A small, rocky island in a lake, a canoe paddling away across the blue water, a woman standing on a narrow strip of beach, looking after it. I was the woman left on the shore, the canoe held my companions of the past summer, the island was to be my home until another summer should bring them back again.

There is no denying that I was frightened as I turned back along the trail toward the little house among the birches. It was hard work to keep from jumping into a boat and putting out after the canoe that was rounding the point and leaving me alone.

Little chilly fears laid icy fingers on the back of my neck. A shadow slipped between the trees; a sigh whispered among the leaves. I wanted to see all round me; I wanted to put my back against a wall. A little, grinning goblin of a misgiving stuck out an impudent tongue as it quoted some of the jeers of unsympathetic friends and relatives, who had derided my plan for borrowing the camp, when summer was gone, and staying on alone at the Lake of Many Islands.

“Good-by,” had smiled my sister. “You say you mean to stay a year, but you’ll tire of solitude long before the winter. We’ll see you back at Thanksgiving.”

It was only mid-September, but I wanted to see her then at that very instant.

There had been a farewell dinner, the family assembled, to prophesy disaster.

“You’ll freeze your nose and ears off,” mourned a reassuring aunt.

In vain I reminded her that no inhabitant seen in five summers’ sojourn at the lake had been without a nose or ears; all had had the requisite number of features, although some of those same features had withstood the cold of well-nigh a hundred winters. But she was not consoled, and continued to regard me so tearfully that I felt sure that she was bidding farewell to my nose.

“You’ll break a leg and lie for days before anyone knows you are hurt,” said Cousin John.

“You’ll be snowed in and no one will find you until spring,” said Brother Henry.

“You are a city woman and not strong. What do you know of a pioneer’s life? It is the most foolish plan we ever heard of,” chorused all.

Descending from prophecy to argument, they continued:

“Of course you will have a telephone.”

“That I will not,” I answered. “I have been jerked at the end of a telephone wire for years. I want rest.”

“At least you will have a good dog. That will be some protection.”

“A dog would drive away all the wild things. I want to study them,” I objected.

“Then, for mercy’s sake, find some other woman to stay there with you. Surely there is another lunatic willing to freeze to death on the precious island. You should have a companion, if only to send for help.”

“I don’t want a companion,” I protested, tearfully. “I won’t be responsible for another person’s comfort or safety. I will do this thing alone or not at all.”

“I am tired to death,” I stormed. “I need rest for at least one year. I want to watch the procession of the seasons in some place that is not all paved streets, city smells and noise. Instead of the clang of car bells and the honk of automobile horns, I want to hear the winds sing across the ice fields, instead of the smell of asphalt and hot gasoline, I want the odor of wet earth in boggy places. I have loved the woods all my life, I long to see the year go round there just once before I die.”

At which outburst they shrugged exasperated shoulders and were silent, but each one drew me aside, at parting, and pressed a gift into my hand.

“Be sure to let us know if anything goes wrong. Write to us if you need the least thing. Don’t be ashamed to come back, if the experiment proves a failure”—and so on and so on, God bless them!

Of all this the bogy reminded me as he danced ahead up the winding trail.

The house looked lonely, even in the brightness of the late afternoon. I hurried supper, to be indoors before the twilight fell. Big Canadian hares hopped along the paths and sat at the kitchen door, their great eyes peering, long, furry ears alert, quivering noses pressed against the wire screen. Grouse pecked on the hill side, as tame as barnyard fowl. From the water came the evening call of the loons.The scant meal finished, I ran across the platform from the kitchen to the main house and locked up. Somehow, I did not want any open doors behind me that evening. Then I loaded the pistol and laid it on a shelf at the head of the bed, along with the Bible and the Prayer Book. If any marauder could know how dreadfully afraid I am of that pistol, he would do his marauding with a quiet mind. I never expect to touch that weapon. It shall be cleaned and oiled when any of the men come over from the mainland, but handle it—never! I would not fire it for a kingdom.

While it was still light I climbed into bed, and lay down rigid, with tight-shut eyes, trying to pretend I did not hear all the rustling, creaking, snapping noises in the woods. Heavy animals pushed through the fallen leaves. Something that sounded as large as a moose went crashing through the dry bushes.

“A rabbit,” I whispered to myself.

Creatures surely as large as bears rushed through the underbrush.

“Grouse,” I tried to believe.

From the lake came stealthy sounds.

“Driftwood pounding against the rocks, not really oars,” I murmured to my thumping heart.

Then light, pattering footsteps on the porch.

In desperation I raised my head and looked out. It was a little red fox, trotting busily along, snuffling softly as he went. I lay down and closed my eyes firmly, determined not to open them again no matter what might happen, then must have dozed, for, suddenly I was aware of a light that flooded all the room.

There through the northeast window, large and round and beautiful, shone the moon, the great Moon of the Falling Leaves. It was like the sudden meeting with a friend, reassuring, comforting. A broad band of light lay across my breast like a kind arm thrown over me. The path of the moonbeams on the water seemed the road to some safe haven. With the moon’s calm face looking in and the soft lapping of the waves as lullaby, I fell asleep—and lo! it was day.

This house, the living room of the camp, that is to be my home for the coming winter, stands on a bluff overhanging the lake. It is a one-room shack, 16×20 feet, surrounded by an eight-foot porch. It is one-storied, shingled, the porch roof upheld by birch log pillars, beautiful still clothed in their silvery bark. There are eight windows, two in each corner, and through some of them the sun is always shining.

Adjoining this main shack and connected with it by an uncovered platform are the kitchen and storeroom, but these will not be used in winter. The stores and I will have to stay in the big house if we are not to freeze.

From these buildings little trails run off through the woods to the dock, the pump, the summer sleeping shacks, and a path goes all round the island close to the shore. Away from these beaten tracks are all sorts of hidden nooks and lovely, dim seclusions.

This little rocky island, one of scores that dot the face of the lake, is all a tangle of ferns and vines and wildflowers. It is thickly wooded with white birch, poplar and wild cherry. There are also oaks, maples, pines, and great clumps of basswood, and innumerable little cedars are pushing up everywhere.

Making a way through the overgrown paths in the early morning, I break through myriads of spiderwebs, stretched across from bushes heavy with dew. They feel like the tiniest of fairy fingers brushing my cheek, and laid on my eyelids, light as the memory of a caress. Butterflies dressed in black velvet, with white satin frills and sapphire jewels, flutter on ahead, and the stems of the birches are seen through a gold-green glow, like sunlight shining through clear water. When I sit on the sandy bottom, with the whole lake for my washpot, small fishes, wearing coral buttons and jade green ruffles on fins and tails, bump their blunt noses against my knees.

Sounds from the mainland come across the lake, blurred and indistinct. On the island I hear only the wind in the trees, the water beating against the stones, and the hum of many insect wings.

There is something queer about the island. I am convinced that it stands on some magnetic pole or other, that puts every clock and watch out of order as soon as it is landed here. Cheap or fine, every timepiece breaks a mainspring, and then we fall back on the sundial to tell us what’s o’clock. We can always know when it is noon, provided the weather be sunny. When it is cloudy we guess at the time and wait for the next fine day.This sundial stands in a clearing beside the house, and bears for its motto, not the high-sounding Latin quotation that seems to belong to sundials, but the trite assertion, “Time is valuable.” A statement wholly untrue, so far as this present life of mine is concerned. A fine bass, now, or a tin of beans perhaps is valuable, but surely not time, in a place where there is nothing to do but eat, sleep, and think.

Yet when I stood to-day, on this lonely bit of land, in the midst of an empty lake, waiting for the shadow to travel to the mark, I seemed to catch, for one fleeting instant, some idea of the terrible, inexorable passing of the hours.

“Set thy house in order, set thy house in order,” something seemed to say, “for never, for thee, shall the shadow turn back upon the dial.” In that moment I stood alone in space, on this old clock the earth, swinging with the whirling of the spheres.

The lake too has its mystery, a strange light that shines from the point of one of the islands. No one lives on that land; there is no farmhouse near it on the shore, nor is it in line with any dwelling whose light could seem to glimmer from its point. The flare is too high and too steady for fox-fire, the glow that comes from rotting wood, and though men say they have explored the place repeatedly, there has never been any sign of a campfire there. But every now and again that light shines by night, like a beacon, and no one has ever explained it.

Perhaps it is the phantom of the council fire, round which the red warriors sat in the days when this land was theirs. For there were Indians hereabout, and not so very long ago; and people on the mainland tell of a great fight that raged here when a band of the Mississagua Nation, led by the chief White Eagle, fought with an invading war party and of a day of battle from dawn until the going down of the sun when the lake was red with blood. On the sheer face of the cliff of the opposite island are red veinings in the rock. If one pretends very hard, they are pictures of two war canoes left there by some artist of the tribe. The people here believe in them devoutly.

“They were painted in blood,” they say.

A very indelible blood it must have been, for those tracings have withstood the wash of high water for many a year.Whether the picture writing is genuine or no, there is plenty of evidence that Indians lived along the shores of Many Islands, and there is a pretty story told of the wedding of a girl, White Eagle’s daughter, to a young brave of her tribe. The Indians came down the lakes and through the portages to Queensport, in their fine canoes, and the lovers were married there by the priest at the mission. Afterward they were all entertained at dinner by the big-hearted wife of the principal merchant of the town. That lady’s daughter tells me that for many seasons thereafter the chief’s daughter would bring or send beautiful birch baskets, filled with berries or maple sugar for the children of her hostess.

The bride is described as slim and young, with big, dark eyes. The wedding dress was dark blue cloth, trimmed with new-minted five- and ten-cent pieces, pierced and sewed on in a pattern—this worn over a vest of buckskin, beautifully embroidered.

What became of you, little Indian Bride, girl of the grateful heart? Were you happy here at Many Islands, or was it life-blood of your brave that helped to redden all the waters? Did you move back and back with your wandering people, or are you lying under the cedars on some green slope of the shore? I shall never know, but I shall think of you and wonder.

There are no Indians here now, except one old squaw, who lives far back on the road to Maskinonge and tans buckskins in the fine old Indian way, but the plow turns up the arrowheads, and once in a while a bowl or pipe, proofs that the red men lived and fought here.