La Chasse-galerie

The defining piece of French-Canadian folklore, printed 1892

It is New Year's Eve in a winter logging camp, the men are a very long way from anybody they love, and there is one way to get home and back before dawn. You make a pact with the devil, you get into the canoe, and the canoe flies. The conditions are the whole story: do not say the name of God, do not touch a church steeple in passing, and be back before the sun. Break any of them and the devil takes the lot of you.

That is La Chasse-galerie, and it is as close to a national story as Quebec has. The version everyone knows is Honoré Beaugrand's, published in French in 1891 and in English in The Century Magazine in August 1892, and collected in his Légendes canadiennes in 1900 with illustrations by Henri Julien. Beaugrand was a journalist, a mayor of Montreal, and is a National Historic Person in Canada, which is a rare thing for a man remembered mainly for writing down a ghost story about lumberjacks.

The story did not start with him. The superstition runs back through the voyageurs of the Canadian northwest to the coureurs des bois under the French regime, and behind that to a French legend about a nobleman named Gallery who hunted when he should have been at Mass and was condemned to hunt the sky forever. Beaugrand's contribution was to put it in a shanty camp on the Gatineau and give it the voice of men who actually worked in one.

The pin here sits on the old river country north of Quebec City, which is the world the story comes from: winter camps, frozen rivers, and a canoe as the only fast thing anyone had. Read it aloud if you get the chance. It was built for a fire and an audience, not a page.