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The Etchemin woman heard him in such silence as one perhaps brings from making a long religious retreat, and forbore to explain that she already had the best of gifts, and was the wife of the big-legged hunter. "I myself had an aunt who, never married," warned La Hontan. "She was an excellent woman, but she turned like fruit withered in the ripening.
Now Etchemin, or canoe men, is the name given by the Micmac Indians to the race of the Abenakis, from their skill in the management of the canoe; and this race has always inhabited the river, whence one of their tribes is still called St. John's Indians.
To another island, four or five leagues in length, he gave the name of Ile des Monts Déserts , which name has been preserved. On the following day Champlain met some hunting Indians of the Etchemin tribe, proceeding from the Pentagouet River to the Mount Desert Islands.
She wound the homely chancel rail with evergreens, and put leaves and red berries on the walls, and flowers under the sacred picture; her Etchemin woman always keeping her company. Father Petit hoped to see this rough shrine become a religious seminary, and strings of women led there every day to take, like contagion, from an abbess the instruction they took so slowly from a priest.
She and the Etchemin found it a dismal place, on their first visit after the winter retreat. She reproached herself for coming so late; but day and night an influence now encompassed Madockawando's daughter which she felt as a restraint on her freedom. A voice singing softly the love-songs of southern France often waked her from her sleep.
The Etchemin made brooms of hemlock, and brushed down cobwebs and dust, and laboriously swept the rocky earthen floor, while the princess, standing upon a scaffold of split log benches, wiped the sacred picture and set a border of tender moss around it. It was a gaudy red print representing a pierced heart. The Indian girl kissed every sanguinary drop which dribbled down the coarse paper.
"Not that way they will see you they are coming from the river! Go through some other door." "Who are coming?" Yielding himself to her will, Saint-Castin hurried with her from room to room, and out through his kitchen, where the untidy implements of his Etchemin slaves lay scattered about. They ran past the storehouse, and he picked up a ladder and set it against the wall.
She often wondered that it stood; though the light materials used by aboriginal tribes, when anchored to the earth as this house was, toughly resisted wind and weather. The Etchemin sat down on the ground, and her mistress on the platform behind the chancel rail, when everything else was done, to make a fresh rope of evergreen.
"My husband is at the camps," said the Etchemin plaintively. "Besides, I am very tired." "Rest yourself, therefore, by tramping far to wait on your husband and keep his hands filled with warm sugar. I am tired, and I go to my lodge." "But there is a feast in the camps, and nobody has thought of putting a kettle on in the village. I will first get your meat ready."
She wanted to be quiet, to enjoy it. By the time they were ready to shut the door for the night the splash of a rising tide could be heard. Fog obliterated the islands, and a bleak gray twilight, like the twilights of winter, began to dim the woods. "The sagamore has made a new law," said the Etchemin woman, as they came in sight of the fort.
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