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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Well, I've said it all, I guess. You understand what you've got to do? Good-by and good luck. You're the keeper of the light now." "Good luck," said Fortin, "I am going to keep it." The same day he shut up the red house on the beach and moved to the white house on the island with Marie-Anne, his wife, and the three girls, Alma, aged seventeen, Azilda, aged fifteen, and Nataline, aged thirteen.
But no; he chose the little Marcel again; the boy wanted to go, and he had earned the right. Besides, he and Nataline had struck up a close friendship on the island, cemented during the winter by various hunting excursions after hares and ptarmigan. Marcel was a skilful setter of snares.
When it faded, my mother Nataline went to the window, and there on the floor, in a little red pool, she found the body of a dead cross-bill, all torn and wounded by the glass through which it had crashed. She took it up and fondled it. Then she gave a great sigh, and went to my father Marcel and kneeled beside him.
The boat ought to be able to run down the shore in good time. One evening as Nataline came down from her sleep she saw Marcel coming up the rocks dragging a young seal behind him. "Hurra!" he shouted, "here is plenty of meat. I shot it out at the end of the island, about an hour ago." But Nataline said that they did not need the seal. There was still food enough in the larder.
Marcel and Nataline were coming up from the point of the island, where they had been watching for their seal. She was singing "Mon pere n'avait fille que moi, Encore sur la mer il m'envoi-e-eh!" When she saw the boat she stopped short for a minute. "Well," she said, "they find us awake, n'est-c'pas?
And the birds visit the island, not in great flocks as formerly, but still plenty of them, long-winged waterbirds in the summer, and in the spring and fall short-winged landbirds passing in their migrations the children and grandchildren, no doubt, of the same flying families that used to pass there fifty years ago, in the days when Nataline Fortin was "The Keeper of the Light."
But though they were hungry, they were not starving. And Nataline still played the fife. She jested, she sang, she told long fairy stories while they sat in the kitchen. Marcel admitted that it was not at all a bad arrangement. But his thoughts turned very often to the arrival of the supply-boat. He hoped it would not be late. The ice was well broken up already and driven far out into the gulf.
"It is a bird, m'sieu'," said Baptiste, "only a little bird. The light draws them, and then it blinds them. Most times they fly against the big lantern above. But now and then one comes to this window. In the morning sometimes after a big storm we find a hundred dead ones around the tower." "But, oh," cried Nataline, "the pity of it! I can't get over the pity of it.
She refused to be put off with a shorter spell than the other girls. "No," she cried, "I can do it as well as you. You think you are so much older. Well, what of that? The light is part mine; father said so. Let me turn, va-t-en." When the first glimmer of the little day came shivering along the eastern horizon, Nataline was at the crank. The mother and the two older girls were half asleep.
A self-appointed committee of three, with Thibault at the head, waited upon Nataline without delay, told her their plan, and asked for the key. She thought it over silently for a few minutes, and then refused point-blank. "No," she said, "I will not give the key. That oil is for the lamp.
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