L’Islet sits on the windswept south shore of the St. Laurence, where it passes from river to estuary, and the low mountains of the Laurentians rise twenty kilometres across the water and the small islands in a dark blue haze of late spring.
We’re in Cap-St-Ignace at our little chalet, in Quebec for a wedding. The wind is humid and cold, coming up the river, heading south, and long low muddy waves splash against the outcrops of red rocks on the shore. Down the road about a kilometre still stands the old mill tower which held a windmill and was the heart of the fiefdom: the seigneurie, the Domaine of Vincelotte. This was one of the first in New France, and dates back to 1672. The seigneir, or feudal lord, owned all the lands and you can still see the long narrow strips of farms that combed back from the river. There were no roads for a long time. The river, instead, was the road and trade was moved by barge and canoe.
The habitants would farm in the summer, never so much, since the feudal taxes system did not motivate production. And in the winters the men would go off to work their trap lines, up river, past the narrows at Quebec and the big city at Montreal, to the Indian territory. Hunting for furs to earn their winter’s keep. They were the original trappers. When the British pushed in from Hudson Bay they were a thousand kilometres father inland than the French. And as the beaver were hunted to extinction around the Great Lakes, the men here would sign on as labourers and paddlers to move men and materiel deeper into the continent. The voyageurs.
They would return here in the winters, since travel was only during the summer months. Which is now why the farming was never as productive as it was around Toronto. The people here live in old houses, on land demarked centuries ago. Our chalet came down through my wife’s family. They’ve been here in L’Islet for fourteen generations. There is no memory of France. Just here. The people around here are friendly, there is little English spoken. It was an isolated patch of farming during the conquest, and even now it feels that way, even if it is connected by two highways, it is still a side-stop on the way to the Maritimes or the Chic-chocs. I think people here like it that way. They are insular. Farms here are quiet and fertile. Families have long lines within the same small town. You look at a phone book and there are only fifteen names, though 40 entries under each.
The sun is coming out, warming things up, turning the Laurentians to a deep green. When it gets beautiful here it really dresses up. Thousands of white birds with black wingtips, the Oiseaux Blanche, like they been dipped in ink, wheel around the shoreline. The hunters can not shoot between the road and the water, and interestingly, you will see fields of these birds nesting but never a one on the wrong side of the road.
