Tuesday Tales: From a Picture

Welcome back to Tuesday Tales, the weekly blog post where books are born and grow into novels. Each week, a group of authors participate in a blog hop where they share their work in progress with you. As an added challenge, they have to incorporate a specific word or picture into the scene they write. This is picture week, and as such, our posts are limited to 300 words.

Our lovely hostess, Jean Joachim provides the prompts, but this week instead of using one of the original ones she provided, I had to request a different one. Here’s the image I needed. In Lucien’s words, merci beaucoup.

 

I’m working from my historical romance, The Price of Courage, Book Two of the Canadiana Series.

Enjoy!

Thanks to a snowstorm, it took more than three weeks to reach Tadoussac. The shorter days and heavy winter clothing, which hampered their mobility, made it hard to cover more than ten miles a day. Mid-afternoon, the men made camp while they still had daylight and could find what they needed for a fire that would last the night.

Careful to find the canoe a landing place well out of the water to avoid wet feet, they would don the snowshoes necessary to walk on the snowy shore. While Okwaho collected dry birch bark and small, dead branches from spruce trees, Lucien and Yves would find a healthy, thick-branched spruce large enough to make a suitable camping spot. Once they did, they would scout the area and bring back the dry wood to feed the fire from dark until dawn. Only two slept at any time, the third sitting guard on the watch for hungry wolves or cougars.

Digging down to the ground when he could, Okwaho would create a fire pit keeping the side away from the tree high to act as a reflecting wall. While he did. Yves and Lucien would set up the hide tent under the spruce branches to protect them from  melting snow. Once the Mohawk had the fire pit ready, he would pile up a mixture of the dry bark he’d found and the dried moss he’d brought with him, and using Lucien’s flint and striker, he would start a fire, feeding it small spruce branches until it was established enough for small logs.

There was nothing better on a cold night than a pipe and a cup of spruce tea, with a shot of caribou, the beverage made by combining red wine, brandy, and maple syrup.

That’s it for this week! Don’t forget to check out all the other posts on  Tuesday Tales.