The Bœufstone

The Legend of the Bœufstone

The winter of 1791

On the north shore of the St. Lawrence, where the river widens until you can’t see the far side, there’s a cove called l’Anse-aux-Bœufs. At its mouth, half in the water and half on the stones, lies a grey granite boulder the size of a fishing shed. From the water it looks like an ox lying down: a broad back, a heavy head, and one horn still pointing at the sky. The people of the cove call it the Bœufstone. If you ask how it got there, they’ll tell you this.

In the hard winter of 1791, the cove had one ox. He was a grey giant named Grand-Gris, who belonged to the widow Gagnon and her daughter, Mathilde. He hauled firewood in winter and nets in summer, and he was so patient that children slept against his flank in the barn.

That February the ice ran out from the shore for a mile, and the men of the cove walked out onto it to fish through holes and hunt seals at its edge. One morning the wind swung round to the southwest and turned warm. By noon the ice was groaning. By mid-afternoon a crack opened between the shore and the men, and the whole outer ice, eleven men on it, began to drift toward the open river.

The women stood on the shore and screamed into the wind. A boat couldn’t be dragged across the broken ice, and nobody could walk it. Only Mathilde, who was fourteen, ran the other way: to the barn.

She brought Grand-Gris down to the shore with the longest rope in the cove, the one they used to haul boats up for winter. She tied one end to his yoke and the other around her own waist. Then she walked out onto the moving ice, testing every step with a pole, while the ox stood at the water’s edge and leaned back against her weight.

She reached the floe as the light was going. The men tied the rope to a seal gaff driven deep into the ice, and one by one, all night, they pulled themselves back along it. Each time a man went into the water, Grand-Gris dug in his hooves and pulled. The women said later that they heard him lowing in the dark, steady as a bell, every time the rope went tight.

At dawn all eleven men were on the shore, and Mathilde with them. Grand-Gris lay down on the stones where he had stood all night, his head toward the river, and he didn’t get up. The frost came in hard behind the warm wind, and by the next morning the ox was grey from horn to tail, and cold, and hard as the shore.

That, they say, is the Bœufstone.

Geologists who’ve come to the cove say the boulder is a glacial erratic: granite carried down from the north by the ice sheet ten thousand years ago and dropped on the shore. The people of l’Anse-aux-Bœufs don’t argue with them. They only say:

“The ice brought him, and the ice took him.”

The customs have lasted longer than anyone who remembers the winter of 1791. Before the season’s first trip out, every fisherman in the cove lays a hand on the stone’s horn, which is worn smooth and shining from two centuries of hands. Each spring someone leaves a twist of hay in the hollow by the stone’s head, and nobody admits to doing it. Boats coming home in fog steer by him: “Keep the ox off your bow, and you’ll find the cove.”

When an east wind blows across the hollow by his head, it makes a low, mournful note. The old people say that’s Grand-Gris calling a warning, and that fog will follow within the day. More often than not, it does.

And they say one more thing, though only to children: if you find the Bœufstone warm on a winter’s morning, someone is in trouble on the water, and the ox is pulling again.

The Second Pulling

November 1898

The cove remembered Grand-Gris for a hundred years. The story went down from Mathilde to her children, and from them to theirs, until it was more a song than a story. By 1898 a lighthouse stood on the point above the cove. Its keeper was Mathilde’s grandson, Théodore Gagnon, a quiet man who wound the lamp every evening and touched the stone’s horn every morning, the way his grandmother had taught him.

That November a schooner, the Marie-Ange, was beating home late with a hold full of salt cod and nine men aboard. Snow came down out of the north so thick that Théodore couldn’t see his own lamp from the gallery rail. Then the wind went round to the east.

The stone began to low.

Théodore’s son, Ovide, was ten that year, and he heard it first. It was a long, deep note rolling up from the shore, the sound his great-grandmother had described. The grown-ups said it was only the wind in the hollow by the stone’s head. Ovide went down to the shore with a lantern anyway, and he put his hand on the stone.

It was warm. It wasn’t warm the way a stone gets in the sun, but the way a living animal is warm under its hide, and there was no sun that day.

He ran back up the hill shouting, and his father didn’t argue. Théodore knew the old saying as well as anyone: if the Bœufstone is warm in winter, someone is in trouble on the water, and the ox is pulling again.

The lamp was no use in the snow, and you can’t fire a signal gun at a ship you can’t see. So Théodore did what his grandmother had done. He took the longest rope in the cove, tied one end to the stone’s horn, and rowed out into the white with the other end around his waist, pulling toward the sound of the Marie-Ange’s bell.

He found her a quarter-mile out, drifting toward the rocks under the point, her captain sure the cove was a mile to the west. Théodore made the rope fast to her bow. The crew hauled themselves in hand over hand along it, the way the eleven men had crossed the ice a century before. The line ran straight back through the snow to the Bœufstone, and it never once went slack.

When the Marie-Ange was safe in the cove, Ovide ran down to the stone again. It was cold, ordinary granite under his hand, and the lowing had stopped. The hay someone had left in the hollow that spring was gone, every stalk of it.

No one ever explained the hay.

From that winter on, the families of l’Anse-aux-Bœufs kept a rope coiled at the foot of the stone through the cold months. It’s still there today, a new one every year, though the boats now have radios, radar, and GPS that can find the cove in any weather. The rope is never used, and no one would think of taking it away.

On the hundredth anniversary of the second pulling, the cove had a plaque made for the stone. It gives the names of the eleven men of 1791 and the nine of 1898 that were rescued, and below them a single line in French and English: