No Great Mischief Read Online Free PDF Page A

the embedded axe from the chopping block.
    “I don’t really know,” he said. “It’s just the word they always used, ‘shallop.’ It’s sort of a small open boat. You can row it or use sails. Sort of like a dory. I think it’s originally a French word.”
    As I gathered the kindlings that fell from his axe, another V of geese flew north. These seemed somehow lower, and it was almost as if one could hear the strong and regulated “whoosh” of their grasping, powerful, outstretched wings.
    One sees the little group of people even now, as if we could, in imagination’s mist, rowing or sailing in their shallop or shallops across the choppy fall sea. Looking along the Cape Breton coastline, which would become the future subject of “Chi
Mi Bhuam
,” although they had no way of knowing that then. Nor did they know, probably, that once they landed they would be there “forever” – none of them in that boat ever returning to the mainland during their natural lives. One sees them with the “saved” dog, perhaps, in the shallop’s prow, the wind spray flattening the hair along her skull while she scanned the wooded coastline with her dark intelligent eyes. When the boat landed on the gravelled strand, the cousins who had written the Gaelic letter and the Micmacs who were at home “in the land of trees” helped them ashore and continued to help them through that first long winter.
    Official settlement was not appreciated in Cape Breton at that time because of the many political and colonial uncertainties, but in 1784 Cape Breton was constituted a British province and those who were already “inhabitants” petitioned for the land they had been working.
Calum Ruadh
, after walking the hundred or so miles to Sydney, received “the paper” outlining in some formal sense his land in “the colony of Cape Breton.” He wassixty years old at the time. Thirty-six years later, after Cape Breton was re-annexed to Nova Scotia in 1820, he obtained new papers for the new province, but by this time there were local magistrates and he did not have to walk. It was probably just as well, as he was ninety-six at the time of the re-annexation and he had been in the New World for forty-one years. He continued to live for another fourteen years, giving his life a strange sort of balanced structure; living to be one hundred and ten years old; fifty-five in Scotland and a second fifty-five “in the land across the sea.” Of the second fifty-five, he spent five as a sort of energetic squatter and thirty-six as a “citizen of Cape Breton” and fourteen as a citizen of Nova Scotia. When he died, in 1834, it was thirty-three years before Confederation.
    He was never a married man in the new country and that is, perhaps, why his grave seems doubly lonely, set as it is on the farthest jutting headland that points out to the sea, where it is caught by all of the many varying winds. Most of his children are buried in the early “official” graveyards beside their wives and husbands and sometimes, in the larger plots, surrounded by their own children and children’s children as well. Families in death, as they were in life. But
Calum Ruadh
is buried all alone, apparently where he wanted to be, marked only by a large boulder with the hand-chiselled letters which give his name and dates and the simple Gaelic line:
Fois do t’anam
. Peace to his Soul.

In
the years that followed, some of
Calum Ruadh’s
many descendants expanded his original land holdings, while others moved farther along the coast and others deeper inland. Nearly all of them had large families, which led in turn to complex interrelationships and complicated genealogies, over all of which his name continued to preside. I remember as a high-school athlete, travelling to hockey games in communities which seemed a great distance away, sometimes playing in arenas but more often on windswept ponds beside the sea. And after our games we would be invited into the homes of our