contact with
the eel, it wrapped around the top of its slippery body and closed
like a vice, trapping it against the two fingers below. Worcester
tried the grip on dead eels, but he could not nerve himself to
probe under rocks for live ones.

Whenever Mattie caught eels, Worcester would watch the
Indian clean them. Throwing the eel upon the sand, Mattie would
wait as the animal squirmed and twisted. The dry sand stuck to its
soft, slimy underbelly slowed its movements. Grabbing a handful
of sand, Mattie scrubbed what he called the
skumogan
from its
body. Worcester figured it was where the white settlers had gotten
the word “scum” from. The rough sand soon made the writhing
animal easier to handle. Mattie walked to the nearest tree and cut
the skin all the way around, just below the eel's jawline. Holding
the eel's head against the trunk with his left hand, he stabbed
his knife through its skull with his right, impaling the fish to the
tree. The eel never bled a drop. While Worcester watched, Mattie
would grip the eel's skin between his fingers and, with one long,
steady, continuous pull, relieve the writhing eel of its tough hide.

But on this particular evening, Worcester watched in silence
as Mattie fished for eels in a way he had never have thought
possible. They had caught a couple of salmon that day. Mattie
had kept the strings of ripe eggs from the spawning fish. He
called them “the pips.”

As Worcester looked on, Mattie tied one of the pink strings
of spawn to a long line. He threw the bait into the brook and sat
down on his haunches to wait. Worcester had never seen Mattie
hunt or fish for anything just for the sport of it. He always did so
for food. He wondered why he would he put bait into the water
without a hook. Standing over Mattie's shoulder, Worcester soon
got his answer. From out of the black depths an eel appeared. It
looked to be more than four feet long. Its two small pectoral fins
kept its head above the rocky bottom.

The eel's mouth yawed open, and in a slow, almost lazy
motion, as if it weren't really hungry but would take the spawn
anyway, it swallowed the bait. As it gulped and swallowed the
salmon eggs, Mattie paid out the line, giving the eel slack. As the
eel swallowed the bait, it kept dragging the line down its gullet
along with it. The fish stopped swallowing, turned its head away
with a flick of its fins, and headed back to deeper water. Mattie
yanked its body around with a strong pull on the line. Standing in
a half-crouch, Mattie pulled the line hand over hand.

The startled eel twisted in protest as it was pulled along the
bottom. It spun over and over like a giant worm dangling from a
trout pole. In seconds, Mattie had pulled the creature up on the
shore. He kept pulling the line up out of the eel's stomach. The
creature's digestive muscles had such a tight hold on the bait that
Mattie lifted the eel off the ground in his efforts.

The salmon spawn, still intact, was half pulled and half
vomited from its mouth. The eel fell back to the ground, and
Mattie was quick to grip it in his firm “eel grab.” He turned to the
astonished Worcester and said with a grin, “Anudder ol' Indian
trick, Preacher!”

Worcester killed a caribou with one clean shot one early
morning. The report from his heavy rifle had not died away
before they both saw a long, tawny figure loping away from a
pile of rocks nearby.

“Wolf!” hissed Mattie, his eyes following the animal.

As quickly as it had appeared, the wolf faded away again.
Worcester had killed one Newfoundland wolf before. He had
also killed a couple of western timber wolves on other hunts in
America. But he had never seen a wolf the size of the one that
had just vanished into the woods ahead of them. He wanted to go
after it, but for the first time since they had been together, Mattie
disagreed with him.

“Ver' many wolves not 'ere now. White mans hunt too many.
Indian too, maybe. Dat one 'ave fat stomach. She 'ave pups
inside, maybe.”

They walked back to the pile of rocks where they had seen
the wolf and found the animal's lair. They went back to clean the
caribou. Mattie left the viscera among the entrails, even though
Worcester knew Mattie considered the organs a delicacy.

That night in their camp, miles away from the kill site, they
heard the long, howling cry of a wolf several times. Worcester
believed the animal sounded like it had a full stomach.

LATE ONE EVENING WHEN THEIR TIME
of hunting the wild land
was almost done, they wended their tired way back to Mattie's
wigwam. Mattie stopped at the edge of the natural clearing
where the shelter lay still against a magnificent forest backdrop.
He glanced all around when Worcester stepped out of the woods
behind him to make his way across. The words “Preacher, stop,”
came suddenly in a whispered hiss from the Indian's mouth.
Taken completely by surprise, Worcester stopped in his tracks
and turned to see Mattie concentrating on something.

“Someone bin 'ere! Maybe 'ere still!” he whispered.

“What do you mean? How do you know that?” Worcester
whispered back. He looked toward the shelter, half expecting two
or more men to rush out of the closed doorway.