Mattie Mitchell Read Online Free Page A

she had first heard them.
    Marie remembered her first movies about cowboys and
Indians. The Indians were always the bad guys and never wonany of the battles. Around her in the theatre all of her friends had
shouted “Shoot the redskins!” All she could do was stay quiet
and wonder why.
    Remembering the days of her childhood, Marie still felt the
sting of prejudice. The taunts of “Marie is nothing but an Injun”
coming from her peers was anything but funny to her. But through
it all she remained steadfast to her heritage. Nothing would sway
her from the pride she felt of who she was. And she was proudest
of all that her grandfather was the one and only Mattie Mitchell.
    In 1946, Marie was ten years old and in the fifth grade. One
day, as she sat in her classroom in Corner Brook, she heard the
teacher speak the name of Mattie Mitchell. She timidly raised her
hand and in a quiet, shaky voice said, “That’s my grandfather,
Miss.”
    Her teacher hushed the other children, who were laughing at
Marie. Marie finally convinced the teacher that her statement was
true. The other kids stared at her in awe: she had a connection to
a figure in their Newfoundland history school book!
    Bursting with pride, Marie raced home and informed her
parents of the sentence in her Newfoundland geography book, the
one that said her grandfather had discovered the mine in Buchans.
Her parents, who of course knew about Mattie’s discovery, were
thrilled to learn that Mattie Mitchell’s name was living on in
Marie’s generation.
    From that day forward, Marie started a lifelong quest to
record all known information about her legendary grandfather.
Her dedication to the task ended only with her death.

CHAPTER 2
    THE HIGH GREY MOUNTAINS WITH their wondrous mystery
were silent. Their vast, white, flat-topped plateaus draped behind
dark evening clouds. It was late March, but the hills and valleys on
Newfoundland’s west coast were still choked with heavy winter
snow. A mist had drizzled from the low-hanging clouds all day. It
was a sly, sneaky moisture that seeped through a man’s clothing
and soaked the skin almost without his knowing. Now with night
shadows climbing up through the deep-wooded valleys below,
the rain got colder.
    Mattie Mitchell was soaked to the bone. His coarse, black
woollen clothes, most of it showing sparse herring-bone patches
of his own careful stitching, were plastered to his tawny skin.
Despite the cold rain, Mattie was sweating. The mild temperature
along with the rain made the snow soft underfoot, and although
the trail he followed was well packed, he sank through in places.
The trail wound its twisted way through a mature virgin forest. At
intervals, open spaces between the trees allowed Mattie a view of
the distant ridges. They showed blue against the slate sky. Tiny
tendrils of steam emanated from beneath his worn coat collar
and, like the last rising images of heat from a dying campfire,
vanished into the air.
    The worn thin straps from a dirty grey canvas pack bit into
his tired shoulders. Inside the pack were the pelts of three fox—
two with thick red hides and one with a shiny black coat. One
fawn-tinted lynx and three brunette beaver skins, the lush hide of
one partly cured “marten cat,” several pounds of cured caribou
meat, and a few meagre personal belongings filled his pack to its
laced mouth. Lashed securely to the outside of the pack was a
large unskinned beaver with its broad tail dangling below.
    More than two hours’ walk behind, Mattie had pulled the
furred rodent from its watery grave beneath the ice of a small
pond, reset the steel trap, and walked on. Running under the
heavy pack, angled upward and crossing his forehead ran a two-inch-wide leather thump line. It was a simple and practical native
design that relieved much of the weight from the lower back and
transferred it to the neck and head.
    Now, standing on the edge of a high,