Category: Short Stories

The Chase of Saint-Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World

The waiting April woods, sensitive in every leafless twig to spring, stood in silence and dim nightfall around a lodge. Wherever a human dwelling is set in the wilderness, it becomes, by the very humility of its proportions, a prominent and aggressive point. But this lodge of...

Chapters

8. Part 8

The woman had disappeared in underbrush, but, surrounded by hunters in full chase, she came running out, and fell on her hands, making a hoarse noise in her throat. As she looke...

9. Part 9

And as soon as Claudis Beauvois was out of sight, Gabriel Chartrant followed with his dozen French Puants, in feathers and buckskin, all smeared with red and yellow ochre, well...

6. Part 6

Keen stars held the sky at immeasurable heights. There was no mist. The chill wind had swept the river clear like a great path. Within reach of Jeannette's hand, but hidden from...

5. Part 5

Laurent's wound was serious. After all his exertions he fainted; but Angèle took his head upon her knee, and the fathers and mothers and neighbors swarmed around him, and Father...

7. Part 7

"I have never tried to chain you." Her husband approached, shaking his finger at her. "There is not another woman in the settlement who has her way as you have. And see how you...

4. Part 4

Night pressed against the unblinded window. A stir, not made by the wind, was heard at the door, and Frontenac, and Frontenac's Récollet confessor, and Sainte-Hélène's two broth...

2. Part 2

She looked at him in a way that made his face scorch. He remembered the year wife, the half-year wife, and the two-months wife at Pentegoet. These three squaws whom he had allow...

3. Part 3

Gaspard's farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long. It was one of several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights east of Beauport which rise to Montmoren...

10. Part 10

Though the joy of shoeing her brothers was not to be put off, she had not intended to let them keep on these precious brogans of civilization while they played beside the water....

1. Part 1

The waiting April woods, sensitive in every leafless twig to spring, stood in silence and dim nightfall around a lodge. Wherever a human dwelling is set in the wilderness, it be...

11. Part 11

The humid blockhouse and walls of the fort high above the bay began to glisten in emerging sunlight, and Jenieve determined not to be hard on Mama Lalotte that day. If Michel ca...