Lantern Marsh

Mauney Bard did not enjoy mending fences. They were quite essential in the general economy of farming. Without them the cows would wander where they had no business, trampling precious crops or perhaps getting mired in these infernal boglands. In principle, therefore, his present occupation was logical, but in practice it was tedious.

During the long afternoon he occasionally paused for diversion to gaze across the wide tract of verdant wilderness before him. Like a lake, choked by vegetation from beneath and strangled by determined vegetation on all sides, the Lantern Marsh surrendered its aquatic ambition. There was very little water to be seen. Only a distant glare of reflected sky remained here and there, espied between banks of thick sedges. A cruel conspiracy of nature! Acres of rice-grass and blue flags with their bayonet-like leaves stabbed up through the all-but-hidden surface, while a flat pavement of rank lilies hastened to conceal any water that dared show itself. For two gloomy miles the defeated thing extended, while outraged evergreens, ill-nourished and frantic, crowded close, like friends, to shield its perennial disgrace.

It had always been there, unexplored and forbidding, inhabited by the mud hen, the wild duck, and the blue crane. Mauney sometimes hated its desolate presence and wondered why his father’s farm had to be so near it. But the question challenged custom and actuality—things his young brain had not learned to affront.

Late in the afternoon he was roused from work by a sound as of tensed, satin fans cutting the air. He looked up to behold the broad wings of a blue crane, passing low. The rising wind which had roused it from its feeding grounds brought the dank odor of decayed poplar wood and the wild aroma of rice-grass. His eye dropped to the green waste of the marsh, brushed into fitful waves of tidal grey, and then shifted to the moving limbs of bare hemlocks and birches at the border of the swamp.

Chilled by the sharp blast, he straightened himself to his feet, his shirt moulded to the underlying sculptory of his vigorous young chest. His wind-tossed, auburn hair peeled back from his fine forehead, as his wide, blue eyes received the rugged beauty and his lips smiled from sheer visual delight. Then, as he gazed, a bright magic, bursting from the west behind him, transformed his wilderness momentarily to a static tableau of metallic gold.

It was supper time. Moments since the kitchen bell had been ringing, rocking under its cupola on the kitchen roof. His father, his brother and the hired man, fertilizing the grain field beyond the shoulder of the hill, would have heard it and be promptly on their way. After drawing on his faded coat, he picked up a pair of pliers from the ground and shoved them into the hip pocket of his overalls. He shouldered his axe and saw, then started.

The long marsh was separated from his father’s farm by the Beulah road, a narrow clay highway curving past the head of the swamp toward the village of Beulah. In the opposite direction, it ran on eventually to the town of Lockwood on the bank of the St. Lawrence. The Bard farmhouse, a prosperous red brick structure, faced the road and the swamp, presenting a stone fence of dry masonry, and within the fence an apple-orchard. At one side a lane, guarded by a board gate, led in from the road.