Crow Wing Water
McMillan, C. M.
MILE after mile of lonely prairie, curve after curve of tortuous, rutted wood-road, then comes the old dam at Crow Wing where the sluggish water slides lazily away, its work for man done. Some...
...Outside the little channel of clear w^ater which meanders erratically from side to side of the broad stream, thick, slimy weeds clog the oars of the unwary sportsman until he pulls like a man rowing in mush, regretting pleasanter waters...
...The last car has ground its way up the road, and silence comes, the silence of an empty world...
...It had drifted a long way from the place where a wounded crow still floundered among the deceitful green hummocks of a greedy bog...
...Adventure always lay in wait for him behind the singed tamarack tops where the crows cawed derisively, just out of range of his unready rifle...
...It is too dark to work in the garden...
...The lure of pike and crappie tempts only an occasional fisherman to labor in a flat-bottomed boat upward from the dam...
...There is a man at Crow Wing, his face and clothes weathered to the color of the sand...
...There is a woman at Crow Wing...
...for the boy was very merry, eager, like his mother, cheerful, like his father, and above all young, so young...
...For a moment there will be man's talk, of big strikes that broke the tackle, of frog bait, of small hooks for the paper-mouthed crappies...
...These will be sent upon request...
...Their heavy anchors were thrown on the sand an hour ago...
...and tiers of cord-wood, double protection against the bite of the vrind, almost hide the third wall...
...Nets are drying on the woodpile, and a few chickens peck about the sand and hop upon the boats drawn up for hire...
...Some distance above the spillway the river broadens into a lake...
...A constant thin piping sounds where small gulls dip and dart above the tiny floating islets of weed, a heron coughs raucously by the bleached grey skeleton of a fallen tree, and there are always the crows, wise, insolent, vociferous black rascals...
...Information on binding Ufill be given upon application to the offices of The Commonweal...
...The man and the woman and the boy painted the boats together, with incessant chatter...
...Indians camp there in the season of wild rice...
...the snails in the shallows...
...but at other times its shores are desolate...
...The title page and index for Volume V of The Commonweal are now ready...
...The rented boats have all come in...
...The shores of Crow Wing river are flat and featureless...
...and there at last the unwholesome mire gave up its secret, the latest defeat of life in its ceaseless battle with the earth...
...In the morning, life pulses high near the sun-bitten banks...
...The man yawns and stretches and goes into the clean kitchen to mend a net by lamplight...
...The sunfish, spinning globes of gold and blue on his line, were earnest of twenty-pounders to his brovra fingers...
...It is only when night falls and the sky joins the water that the wail of a loon seems to break the silence of an empty world...
...Arrangements have been made for binding Volume V in leather or cloth...
...When he dips a pail of minnows for their use, they will pay him, too, the cash that means tobacco and sugar...
...There they found the boy's hat...
...There was a boy at Crow Wing once, when the house was new, when there were curtains at the windows...
...Like the gaze of a creature straining at a leash her absent eyes leap past the glow of her flowers and the earth-bound promise of winter good, hastening down some road whose end is not in her garden...
...Down the long path with empty buckets, and up again, carrying the river to the thirsty ground, hoeing imtil the enclosure is as clean as her spotless kitchen, she does not stop to enjoy the reward her garden returns for her care...
...When the slither of wheels in the sand and the grind of brakes announce the arrival of a fishing party, his faded eyes brighten in eager anticipation and his lax muscles tighten...
...The woman at Crow Wing is neither young nor old...
...For hours every day he sits tilted back against the house, chewing and whittling, or leans idly on the rough fence above the sluice, throwing pebbles at the turtles...
...Her words then are few, as though she grudged the low sounds...
...The woman at Crow Wing stands motionless in the darkness, staring upstream toward the distant bog...
...Sometimes, not often, she rents the boats...
...There is a house at Crow Wing dam, set in the deep sand, so close under the road curving steeply down to the bridge that a car, overturned, would crush in the roof...
...Otter and muskrat slip quietly through the reeds, the foulsmelling snapping-turtle lays her eggs in the sand, and the striped shite-poke is busy among...
...Covered with tar-paper, built for a temporary structure, it is stained and streaked by the rain and snow of years...
...It was almost sunset before anxiety at his absence set them calling and searching,, and morning before they found his boat...
...The bank, rising abrupt and bare to the road, shelters it from the winter on two sides...
...The shores of Crow Wing grow dim behind the mist...
...Broad of shoulder, strong and supple, she cleared with her own axe the ground where she works tirelessly from the early summer dawn to the late northern twilight...
...Usually the visitors see only a shadow moving behind the curtainless window, or catch a glimpse of a shapeless garment as she strides swiftly away from them through the sand-burrs to the hidden clearing where her garden lies...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 10
