I am happy to note that Joubert the Wolf Catcher, recently released as a podcast episode of Short Story Theater, and as a brief film on YouTube, has met with some approval. Since I've had a request for the written version of it, and have never published the 3800 word story before, here is the full text of the tale, with a few pictures.
Bill Russo
January, 2020
Jobert, the Wolf Catcher
by Bill Russo (C) 2020
As late September became early October the last,
vast wilderness in the 48 United States began dressing for winter. Bulky pines, a hundred feet tall, held strong
against the cold; but the Maples, Elms, Oaks and such, quickly surrendered
their motley colored leaves to the icy rip of autumn’s frosty fingers.
The raging Allagash and St. John rivers, swollen
from late summer rains and further gorged by melting early snow from Quebec
Province, two hundred miles due southwest; formed an impassable border between
Northern Maine and Canada’s Maritime Province, New Brunswick.
Few people live in this mainly deserted area the
locals call simply ‘The County’ - Aroostook County, the upper-most part of
Maine. It’s not just the biggest county in
the State of Maine it’s one of the largest in all the ‘48’.
How big is it?
It’s so massive that you could tuck all of Rhode Island and Connecticut
inside it and still have room left over for a couple of ‘Indian’
Reservations.
Francois Joubert knew about the reservations from
stories his mother told. She was half Wompanoag, a Native American tribe best
known for helping the “Pilgrims” of the Plymouth Colony survive their first
winter in what the invaders called the “New World”.
In little more than a generation, most of the men, women,
and children of the tribe were killed off or sold into slavery by the Europeans
during the expansion of their settlements from Plymouth into Boston and
beyond.
Some few fortunate strays,
including his mother’s ancestors made it safely to Maine, which at the time was
a distant outpost of Massachusetts.
His father was a mix of French Canadian and Maine
Arcadian – part of a small band of people who lived on either side of the
border between Canada and the U.S. They
were dual citizens who really didn’t consider themselves residents of either
nation, but simply habitants of their own unique area – the region surrounding
the St. John River.
As a young man, Joubert spent time in the Canadian
cities of Montreal, Edmundston, and Halifax before drifting back into
Maine. He journeyed all the way down to
Bangor, before heading back North, skirting the border in the towns of
Madawaska and Fort Kent.
He was drawn to the solitude of the dense wilderness
of the Allagash country. It’s a massive unincorporated area south and west of
Fort Kent, the last town before the area gives way to untouched forests that
look the same as they did the year Columbus stumbled into America. The region, devoid of a single village, is
inhabited only by trappers, hunters, fishermen, loggers, and a handful of
farmers.
Joubert claimed and cleared a few acres of land near
a small pond, built a sturdy log home, and began farming the one crop that
loves the frigid Maine climate and its rocky soil, potatoes.
To augment his income as well as his larder, he
began hunting and trapping. Moose, deer,
bear and smaller animals were plentiful.
He never really got commercially involved in these pursuits, mostly just
taking what his own needs dictated.
With his first harvest loaded on a horse-drawn
wagon, Francois Joubert made his way to Madawaska, the Northern most city in
the United States. A pretty village consisting of one main street and a dozen
smaller side streets, it’s perched on
the American side of the St. John River at the peak of the state across from
the Canadian city of Edmundston, New Brunswick.
A cooperative bought his harvested spuds and put
them on a train with those of other farmers and railed them 500 miles down to
Boston where they’d find fame on grocer’s shelves all around the nation as
“Maine Potatoes”.
During the winter season with its short days of
sub-zero temperatures and snowfalls often counted in yards instead of feet and
inches, the young farmer concentrated on improving his holdings. He finished
construction of a barn that he framed and roofed before the first ice and snow.
Inside the cabin, he laid a wooden floor and crafted shelving for his walls, a
bureau with four large and two small drawers, and even a bookcase.
Inside the log house, a warm fired burned steadily
24 hours a day, with wood taken from the mountain of logs laboriously cut and
split in the odd moments between the various other jobs the farm required. Nights after supper were also reserved for
chopping and splitting.
In an area where the temperature in January and
February can easily drop to ten, twenty, or even 30 below zero, having an ample
supply of firewood is the difference between life and death.
Joubert started stacking the firewood against the
side of the house to the left of his front door. He made a pile of split logs six feet high
and four feet wide. Within a week the
stack resembled a railroad boxcar built entirely of logs. In a month, the thick pile had the appearance
of a wooden train snaking around the front of the house and hugging the side and
rear walls until it nearly reached the back door.
By the end of August the whole cabin was surrounded
by a stack of split logs that ended up being six feet wide as well as six feet
high. You could barely see the cabin for
the great wall of wood.
In mid-September the fireplace had eaten its way
through the entire section from the front door to the East side of the
cabin. The supply on the left side
lasted until Columbus Day when the first big snowfall came.
Joubert was concerned. About one fourth of his firewood was gone
with four months to go until March. When
the weather allowed, he gathered and split as much additional wood as he could.
As he crossed the weeks off the calendar the wooden
wall of firewood became increasingly smaller, yet when March came, he happily
found he still had about ten feet of fuel left.
By May or June every spring, Joubert set out for town
to trade hides for supplies. It was on
one of these trips, just before his fourth harvest, he met Jolene Bouvier.
A tiny lady of slightly less than five feet, she had
shiny black hair that curled around her face like a beautiful onyx frame. She
was light skinned but had enormous black eyes that hinted at an American Indian
heritage similar to Joubert’s. Her frame was generously filled but not overly
so.
Just eighteen, she recently left an orphanage where
she spent most of her life and hired on as a clerk in Madawaska at Daigle’s General
Store on Main, across from Fifth Street.
She wore a frilly white blouse with a black skirt of
the length dictated by the times – a few inches below the knee. Skirt hemlines had been going up rapidly in
recent decades, rising from the floor to their present height in just 30 years.
Though Joubert loved the way the lady was dressed he
had no idea of fashion. He merely knew
that he had fallen in love just like in the story books – at first sight.
As for the way he looked, it was typical Maine
farmer consisting of dungarees,
battered slouch hat, and a dark cotton shirt, with beat up, ratty boots on his
feet. He was fairly large for the times,
almost five foot nine inches tall, with a weight of about 160. His face was handsome though his beard and
mustache seriously needed looking after. The hair on his head was shaggy and
unkempt. But Jolene saw through the
haystack on his face and head and spied the inside man. She liked what she detected.
For Joubert who had known few women and Jolene who
had known even fewer men, it was indeed, love from the get-go. They were married within six months of that
first meeting and were happy in the wilderness cabin. She worked hard inside to make it the very
best house possible. He labored hard
outside to make the farm as bountiful as it could be.
Things were going well until he took Jolene along
with him when he went trapping. She wept
at the agonizing sight of a wolf cub, desperately trying to free himself from
the sharp steel teeth of a trap. His leg
bled profusely from the trap as well as from his trying to gnaw it off to gain
freedom.
Jolene pleaded with Francois to release the pup,
giving it the name, ‘Little One’. He
did even better. To her delight, he took
the young wolf home and kept it in the house, treating it like a puppy dog while
it healed and for some time afterwards until it got near its full growth.
When Little One was almost an adult, Francois put a
scarf-like expandable collar around its neck, which would grow as the animal
did. Joubert and Jolene released their
four pawed pal in deep woods three miles from their log house.
For months afterwards the wolf returned home every
day or two. Upon spying him in the yard, happily the Jouberts dashed outside with
their hands full of treats. Little One,
growing strong and bulky, came right up to them, ate from their hands, and played
just like when he was a puppy. Finally
the wolf came no more and they were sad but speculated he probably found a mate
and made a new life
.
Jolene pleaded with Francois to promise that he
would never trap another animal. He consented
and did even more. One day a week,
usually on a Sunday, he tramped for miles to rescue unfortunate creatures caught
in snares. Many times he found and freed
foxes, deer, and other animals.
Whenever he came upon an entrapped young wolf, he
put one of his flexible red and yellow scarf-collars on it, just like the one
that Little One wore. Afterwards he’d bring the pup home to Jolene who was
always excited to have a new ‘foster child’ to care for until it got big enough
to be sent back to the forest.
The farm was prosperous and doing so well that a
sizeable stack of currency accumulated in their account at the Aroostook County
National Bank. Their output was always
the most spuds per acre of any farm in Maine and they received the highest
prices at the potato co-op.
One thing marred their happiness, they didn’t have children. The doctor in Madawaska tested them and
confirmed what they already knew, they couldn’t have kids. Francois was not capable of planting a child-seed
and even if he were, Jolene would not have been able to grow it.
Saddened but not bogged down by self pity, Jolene
suggested that they adopt a child. After
being abandoned at age five by her mother, Jolene spent thirteen years in the
orphanage. She told Francois of the pain
of ‘adoption showcase days’.
What’s ‘adoption showcase days’ Jolene?
“It’s when prospective parents come to the home to
look at the children who are paraded in front of them. The people ask
questions. All the kids hope to be the
one selected for a new home, but only the funniest, cutest, or youngest get
picked.
“I went through this 50 times a year without ever
being picked. When I was thirteen and
starting to become a woman, the men began to take an interest in me and I got
scared. It seemed like I was going to be
adopted – but for the wrong reasons.
After a few of these uncomfortable interviews, I refused to participate
in them anymore.
“Did they try to force you? Did the people at the orphanage threaten
you?”
“Yes they tried punishment and that didn’t
work. I still refused. Then they tried bribery. They said they would give me things. Dresses, special privileges, even money if I
would agree to the presentation parade.
I still declined. As soon as I turned 18 and was legally able to do so,
I left that horrid place.”
Francois and Jolene decided to adopt. In the winter, a few weeks before they were
scheduled for final approval Jolene came down with a fever. She was dizzy and her face was sunburn red.
The fever shot up higher.
Confused and
barely conscious, she was losing ground fast. Francois bundled her up and took
her by horse and buggy fifty miles to Fort Kent, the nearest settlement. He got
her to the doctor’s office but there was nothing to be done. Within a day she succumbed to some kind of a
flu bug.
Being that it was mid-winter in an area where the
record low temperature is 41 degrees below zero, nobody could be buried until spring
because of the frozen ground. The doctor informed Francois that he would put
Jolene’s body in a barn that served as a morgue storage area. Already, there
were four or five others inside who had died earlier that winter and who also
were awaiting burial in the warm season.
“No. Never! My wife is not going to spend the winter
in there. I’ll take her back with me.”
He did it too.
He brought her home and gently placed her on the couch in the living
room. He wanted to keep her for a while
longer so he didn’t build a fire.
“It’s cold tonight dear,” he said to his lifeless
wife. “Seventeen degrees in the house, but that’s good honey. It means I can keep you here by my side. I don’t want to let go.”
Though he was out of his mind with grief in a few
days Francois realized that he had to put Jolene in the barn, until the passing
of the cold season. Reluctantly he dressed
her in her prettiest outfit and kissed her lips one last time, before wrapping
her in thick blankets. Finally he added
a few layers of canvas and lovingly placed his wife on a potato sorting table
in the rear of the barn.
Months later, on a warm day in June he buried her in
the yard behind the cabin.
At the head
of her grave he set a headstone into the ground. Purchased in Portland, the marker was
engraved…
Here
lies Jolene Bouvier Joubert
Born:
Somewhere - Place and time unknown
Died:
Right here before she was barely grown
Loved:
By her husband and everyone else she met
Never:
Will I wed again. “Jolene, I’ll never forget”
Francois
Joubert: 19--
He was now alone, but Francois still set a place for
Jolene at dinner every night. Speaking across the table to her empty chair, he
said…
“You’ll be very proud of me this year Jolene. The new crop is coming along even better than
the last one. I pulled up a few sample potatoes
today and each one is perfect. It’s
going to be a great harvest.”
It turned out even better. At Madawaska he beat his old record, selling
his entire harvest for the highest prices ever given to an Aroostook
farmer. After the sale, with little to
do until spring, Francois devoted more time to animal rescue.
Winter always comes early in the Northern-most part
of the United States, but the first winter after Jolene’s death, it came even sooner. Francois knew from the clouds in the sky that
snow was probable. It’s not uncommon,
even in September or October, for the ‘County’ to have a snowfall of a foot or
more in just a few hours.
Francois was twenty miles from home. In his arms he held a newly rescued, badly
wounded wolf pup. It appeared that the
animal resting in his arms had been in the trap for a long time. Besides the blood loss, the pup was further
weakened by having had neither food nor water. It was barely alive.
In the far North, night comes quickly in October and
Francois didn’t want to try to start the trek back to the cabin on a night with
a strong possibility of a blizzard.
He found shelter under the branches of a stout pine
tree. The lowest limbs were about four
feet from the ground. The clear space beneath them afforded the best
opportunity to wait out the weather.
The storm began at twilight and plunged the
temperature to near zero. The
earsplitting, howling wind picked up and battered the sturdy pine. Francois had his sleeping blankets, but
fighting against the frigid temperatures and the gale force winds was a losing
battle.
The snow raced down at the rate of an inch every fifteen
minutes, blasted into the ground by gusts of up to sixty miles per hour. By eleven p.m. more than a foot of snow had fallen. Sculpted by the wind, it drifted up as high
as five feet around the tree. Becoming a solid white wall around the old pine,
the snow formed an igloo of sorts, surrounding the lower branches.
“We’re in luck Little One,” he said to the pup. “Nature
has built us a snow fort. We’re walled
in and it will get warmer in here now that we’re not getting struck by that
fierce wind. We’ll be just fine. Let me
get a bit of bacon out of my pack for you.
You can have a little midnight snack before we try to sleep till
morning.”
Francois watched the bright eyed pup happily munch
the bacon and then close his eyes in a peaceful sleep. There was a noise in the distance. With a gloved hand he dug a small hole in the
snow wall and pushed an opening through.
Clear sky and a glowing half-full moon lit up the area making it as
bright as morning twilight. The snow glistened like icing on a candled cake,
revealing a beautiful landscape of frosty white with green bumps where pines
pushed through at irregular intervals
Francois heard a noise far off. Dim and muffled as it was, he wasn't sure. Wolves? No, probably the wind.
.
The racket was getting louder. For a second or two, he thought it could be people, but soon he
realized it was the din of desperate, baying wolves. Half starved by the shortage of winter food,
the always dangerous pack was made even more so by their ravenous hunger.
The howling and growling of the approaching animals grew
more intense. He could hear the pack
leader barking orders. The pack noted the
yelps of their commander and responded with eerie howls of their own that
gained in volume as the beasts came within a hundred yards of Joubert’s hiding
place.
“They smell us Little One,” he told the cub in his
arms. “They’re coming for us. Back before I met Jolene I always travelled
with my rifle and pistol. I stopped
using weapons when Jolene made me realize I don’t want to hurt any living
creature ever again. Little One, I still
don’t. But if I had a weapon I could
fire it in the air when they try to close in on us and maybe that would scare
them off.”
The pack closed in for the kill. The leader plowed his way through the snow
surrounding the thick branches of the sheltering tree. Once inside, the creature slowly advanced on Francois.
The huge wolf opened its mouth revealing razor sharp teeth powered by a jaw strong
enough to snap a two by four. A ray of
moonlight danced across the neck and head of the ravenous wolf. Francois noticed something odd. He spotted a scarf-like
collar around the wolf’s neck. He
couldn’t be sure but it looked like there were splashes of red and yellow.
“Red and yellow?
Just like the colors on the collar I put on Little One. Little One?
Is it you? It can’t be.”
Ready to lunge, the wolf froze, looking closely at
Francois. It got so close that he could feel the hot breath steaming out of the
big animal’s mouth. It sniffed him.
Suddenly the wolf let out a squeal and a yelp and
began licking Francois’ face.
“Little One it is you! It’s so good to see you,” shouted a shocked and
happy Francois. He began patting the big
wolf and scratching him under his chin just like when he was a puppy.
The rest of the pack jammed into that space between
the ground and the lower most branches.
Under a signal from Little One they all huddled closely around Francois
and the new Little One, keeping them warm and safe until morning when the sun
lifted the temperature above freezing.
By the light of day, Francois could see that two
other wolves, younger than the original Little One, also wore red and yellow collars. They too were the product of his rescue
efforts, and happily joined the original ‘Little One’ in a session of nuzzling
and chin scratching with their old pal.
Francois took his supply of ham and bacon from his
pack and happily shared it with his friends.
After they ate, Francois said to the original Little One, “Take me home old
friend”.
With Little One leading the way, the pack formed a
column of two and began marching towards Francois’ cabin. There were fifteen wolves in Little One’s pack
and they acted like a plow pushing aside the heavy snow and making a clear path
for Francois and the newest “Little One”, still cradled in his arms.
The long, furry column with Little One at the head
and Francois at the tail moved quickly, reaching the farm shortly before dark. Francois threw open the cabin door and
invited the entire pack inside where he spread plates and cups all over the
floor, filling them with food and water. The wolves ate heartily and much more
civilly than might be expected. After
the meal he set a roaring blaze in the hearth and the entire pack, as well as
Francois and the new ‘Little One’, stretched out in front of the fire and slept
soundly through the night.
In the morning Francois fed the wolves again, heaping
the dishes full of beef, ham, spuds, and bacon.
After the morning meal the original Little One got up on his back feet
and put his front paws on Francois’ shoulder.
Stretched out like that, he was so large that he towered over Francois
by nearly a foot. Little One licked
Francois’ face for several seconds then gave a short bark which brought the
pack to attention.
With a final nuzzle, the shaggy canine headed for
the door. Francois opened it and patted
each and every wolf as they filed through and headed back to their range.
“Come back in about six months Little One,” he
shouted. “The new Little One will be big enough to join your pack by then.”
The
End
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