Mattie Mitchell (3 page)

But it was not to be. The old woodsman suffered a stroke and,
with the help of his friend, returned home without ever finding
the treasure. He would never return to St. John Island again. The
island with the pirate treasure is still a legend.

FOR MARIE MITCHELL
,
THE WINTER NIGHTS
when the
men talked their trail talk were openings into the world of her
grandfather, one she would never see with her own eyes. But
inside her head the tales would forever remain as vivid as the
nights when she had first heard them.

Marie remembered her first movies about cowboys and
Indians. The Indians were always the bad guys and never won
any of the battles. Around her in the theatre all of her friends had
shouted “Shoot the redskins!” All she could do was stay quiet
and wonder why.

Remembering the days of her childhood, Marie still felt the
sting of prejudice. The taunts of “Marie is nothing but an Injun”
coming from her peers was anything but funny to her. But through
it all she remained steadfast to her heritage. Nothing would sway
her from the pride she felt of who she was. And she was proudest
of all that her grandfather was the one and only Mattie Mitchell.

In 1946, Marie was ten years old and in the fifth grade. One
day, as she sat in her classroom in Corner Brook, she heard the
teacher speak the name of Mattie Mitchell. She timidly raised her
hand and in a quiet, shaky voice said, “That's my grandfather,
Miss.”

Her teacher hushed the other children, who were laughing at
Marie. Marie finally convinced the teacher that her statement was
true. The other kids stared at her in awe: she had a connection to
a figure in their Newfoundland history school book!

Bursting with pride, Marie raced home and informed her
parents of the sentence in her Newfoundland geography book, the
one that said her grandfather had discovered the mine in Buchans.
Her parents, who of course knew about Mattie's discovery, were
thrilled to learn that Mattie Mitchell's name was living on in
Marie's generation.

From that day forward, Marie started a lifelong quest to
record all known information about her legendary grandfather.
Her dedication to the task ended only with her death.

THE HIGH GREY MOUNTAINS WITH
their wondrous mystery
were silent. Their vast, white, flat-topped plateaus draped behind
dark evening clouds. It was late March, but the hills and valleys on
Newfoundland's west coast were still choked with heavy winter
snow. A mist had drizzled from the low-hanging clouds all day. It
was a sly, sneaky moisture that seeped through a man's clothing
and soaked the skin almost without his knowing. Now with night
shadows climbing up through the deep-wooded valleys below,
the rain got colder.

Mattie Mitchell was soaked to the bone. His coarse, black
woollen clothes, most of it showing sparse herring-bone patches
of his own careful stitching, were plastered to his tawny skin.
Despite the cold rain, Mattie was sweating. The mild temperature
along with the rain made the snow soft underfoot, and although
the trail he followed was well packed, he sank through in places.
The trail wound its twisted way through a mature virgin forest. At
intervals, open spaces between the trees allowed Mattie a view of
the distant ridges. They showed blue against the slate sky. Tiny
tendrils of steam emanated from beneath his worn coat collar
and, like the last rising images of heat from a dying campfire,
vanished into the air.

The worn thin straps from a dirty grey canvas pack bit into
his tired shoulders. Inside the pack were the pelts of three fox—
two with thick red hides and one with a shiny black coat. One
fawn-tinted lynx and three brunette beaver skins, the lush hide of
one partly cured “marten cat,” several pounds of cured caribou
meat, and a few meagre personal belongings filled his pack to its
laced mouth. Lashed securely to the outside of the pack was a
large unskinned beaver with its broad tail dangling below.

More than two hours' walk behind, Mattie had pulled the
furred rodent from its watery grave beneath the ice of a small
pond, reset the steel trap, and walked on. Running under the
heavy pack, angled upward and crossing his forehead ran a two-inch-wide leather thump line. It was a simple and practical native
design that relieved much of the weight from the lower back and
transferred it to the neck and head.

Now, standing on the edge of a high, snow-covered alpine
meadow, he paused. He had not stopped for a rest since he had
shrugged the dead beaver into place onto his broad shoulders
miles back. Weary and nearing the place where he would find
rest, Mattie scanned the deep, white valley below him. He
couldn't see the river that ran the length of the winter valley,
but he knew it was there, even without hearing the sound of its
waters rising and falling on the evening breeze. What he could
see of the distant elevation through the misty rain showed a dark
blue. It was another sure sign of a mild spell. Maybe it was time
to leave for the coast, he thought.

The man who stood looking down into the wet, misty valley
was tall. He was several inches taller than six feet. His small,
far-seeing eyes were dark, like the deep colour of a perfectly
cured pine marten hide. His face was long and angular, and his
full head of thick black hair fell matted below his ears. His jaws
and well-defined cheekbones were clean of facial hair, though he
seldom shaved. His mouth was full, below a straight, full nose
that belied his ancestry. Mattie Mitchell was a handsome man.
He looked as if some hidden gene had been lodged in his veins,
producing in his features, for all to see, the link of his mysterious
lineage.

Mattie was of Mi'kmaq/Montagnais Indian descent. He was a
revered chieftain among his people. He had “royal” blood in his
veins. His bloodline reached back into the realms of pre-recorded
history. The tales of his breed had been passed down through
long generations beside countless campfires in wonderfully told
accounts by those who knew and who believed.

He was the descendant of an ancient nomadic people who
had roamed the steppes of a far eastern land. The land bridge
that had kept the earth's greatest land mass as one allowed his
magnificent, wandering, fearless ancestors access to a land of
wonders. In his veins coursed the blood of ageless corsairs for
whom distant oceans were never a barrier. He was truly a man of
the earth. He was timeless.

A brief rest slowed his pulsating blood as his wet clothing
cooled him. Knowing he would get a chill with a prolonged stop,
he moved away from the rim of the valley. A few long strides
took him across a narrow meadow and to the edge of the dripping
woods beyond.

He was about to enter a faint trace, his right hand lifting a
snow-sodden alder branch out of his way, when a distant, muffled
boom thudded up through the valley behind him. Mattie froze
but didn't turn his head toward the sound. For several minutes he
waited, listening for the sound to come again.

When it came again he turned, and before the sound had
faded away he was standing once more on the valley edge. It had
come from the direction of the sea just a few miles away to the
west. Despite the high mountains with their deep valleys, there
was no following echo from the loud noise, just a dull roar that
hung for a while in the damp air before dissipating.

It was a ship's cannon fire. Mattie was as sure of that as if he
had been standing on the coastline watching the white men play
with their modern weapons. He had heard the sound many times
before and had once been witness to a strange event involving the
big black guns.

IT HAD BEEN A QUIET
,
WARM SUNDAY
morning that summer
past. Mattie had decided to attend Mass in his small village. The
Catholic Church had always played a big part in the lives of his
people. It was a friendship that had begun long before Mattie's
time, across the water on the mainland of Canada.

The native peoples of that vast land to the westward had no
say in the forced occupation of their country by warring nations
of white men. The two nations that were the most vicious in their
dominance of so much natural virgin wealth were the English
and the French. These two neighbouring countries had fought
against each other for centuries on the east side of the Atlantic
and now sought to extend their battlefield. They came to lord over
the land. They wanted the fish and the fur-bearing animals, the
immense tracts of timber, the stretches of fertile land. It was an
unimaginable resource to the land-hungry and resource-starved
explorers from Europe. It was a land that knew nothing of the
modern invention of steel.

The hook, the trap, and the gun would bring an ages-old
native lifestyle to an end. The invading people with the sickly
skin colour wanted to own the very land that the indigenous
peoples had occupied forever. This was a concept the natives
could not understand. How could anyone own the earth? It was
under the feet of everyone. It was a part of all of their races. The
magnificent waters running through it were like clear bloodlines
that linked humans to the Great Spirit. The white man claimed
ownership over the land that wasn't theirs to take in the first
place.

The Mi'kmaq people of which Mattie Mitchell was a part
would survive the wars, but would never be their own complete
and unique nation again. Of the two foreign nations vying for
dominance over the virgin continent, the Mi'kmaq aligned
themselves with the French, and along with them their version
of Catholicism.

Mattie knew about his people's belief in Glooscap, their
god who came from nothing. According to their ancient belief,
Glooscap was a man created from speech. Secretly, Mattie didn't
see much difference in this belief than the Christian belief. He
had never heard the priest say where God came from. He knew
God had a son who came from a woman whom had never lain
with a man and that this man and his father were supposed to
be the same person. This same God blew His breath upon the
dust of the land and created man. Mattie dared not mention the
similarities between the two beliefs. For Mattie, to sit at the back
of the church and experience the reverence of something he never
quite understood was in itself spiritual.

Several wharves jutted out into the calm Sunday morning
harbour, and as Mattie walked along he noticed a schooner was
tied securely across the head of one of the wharves. Below her
two masts, and fastened diagonally to them on the main- and fore
booms, two stained brown sails were neatly furled. Docked as it
was, the schooner and the rickety wharf had formed a T jutting
from the craggy shoreline. Mattie had always liked the little
schooners, though he had never sailed on one. Watching them
sail in and out of the bays, sometimes seeing them below him
as he stood atop a high fjord, they always seemed to be quick,
spirited things, borne freely along by a brisk wind.

As he drew nearer to the schooner, several shouting men
were hastening out onto the wharf toward it. The rickety wharf
creaked and buckled under the feet of so many hurrying men.
Mattie stopped at the wharf's entrance, and without venturing
onto it, listened to the noisy white men.

“I tells 'e 'tis no good to be wasting a cannon shot yet. 'Twill
take seven days fer a body to come afloat.”

This shout came from a bearded, burly man who had just
appeared through the slanted forecastle door. Judging by the
way the rest of the men were looking to him for answers, Mattie
guessed he was the schooner's skipper.

“Well, 'tis not shot we're asking 'e to fire from the bloody
cannon. Only a charge of black powder, is all. An' I always heard
'twould take only three days fer a drownded body to come back
up. An' 'tis been four days now since poor Walt disappeared.”

The small, skinny man who was shouting his concerns into
the captain's face seemed to be speaking for the rest of the crowd.
They all yelled in support.

The church bell started to ring across the calm, black water.
The men, some of them still standing on the wharf, some of them
aboard the schooner, all turned as one toward the sound. Mattie
stood with his hands in his pockets and continued watching. He
was amused by the loud talk and wondered what would happen
next. The ringing bell gave the captain what he thought could be
a way out of shooting his cannon.

“B'ys, can't ya hear the bell ringing? 'Tis Sunday morning,
fer gawd's sake. I can't be firing guns on Sunday morning.”

“Don't let that bother you none. 'Tis only the first bell, and
besides, that's a Catholic church. They got nothing against firing
guns on Sunday. By the time the second bell rings out we can
have it over with, an' not only that, who knows? Poor Walt could
be brought up from the deep!”

The thin man was waving his arms at the skipper, pointing at
the church and gesticulating out over the water at the same time.
Mattie knew he was cursing at the schooner skipper. Cursing was
something for which Mattie's ancient Mi'kmaq language had no
words. He had asked a white man once what he meant by those
cursing words. Most of them had been drawn from the Bible, but
the man who was so vehemently uttering them could not explain
them. Mattie observed they were usually said during bouts of
anger or excitement.

The captain mumbled something that Mattie could not hear.
Walking behind the tall mainmast of the schooner, the skipper
stopped before a small bundle covered with a tarp. Pulling the
heavy covering away from the pile, he exposed what appeared
to be a tangle of manila and hemp ropes. It took him several
minutes to reveal under the snarl of rope what indeed looked like
a small cannon.

“This is not a man-o'-war but a fishing vessel. The old whale
gun could come in handy if we are of a mind to shoot at one of
the big ones sometime.”

The captain seemed to be a bit self-conscious due to the size
of his “ship's cannon” now exposed for all to see. Some of the
men gathered around were taken aback by the small gun, but the
skinny one who had the most lip was not.

“By gawd, 'tis not the size of the gun that matters but the
bloody racket it can make. That's what we're after this marnin'.
Poor Walt loved the sound of a loud gun, he did—'twill bring
him up, fer sure.”

Mattie looked on with interest. He knew what they were about
to do. He had seen it done once before. From the few glazed
streaks of paint left on the gun, it was obvious it had once been
black. But now dark red blotches of rust dominated it's surface.
Pitted metal sores ran the length of the small cannon barrel, so
that it resembled a small cylinder of discarded metal more than
it did a cannon.