Chapter IV: Painted Rock

Then the North took us,
Forced us through rocky walls,
Tore at our tires,
Gave us no inch of earth
Upon our steady climb.
Yet even here, beside the cruel road,
Were scraggy plots of farm,
And wood-piles neatly stacked,
And shacks, and gloomy faces.
Then an acre of more fertile land,
Pine trees and woods,
And suddenly, like a blue cup held high,
The lake Mazinawa ...
All silence, silence, silence--
Dark colours filling the blue cup.
And, like a purple stain against the sunset,
The great rock of Mazinawa,
Sacred to Indian tribes how long ago!
A thousand years ago?
Why should one care to know!

It looms up larger than I dreamed;
Roadways of rock
And canyons full of light;
Niched balconies for pines bent all one way;
Small birds in flight,
Dashing against the dark
Of that vast rocky flank,
Whose sides of iron seams,
Laid under golden lichen,
Have been a place of dreams
And of brute sacrifice.
What if it has a power to draw us near
As in the days of fear?
When from the rocklands of the Georgian Bay
Or through the bush roads whence we came to-day,
But then on foot, soft-padding all the way,
Or in the war canoes
They crowded to this small blue lake of theirs
And an old shrine ...
What are we floating towards
In this small, low canoe?
A naked, ceremonial singing past
Seems to reach out and whisper.

STUDY IN SHADOWS

_The Rock at Bon Echo_