The Diana of mythology was an ancient Roman goddess of the hunt of both wild and domestic animals. Her Greek counterpart was Artemis. The following tale was penned by Robert C. Reade and published in the Toronto Star Weekly on Saturday, December 10, 1931. Reader Keith Jones sent this to me. With the aid of glasses and magnifying glass I was able to produce the following which I have edited for clarity. By the way, Big Salmon Lake to-day is known as Limerick Lake.
DIANA of BIG SALMON LAKE PART ONE
The recent hunting season in Ontario has produced a record crop of Diana’s. As the statistics of the deer slaying are tabulated, it is found that the female of the species in large numbers take to the bush in high leather boots, breeches, windbreakers and are just as deadly as the male when a buck is bounding down a runway.
These huntresses are distributed all over this province. A young Toronto girl invaded a male hunting camp on the edge of Algonquin Park and secured herself a trophy of the chase while grizzled veterans went scoreless.
There are women in Sault Ste. Marie who think no more of going for a haunch of venison than to the butcher’s for a leg of lamb.
The wife of the Mayor of Manitoulin Island met a five hundred pound black bear at close quarters in a cedar swamp and filled him with lead as nonchalantly as she would have powdered her nose.
To give full credit to these feminine Nimrods who get their deer or bear, it may be added that not one of them got their man. The homicide squad in the Ontario woods this fall was entirely male. Great are the Diana’s of Ontario but the greatest of all is the Diana of Salmon Lake, Mrs. Emily Barragar, an old lady of 83 autumns, the majority of which have been spent with a gun on her shoulder.
When news came to me from St. Ola that she had used the tag on a hunting license, I laughed to myself a long and exceedingly noisy laugh. “Ha, ha!” I said. “That’s a good one. Those Haliburton folk must think that we city people are the original Gulliver’s.”
I’ve swallowed a lot of hinterland fiction, but this is too preposterous. Old ladies of 83 can’t beat about the bush. They are too simple and rheumatic.
I figured that this was what happened. Grandma was in her rocking chair on the veranda knitting in the November sunshine. A deer entered the backyard and got its antlers caught in a bucket that had contained oats, or put its foot into that hole in the pump platform that has never been mended. The old lady with the help of her cane hobbled off the kitchen stoop and tied it up with a rope until the men folks came home and slit its throat. Or perhaps she did not have even that contact with the deer.
One of her grandsons or great-grandsons may have taken out an extra license in grandma’s name and used it, to legitimize his second pair of horns. That kind of thing is always done. Many a man goes to a dinner party and vaingloriously carves a loin of venison as his own, when he has shot it only by proxy.
“St. Ola,” said I, “has a new publicity man. This yarn about Grandma Nimrod is his first stunt. Not bad for an amateur.”
I looked at the map.
PART 2
I couldn’t find St. Ola. The telephone girl had better luck or a better sense of direction. She put me in touch with the publicity man. He was John Morton, the local blacksmith. A man who works with his hands in iron should find it easier to work in hide and horn.
“That story about the old lady of 83,” said I, “is a good story. But of course it’s not really true?”
Sticking to His Story
Remember I was talking over the telephone. I would not have dared to question a brawny blacksmith’s veracity face to face.
He didn’t take offense at my credulity. He merely pities my ignorance of facts known by the whole world from Haliburton to St. Ola and as far north as Madawaska.
“You don’t know Mrs. Barragar,” said he. “She has hunted deer since she put on her first long skirts. Come up and see her. She’s a remarkable woman.”
Running a chance of being snowed in for the winter, as well as being a victim of a St. Ola publicity stunt, I took to the highway and went away back of Belleville up near Bancroft. And that is the end of steel.
It is a good thing that there was no mist. Otherwise, we might have passed through St. Ola without knowing it. The weather being clear, I found the village and the blacksmith’s forge.
“So,” said I to the smith, “you still stick to your story that one of your oldest inhabitants, a decrepit grandmother, is a renowned deer-slayer?”
“If she’s decrepit,” said Mr. Morton, “I’m an invalid. She’ll out-freeze any man I know fighting through a hole in the ice in the winter time. She’ll row across the lake in any storm that blows and she can clean and dress a deer as well as shoot it. But she isn’t much of a walker. She doesn’t get into town very often. You’ll find her three miles away near the lake.”
I came to a new bungalow from which Salmon Lake was visible a mile away, like a blue ribbon through a gap in the hills. Snowflakes were flying. The ground rang like iron but Mrs. Barragar, despite her 83 years, without a hat on her head or even a shawl around her shoulders, was vigorously attacking a pile of cordwood with a broad axe.
Taking me into her neat bungalow she at once dressed herself up for company by putting on a big apron. As she rocked by her Quebec heater with her hands folded in her lap there never was seemingly a more grandmotherly old body.
But there were no knitting needles and yarn on her table. A rifle leaned prominently against the wall. Other things that caught my eye were an archer spinner and other trout lures. The Diana of Salmon Lake is surrounded by the implements of the chase.
“They tell me,” said I, “that you don’t think any more of knocking down a deer than of stroking a cat.”
“Good gracious,” said she, “are they talking about that? They might get something more exciting. Sure, I got a deer this year, but I’ve got one every year for a long time back, almost ever since I’ve been here.”
“You weren’t born at Salmon Lake?”
“No, I was born at Letty’s Mills. I don’t think the place exists any longer. It was south of here near Peterborough. I was a ‘Lake’ and my father made wagons and sleighs. Do you know that one day last winter I saw one of his old sleighs on the road?” TBC