“I don’t think I’d talk about Pic,” urged Grampa Edgar.

“I will so! I’m proud of him. Well, Xavier Pic, he must of been born around 1790. Uncle Emil said that some folks claimed he was born on Mackinac Island and some on Lake Pepin and some in New Orleans or even back in the Old Country, in France, and they all said Xavier wasn’t a tall man, but awful strong and brave, and he could sing fine and he drank too much, and languages, my! they claim he spoke all the languages there are—French and English and Spanish and Chippewa and Sioux and Cree—Xavier spoke them all, Uncle Emil told me, and my Uncle Emil was a truthful man, except about furs. Oh, Edgar would have hated Xavier Pic!”

“Always did. If you didn’t just make him up,” explained Grampa Edgar.

“Yes, like I said. So Xavier—they say he was a voyageur for the Hudson’s-Bay Company, but afterwards he was a coureur de bois for himself, a free trader and a fur-buyer. He was slick at shooting the rapids. Prob’ly when he was young, he wore a sash, like the voyageurs did, and he sang—

“Why, Neil, I think I must of told you a little about Xavier when you were only as high as my kitchen stove. You would forget it now, but do you remember the little song I taught you of the voyageurs, Dans Mon Chemin?”

“Yes, by golly I do begin to remember it now, Gramma.”

* * * * *

From his anecdotal Minnesota history in high school, from lost tales of his mother and Gramma Julie, Neil could see the outlines now of his ancestor, Xavier Pic.

While Gramma Julie nodded in silence, he sketched that robust and jovial French adventurer.

Xavier was not plowing dun English fields, like the worthy forbears of Dr. Kenneth, who were doubtless as rustic as they alleged themselves to be royal. Xavier belonged not to evening and mist and gossiping cowbells but to alert morning on the glittering rapids of unknown rivers. Neil saw him coming out of Montreal on a spring morning, with the squadron of canoes bound away for the pine-darkened fort at the mouth of the Kaministikwia.

Xavier Pic. He would be a pink-cheeked and ribald roisterer with a short and curly golden beard, and he would be wearing a blanketcloth capote of morning blue, thrown back, with his tobacco pouch and his agile knife swung from his scarlet sash. His moccasins and leggins were of elkskin, and in his knitted cap was the feather of a Nor’wester.

Challenging the rapids and the wolf-haunted night in the immense loneliness of the Northern forest, laughing back at the monstrous storms of Lake Superior, scoffing at cold and hunger and the malign Indians, Xavier would be singing with his mates, at the gay start of the journey:

Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré
Trois cavaliers bien montés—
Lon, Lon, laridon daine.

Thus, not in words but in images, bright and strong, Neil recalled the springtime hero who was his source.