It was the first week in September. This meant a race with the "freeze-up" into Whale River, for with the autumn headwinds, it would take him a month, travel as he might. Though he sorely needed geese for food on his way north, there was no time to waste at Hannah Bay, so Marcel paddled steadily all night. At dawn, in the mist off Gull Bay, Fleur became so restless with the scent of the shoals of geese, which the canoe was raising, that Jean was forced to put a gag of hide in her mouth while he drifted with the tide on the "wavies" and shot a week's supply of food.
At daylight he went ashore, concealed his canoe behind some boulders, and trusting to Fleur's nose and ears to guard him from surprise, slept the sleep of exhaustion. Later, while his breakfast was cooking, Jean revelled in his reunion with his dog. In the weeks since he had last seen her she had fairly leaped in height and weight. Food had been plenty with the half-breeds and Fleur was not starved, but his blood boiled at the evidence she bore of the breeds' brutality. He now regrettedthat he had not ambushed the confederate of the man he had beaten, and branded him, also, as the puppy had been marked.
Though Fleur was but six months old, the heavy legs and already massive lines of her head gave promise of a maturity, unusual, even in the Ungava breed. Some day, mused Marcel, as Fleur looked her love of the master through her slant, brown eyes, her head on his knee, he would have a dog-team equal to the famous huskies of his grandfather, Pierre Marcel, who once took the Christmas mail from Albany to Fort Hope, four hundred and fifty miles, over a drifted trail, in twelve days.
"Yes, some day Fleur will give Jean Marcel a team," he said aloud, and rubbed the gray ears while Fleur's hairy throat rumbled in delight as though she were struggling to answer: "Some day, Jean Marcel; for Fleur will not forget how you came from the north and brought her home." And then the muscles of his lean face twisted with pain as he went on: "But who will there be to work for with Julie gone?"
That day, holding the nose of his canoe on Mount Sherrick, Jean crossed the mouth of Rupert Bay and headed up the coast. In three days he was at East Main, where he bought dried whitefish for Fleur, for huskies thrive on whitefish as on no other food, and salt to cure geese; then started thesame night for Fort George. Two days out he was driven ashore by the first north-wester and held prisoner, while he added to his supply of geese, which he salted down.
After the storm he toiled on day after day, praying that the stinging northers bringing the "freeze-up" would hold off until he sighted Whale River. At night, seated beneath the sombre cliffs by his drift-wood fire with Fleur at his side, he often watched the wonder of the Northern Lights, marvelling at their mystery, as they pulsed and waned and flared again over the sullen Bay, then streamed up across the heavens, and diffusing, veiled the stars, which twinkled through with a mystic blue light. The "Spirits of the Dead at Play," the Esquimos called those dancing phantoms of the skies; and he thought of his own dead and wondered if their spirits were at peace.
And then, as he lay, a blanketed shape beside his sleeping puppy, came dreams to mock him—dreams of Julie Breton, always happy, and beside her, smiling into her face, the handsome Inspector of the East Coast posts. Night after night he dreamed of the girl who was slipping away from him—who had forgotten Jean Marcel in his mad race south for his dog.
On and on he fought his way north through thehead-seas, defying cross-winds; landing to empty his canoe, and then on to the lee of the next island. While his boat would live he travelled, for September was drawing to a close and over him hung the menace of the first stinging northers which for days would anchor his frail craft to the beach. Hard on their heels would follow the nipping nights of the "freeze-up," which would shackle the waterways, locking the land in a grip of ice.
Past the beetling shoulders of the Black Whale, past the Earthquake Islands and Fort George he journeyed, for the brant and blue geese were on the coast and he needed no supplies; leaving Caribou Point astern, at last the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds loomed through the mist which blanketed the flat sea.
It was to this gray headland that he had raced the northers which would have held him wind-bound. And he had won.
Rounding the Cape, in five days he stood, a drawn-faced tattered figure with Fleur at his side, at the door of the Mission House.
"Jean Marcel! Thank God!" and Julie Breton impulsively kissed the lean cheek of thevoyageur. A whine of protest followed by a smothered rumble at such familiarity with her master drew her glance to the great puppy. "Fleur! You brought Fleur with you, Jean, as you said you would. Oh, wehave had much worry about you, Jean Marcel—and how thin you are!"
She led man and dog into the building.
"Henri! Come quick and see whom we have with us!"
"Jean, my son!" cried the priest, embracing the returnedvoyageur, "and you brought back your dog! It will be a brave tale we shall hear to-night!"
The appearance of Marcel and Fleur at the trade-house was greeted with:
"Nom de Dieu! Jean Marcel! And de dog! He return wid hees dog, by Gar!" as Jules Duroc sprang to meet him with a bear hug.
"Welcome back, my lad!" cried Colin Gillies, tearing a hand of Jean from the emotional Company man. While Angus McCain, joining in the chorus of congratulations, was clapping the helpless Marcel on the shoulder, the perplexed puppy, worried by the uproar of strangers about her master, leaped, tearing the back out of McCain's coat, and was relegated by Jean to the stockade outside.
"Well, well, how far did they take you, Jean? Did you have a fuss getting your dog?" asked the factor.
"I was one day behind dem at Rupert Bay——"
"What, you've been to Rupert?" interrupted the amazed Gillies.
"Oui, M'sieu. I go to Rupert and see M'sieu Cameron."
"And with one paddle you gained a day on them? Lad, you've surely got your father's staying power. Where did you come up with them?"
Then Jean related the details of his capture of Fleur to an open-mouthed audience.
"So there's one less dog-stealer on the Bay," drily commented Gillies, when Marcel had finished his grim tale.
"Why you not put de bullet een dat oder t'ief, Jean?" demanded the bloodthirsty Jules.
"Eet ees not easy to keel a man, onless he steal your dog an' try to keel you. I had de dog. One of dem was enough," gravely answered the trapper.
"That's right; you had your dog which I thought you'd never see again," approved Gillies. "But your travelling this time of year, with the headwinds and sea, up the coast in thirty days, beats me. I was five weeks, once, making it with two paddles. You must have your father's back, lad. It was the best on this coast in his day; and you've surely got his fighting blood."
Basking for three days in the hospitality of the Mission; resting from the strain and wear of six weeks' constant toil at the paddle, Marcel revelled in Julie's good cooking. To watch her trim figure moving about the house; to talk to her while herdusky head bent over her sewing, after the loneliness of his long journey, would have been all the heaven he asked, had it not been that over it all hung the knowledge that Julie Breton was lost to him. Kind she was as a sister is kind, but her heart he knew was far in the south at East Main in the keeping of Inspector Wallace, to do with it as his manhood prompted. And knowing what he did, Marcel kept silence.
On his return he had learned the story from big Jules. All Whale River had watched the courting of Julie. All Whale River had seen Wallace and the girl walking nightly in the long twilight, and had shaken their heads sadly, in sympathy with the lad who was travelling down the coast on the mad quest of his puppy. Yes, he had lost her. It was over, and he manfully fought the bitterness and despair that was his; tried to forget the throbbing pain at his heart, as he made the most of those three short days with the girl he loved, and might never see again, as a girl, for Marcel was not returning from the Ghost at Christmas.
His dreams were dead. Ambitions for the future had been stripped from him, as the withering winds strip a tree of leaves. The home he had pictured at Whale River when, in the spring, he fought through to the Salmon for a dog-team which should make his fortune, was now a phantom. There wasnothing left him but the love of his puppy. She would never desert Jean Marcel.
But Jean Marcel was a trapper, and the precious days before the ice would close the upper Whale and the Ghost to canoe travel were slipping past. Before he went south his partners of the previous winter had agreed to take with them the supplies, which he had drawn from the post, but that they would not net fish for his dog he was certain. Exasperated at his determination to go south, they would hardly plan for the dog they were confident he would not recover.
So Marcel bade his friends good-bye and with as much cured whitefish as he could carry without being held up on the portages by extra trips, started with Fleur on the long up-river trail to his trapping grounds.
When he left, he said to Julie in French: "I have not spoken to you of what I have heard since my return."
The girl's face flushed but her eyes bravely met his.
"They tell me that you are to marry M'sieu Wallace," he hazarded.
"They do not know, who tell you that!" she exclaimed with spirit. "M'sieu Wallace has not asked me to marry him, and beside, he is still a Protestant."
Ignoring the evasion, he went on slowly: "But you love him, Julie; and he is a great man——"
"Ah, Jean," she broke in, "you are hurt. But you will always be my friend, won't you?"
"Yes, I shall always be that." And he was gone.
Although the stinging winds with swirls of fine snow were already driving down the valleys, and nightly the ice filmed the eddies and the backwaters, yet the swift river remained open to the speeding canoe until, one frosty morning, Marcel waked in camp at the Conjuror's Falls to find that the ice had over-night closed in on the quiet reaches of the Ghost just above, shackling the river for seven months against canoe travel.
Caching his boat and supplies on spruce saplings, he circled each peeled trunk with a necklace of large inverted fish-hooks, to foil the raids of that arch thief and defiler of caches, the wolverine. That night he reached the camp of his partners.
Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, like Marcel, had lost their immediate families in the plague, and the year before, had been only too glad to join the Frenchman in a trapping partnership of mutual advantage. For while Marcel, son of the former Company head man, with a schooling at the Mission, and a skill and daring as canoeman and hunter, beyond their own, was looked upon asleader by the half-breeds, Antoine was a good hunter, while Joe Piquet's manual dexterity in fashioning snow-shoes, making moccasins and building bark canoes rendered him particularly useful. Marcel's feat of the previous spring in finding the headwaters of the Salmon and his appearance at Whale River with a pure bred Ungava husky, to the amazement of the Crees, had increased his influence with his partners; but his determination to go south after his dog when it was already high time for the three men to start for their trapping-grounds had left them in a sullen mood. Because they could use them, if he did not return from the south, they had packed his supplies over the portages of the Whale and up the Ghost to their camp, but had netted no extra whitefish for the dog they felt he would not bring home.
That night they sat long over the fire in the shack they had built the autumn previous, listening to Marcel's tale of the rescue of Fleur and of the great goose grounds of the south coast.
In the morning Jean waked with the problem of a supply of fish for Fleur and himself troubling him, for one of the precepts of André Marcel had been, "Save your fish for the tail of the winter, for no one knows where the caribou will be." Down at Conjuror's Falls, he had cached less than two months' rations for his dog, and they were facingseven months of the long snows. To be sure, she could live on meat, if meat was to be had, but a husky thrives on fish, and Marcel determined that she should have it.
Confident of finding game plentiful, his partners, with the usual lack of foresight of the Crees, had netted less than three months' supply of whitefish and lake-trout. This emergency store Marcel knew would be consumed by February, however plentiful the caribou proved to be, for the Crees seldom possess the thrift to save against the possible spring famine. So he determined to set his net at once.
Borrowing Joe's canoe, he packed it through the "bush" to a good fish lake where he set the net under the young ice, and baited lines; then taking Fleur, he started cruising out locations for his trap-lines in new country, far toward the blue hills of the Salmon watershed, where game signs had been thick the previous spring.
Toward the last of October when the snow began to make deep, Fleur's education as a sled-dog began. Already the fast growing puppy was creeping up toward one hundred pounds in weight, and soon, under the kind but firm tutelage of the master, was as keen to be harnessed for a run as a veteran husky of the winter trails.
When he had set and baited his traps over a wide circle of new country to the north, Jean returnedto his net and lines, and at the end of ten days had a supply of trout and whitefish for Fleur, which he cached at the lake. On his return, Antoine and Joe derided his labors when the caribou trails networked the muskegs, but Marcel ignored them.
It looked like a good winter for game. Snow-shoe rabbits were plentiful and wherever their runways led in and out of the scrub-spruce and fir covers, there those furred assassins of the forest, the fox and the lynx, the fisher and the marten, were sure to make their hunting-grounds. During November and December, when pelts are at their best, the men made a harvest at their traps. The caribou were still on the barrens feeding on the white moss from which they scraped the snow with their large, round-toed hoofs, and the rabbit snares furnished stew whenever the trappers craved a change from caribou steaks. But no Indian will eat rabbit as a regular diet while he can get red meat. This varying hare of the north, which, so often, in the spring, from Labrador to the Yukon, stands between the red trapper and starvation, has a flavor which quickly palls on the taste, and never quite seems to satisfy hunger. The Crees often speak of "starving on rabbits."
During these weeks following the trap-lines, learning the ways of the winter forest after a puppyhood on the coast, as Fleur grew in bulk andstrength, so her affection deepened for Jean Marcel. Now nearly a year old, she easily drew the sled loaded with the meat of a caribou into camp, on a beaten trail. At night in the tent Marcel had pitched and banked with snow, as a half-way camp on the round of his trap-lines, she would sit with hairy ears pointed, watching his every movement, looking unutterable adoration as he scraped his pelts, stretching them on frames to dry or mended his clothes and moccasins. Then, before he turned in to his plaited, rabbit-skin blankets, warmer by far than any fur robes known in the north, Fleur invariably demanded her evening romp. Taking a hand in her jaws which never closed, she would lift her lips, baring her white fangs in a snarl of mimic anger, as she swung her head from side to side, until, seizing her, Jean rolled her on her back, while rumbles and growls from her shaggy throat voiced her delight.
Back at the main camp, Fleur, true to her breed, merely tolerated the presence of Antoine and Joe, indifferent to all offers of friendship. Moving away at their approach, she suffered neither of them to place hand upon her. At night she slept outside in the snow, where the thick mat of fine fur under the long hair rendered her immune to cold.
And all these weeks Jean Marcel was fighting out his battle with self. Always, the struggle wentceaselessly on—the struggle with his heart to give up Julie Breton. Reason though he would, that he had nothing to give her, while this great man of the Company had everything, his love for the girl kept alive the embers of hope. He carried the memory of her sweetness over the white trails by day and at night again wandered with her in the twilight as in the days before the figure of Wallace darkened his life.
As Christmas approached, Jean wondered whether Wallace would spend it in Whale River, and was glad that they had not intended, because of the great distance, to go back for the festivities at the post. Should he ever see her again as Julie Breton? he asked himself. Wallace would change his religion. Surely no man would balk at that, to get Julie. And the spring would see them married. Well, he should go on loving her—and Fleur; there was no one else.
One afternoon toward the end of the year when the early dusk had turned Marcel back toward camp from his most northerly line of marten traps, he suddenly stopped in his tracks on the ridge from which he had seen the lake on the Salmon headwaters the spring previous. Pushing back the hood of his caribou capote to free his ears, he listened, motionless. Beside him, with black nostrils quivering, Fleur sniffed the stinging air.
Again the faint, far, wailing chorus which had checked him, reached Marcel's ears. The dog stiffened, her mane rising as she bared her white fangs.
"You heard it too, Fleur?" muttered the man, softly, resting a rabbit-skin mitten on the broad head of the nervous husky. Marcel gazed long at the floor of snow to the north through wind-whipped ridges.
"Ah-hah!" he exclaimed, "dey turn dees way." Clearer now the stiff breeze carried the call of the hunting wolves. Fleur burst into a frenzy of yelping. Seizing the dog, Marcel calmed her into silence. Then, after an interval, the cry of the packslowly faded, and shortly, the man's straining ears caught no sound save the fretting of the wind through the spruce.
Wolves he had often heard, singly, and in groups of four and five, but the hunting howl which had been brought to him through the hills by the wind, he knew was not the clamor of a handful of timber-wolves, but the blood chorus of a pack. None but the white-wolves which, far to the north, hung on the flanks of the caribou herds could raise such a hunting cry and there was but one reason for their drifting south from the great Ungava barrens.
It was a sober face that Jean Marcel wore back to his camp. Large numbers of arctic wolves in the country meant the departure of the trapper's chief source of meat—the caribou. With the caribou gone, they had their limited supply of fish, and the rabbits, eked out by the flour, which would not carry them far, for the half-breeds, in spite of his warnings, had already consumed half of it. To be sure, the rabbits would pull them through to the "break-up" of the long snows in April; would keep them from actual starvation. Then he cursed his partners for failing to make themselves independent of meat by netting more fish in September.
"To-morrow," said Marcel, on his return next day to the main camp, "we start for de barren and hunt de deer hard while dey stay in dees countree."The partners spoke, at times, in French patois and Cree, at times in broken English.
"Wat you say, Jean? I got trap-line to travel to-morrow," objected Antoine Beaulieu.
"I say dis," returned Marcel, commanding the attention of the two men by the gravity of his face. "De deer will not be in dis countree een t'ree—four day."
"Ha! Ha! dat ees good joke, Jean Marcel!" exclaimed Piquet.
"Oui, dat ees good joke!" returned Marcel, rising and shaking a finger in the grinning faces of his partners. "But I say dis to you, Antoine Beaulieu an' Joe Piquet. We go to de barren and hunt deer to-morrow or I tak' my share of flour and mak' my own camp."
Marcel's threat sobered the half-breeds. They had no desire to break with the Frenchman, whose initiative and daring they respected.
"De deer are plentee, I count seexteen to-day," argued Antoine.
"Oui, to-day de deer are here, but, whiff!" Jean waved his hand, "an' dey are gone; for las' night I hear de white wolves, not t'ree or four, but manee, ver' manee, drive de deer in de hills. Dey starve in de nord and come here for meat. To-morrow we go!"
Piquet and Beaulieu readily admitted that thewhite wolves, if they appeared in numbers, would drive the caribou—called deer, in the north—out of the country, but they insisted that what Jean had heard was the echoing of the call and answer of three or four timber wolves gathering for a hunt. Never in his life had Joe Piquet, who was thirty, heard of arctic wolves appearing on the Great Whale headwaters. Thus they argued, but Jean was obdurate. On the following day the three men started back into the barrens with Fleur and the sled.
The first day, by hard hunting they shot three caribou, but to the surprise and chagrin of Antoine and Joe, on the second day, in a country where they had never failed to get meat earlier in the winter, the hunters got but one. After that not a caribou was seen on the wide barrens, while many trails were crossed, all heading south, and following the signs of the fleeing caribou were the tracks of wolves, not singly or in couples, but in packs.
When the hunters had satisfied themselves that the caribou had left the country, they relayed their meat into camp with the help of Fleur and lines attached to the sled to aid her.
That night the trappers took council. The caribou meat, flour and remaining fish, counting Jean's cache at Conjuror's Falls, would take them into February. After that, it would be rabbits through March and April until the fish began to move. In the meantime a few lake trout and pike could be caught with lines through holes in the ice. Also, setting the net under three feet of ice could be accomplished with infinite labor, but the results in midwinter were always a matter of doubt.
"You had all September to net fish, but what did you do? You grew fat on deer meat," flung out Jean bitterly, thinking of his hungry puppy who required nourishing food in these months of rapid growth.
"How much feesh you got in dat cache?" demanded Piquet, ignoring the remark.
"About one hundred fifty pound," replied Marcel.
"Not on Conjur' Fall, I mean at de lac."
The fish Jean had netted and cached at the lake, on arriving in October, were designed for his dog and already had been partly used.
"Only little left at de lac," he replied.
"Dat feesh belong to us all; de dog can leeve on rabbit."
Piquet's remark brought the blood to Jean's face.
"De dog gets her share of feesh, do you hear dat, Joe?" rasped Marcel, his eyes blazing. "You and Antoine got no right to dat feesh; you refuse to help me and you laugh when I net dat feesh. De dog gets her share, Joe Piquet!" Marcel rose, facing the others with a glitter in his eyes that had its effect on Piquet.
"We have bad tam, dees spreeng, for sure," moaned Antoine. "I weesh we net more feesh."
"Well, I tell you what to do," said Jean. "Eef de feesh do not bite tru de ice or come to de net, we travel over to de Salmon, plentee beaver dere."
At the suggestion of moving into the unknown country to the north, with its dread valleys peopled with spirits, the superstitious half-breeds shook their heads. Rather starve on the Whale, they said, than in the haunted valleys where the voices of the Windigo filled the nights with fear.
With a disgusted shrug of his wide shoulders, Marcel dismissed the subject. "All right, starve on de Ghost, de Windigo get you on de Salmon."
With the disappearance of the caribou the partners began setting rabbit snares to save their meat and flour. Jean brought up the last of his fish from Conjuror's Falls but refused to touch his cache at the lake. With strict economy and a liberal diet of rabbit, they decided that their food could carry them into March. Jean wished to keep the flour untouched for emergency, but the half-breeds, characteristically optimistic, counted on a return of the caribou, and they always had rabbit to fall back upon.
During the last week in January while following his trap-lines, Jean made a discovery the gravity of which drove him in haste back to the camp on the Ghost.
"How many long snows since de plague, Joe?" he asked.
His comrades turned startled eyes on the speaker. Piquet slowly counted on his fingers the winters since the last plague all but exterminated the snow-shoe rabbits, then leaping to his feet, cried: "By Gar! eet ees not dees year. No, no! de ole man at de trade said de nex' long snow after dees will be de plague."
"Well, de old men were wrong," Marcel calmly insisted, as his companions paled at the meaning of his words. "Eet ees dees year w'en you net leetle feesh, dat de rabbits die."
"No, eet ees a meestake!" they protested as the lean features of the Frenchman hardened in a bitter smile.
"On de last trip to my traps," went on the imperturbable Marcel, "I find four rabbit dead from de plague an' since de last snow I cross few fresh tracks."
"I fin' none een two days myself," echoed Antoine.
The stark truth of Marcel's contention drove itself home. At last, convinced, they gazed with blanched faces into each others' eyes from which looked fear—fear of the dread weeks of the March moon and the slow death which starvation might bring. The grim spectre which ever hovers overthe winter camps in the white silences now menaced the shack on the Ghost.
Shortly, fresh rabbit tracks became rare. After years of plenty, the days of lean hunting for lynx and fox had returned. The plague, which periodically sweeps the north, would bring starvation, as well, to many a tepee of the improvident children of the snows.
As the weeks went by, the food cache at the camp on the Ghost steadily shrank. The nets under the ice and the set-lines were now bringing no fish. More and more Jean slept in his half-way camp ten miles north, for although the short rations he fed Fleur had been obtained solely by his own efforts, Joe and Antoine objected to the well-nourished look of the puppy while they grew thin and slowly weakened. But, for generations, the huskies have been accustomed to starvation, and if not slaving with the sleds, will for weeks show but slight effect from short rations. Besides, Fleur had, from necessity and instinct, become a hunter, and many a ptarmigan and stray rabbit she picked up foraging for herself.
To increase the difficulty of hunting for food, January had brought blizzard after blizzard, piling deep with drifts the trails to their trap-lines, which they still visited regularly, for the starved lynxes were coming to the bait of the flesh of their kin in greater and greater numbers. Twice, seeking the return of the caribou, the desperate men travelledfar into the barrens beaten by the withering January winds, returning with wind-burned, frost-blackened faces, for no man may face for long the needle-pointed scourge of the midwinter northers off the Straits.
Finally, in desperation, when the flour was gone, and the food cache held barely enough meat and fish for two weeks, Joe and Antoine insisted that, while they had food to carry them through, they make for the post.
"You can crawl into de post lak a starving Cree because you were too lazy to net feesh. I will stay in de bush with my dog," was Jean's scornful reply.
But the situation was desperate. With two months remaining before the big thaw in April, when they could rely on plenty of fish, there seemed but one alternative, unless the caribou returned or the fish began to move. A few trout and an occasional rabbit and ptarmigan would not keep them alive until the "break-up," when the bear would leave their "washes" and the caribou start north. Already with revolting stomachs they had begun to eat starved lynx. If only they could get beaver, but there were no beaver on the Ghost. It was clear that they must find game shortly or retreat to Whale River.
One night Jean reached his fish cache on his return from a three days' hunt toward the Salmonwaters. At last he had found beaver, and caching two at his tent, with his heart high with hope, was bringing the carcasses of three more to his partners. As he approached the cache in the gathering dusk, to his surprise he found the fresh tracks of snow-shoes.
"Ah-hah!" he muttered, his mouth twisted in a grim smile, "so dey rob de cache of Jean Marcel while he travel sixty mile to get dem beaver!"
The last of Fleur's pitiful little store of fish was gone. The cache was stripped.
Jean shook his head sadly. So he could no longer trust these men whose hunger had made them thieves, he mused. Well, he would break with them at once. "Poor Fleur!" He patted the sniffing nose of his dog.
Bitter with the discovery, Marcel drove Fleur over the trail to the camp. Opening the slab-door he surprised the half-breeds gorging themselves from a steaming kettle of trout. But hunger had driven them past all sense of shame. Looking up sullenly, they waited for him to speak.
"Bon soir, my friends! I see you have had luck at de lines," he surprised them with. "I have three nice fat beaver for you."
The hollow eyes of Joe and Antoine met in a questioning look. Then Piquet brazened it out.
"Beaver, eh? Dat soun' good, fat beaver!" and he smacked his thin lips greedily.
"W'ere you get beaver, Jean?" asked Antoine, now that the tension due to Jean's appearance had relaxed.
"W'ere I tell you I would fin' dem, nord, een de valley of de spirits," he laughed.
Marcel heaped a tin dish from the kettle, and slipping outside, fed Fleur.
"Here, Fleur!" he called, "ees some of feesh dat Joe has boiled for you. Wat, you lak' eet bettair raw? Well, Joe he lak' eet boiled."
Returning, Jean ate heartily of the lake trout. When he had finished and lighted his pipe, he said: "You weel fin' de beaver on de cache. I leeve een de morning for Salmon riviere country."
"W'at, you goin' leave us, Jean?" cried Antoine visibly disturbed.
"Oui, I don't trap wid t'ief!" The cold eyes of Marcel bored into those of Beaulieu which wavered and fell. But Piquet accepted the challenge.
"W'at you t'ink, Jean Marcel, you geeve dose feesh to de dog w'en we starve?" he sullenly demanded. "We eat de dog, also, before we starve."
"You eat de dog, eh, Joe Piquet? Dat ees good joke. You 'av' to keel de dog and Jean Marcel first, my frien'," sneered Marcel. "I net feesh for my dog and you not help me but laugh; now you tak'dem from my dog. Bien! I am tru wid you both! I geeve you de beaver and bid you, bon jour, to-morrow!"
Antoine was worried, for he knew too well what the loss of Marcel would mean to them in the days to come. But the sullen Piquet in whom toil and starvation were bringing to the surface traits common to the half-breed, treated Marcel's going with seeming indifference.
Deep in the night, Marcel waked cold. Lifting his head from the blankets, his face met an icy draft driving through the open door of the shack which framed a patch of sky swarming with frozen stars.
Wondering why the door was open, he rose to close it, when the starlight fell on Piquet's empty bunk.
"Ah-hah! Joe he steal some more, maybe!" he muttered, hastily drawing on his moccasins.
Then stepping into the thongs of his snow-shoes which stood in the snow beside the door, he hurried to the cache.
Beneath the food scaffold crouched a dark form.
"So you steal my share of de meat and hide eet, before I go, eh? You t'ief!"
Caught in the act, Piquet rose from the provision bags as Marcel reached him, to take full in the face a blow backed by the concentrated fury of the Frenchman. Reeling back against a spruce support to the cache, the dazed half-breed sank to his snow-shoes, then, slowly struggling to his knees,lunged wildly with his knife at the man sneering down at him. Missing, Piquet's thrust carried him head-first into the snow, his arms buried to the shoulders. In a flash, Marcel fell on the prostrate breed with his full weight, driving both knees hard into Piquet's back. With a smothered grunt the half-breed lay limp in the snow.
"Get up, Antoine!" called Marcel, returning to the shack with Fleur, who had left her bed under a spruce, "you fin' a cache-robber, widout fur on heem, out dere. I tak' my grub an' go."
"W'ere ees Joe?" asked the confused Beaulieu, rubbing his eyes.
"Joe, he got w'at t'ieves deserve. Go an' see."
Antoine appeared shortly, followed by the muttering Piquet.
"Ah, bo'-jo', M'sieu Carcajou! You have wake up," Jean jeered.
One of Piquet's beady eyes was swollen shut, but the other snapped evilly as he limped to his bunk.
Taking his share of the food, Marcel loaded his sled, hitched Fleur, then looked into the shack, where he found the two men arguing excitedly.
"A'voir, Antoine! Better hide your grub or M'sieu Wolverine weel steal eet w'ile you sleep."
With an oath, Piquet was on his feet with his knife, but Beaulieu hurled him back on his bunkand held him, as he cursed the man who stood coolly in the doorway, sneering at the helpless breed blocked in his attempt at revenge.
"A'voir, Antoine!" Jean repeated, as the troubled face of Beaulieu turned to the old partner he respected, "don' let de carcajou keel you for de grub." And ignoring the proffered hand of the hunter who followed him out to the sled, took the trail north.
As dawn broke blue over the bald ridges to the east, Marcel raised his set-lines and net at the lake and pushed on toward the silent hills of the Salmon headwaters.
It had been with the feeling of a heavy load loosed from his shoulders that the Frenchman left the Ghost. Disgusted with the laziness and lack of foresight of his partners in the autumn; through the strain and worry of the winter he had gradually lost all confidence in their capacity to fight through until spring brought back the fishing; and now this robbery of his cache and the affair with Piquet had made him a free man.
For Antoine, the friend of his youth, ever easily led but at heart, honest enough, he held only feelings of disgust; but with the crooked-souled Piquet, henceforth it should be war to the knife. Knowing that there were more beaver in the white valleys of the Salmon country, Marcel faced with hope the March crust and the long weeks of the April thaws, when rotting ice would bar the waterways and soggy snow, the trails, to all travel. Somehow, he and Fleur would pull through and see Julie Breton and Whale River again. Somehow, they would live, but it meant a dogged will and day after day, many a white mile of drudgery for himself and thedog he loved. Crawl starved and beaten into Whale River—caught like a mink in a trap by the pinch of the pitiless snows—no Marcel ever did, and he would not be the first.
The February dusk hung in the spruce surrounding the half-way camp of Marcel beside a pond in the hills dividing the watershed of the Ghost from the Salmon. For three days Jean had been picking up his traps preparatory to making the break north to the beaver country. With a light load, for Fleur could not haul much over her weight on a freshly broken trail in the soft snow, the toboggan-sled stood before the tent ready for an early start under the stars. From the smoke-hole of the small tepee the sign of cooking rose straight into the biting air, for there was no wind. But the half-ration of trout and beaver which was simmering in the kettle would leave the clamoring stomach of the man unsatisfied. With the three beaver he had brought from the north and the fish and caribou from the Ghost, Marcel still had food for himself and his dog for a fortnight, but he was not an Indian and was husbanding his scanty store. Fleur had already bolted her fish, more supper than her master allowed himself, for Fleur was still growing fast and her need was greater.
Disliking the smoke from the fire which often filled the tepee, Fleur slept outside under the lowbranches of a fir, and when it snowed, waked warm beneath a white blanket. For, enured to the cold, the husky knows no winter shelter and needs none, sleeping curled, nose in bushy tail, in a hole dug in the snow, through the bitter nights without frost bite.
As the dusk slowly blanketed the forest, here and there stars pricked out of the dark canopy of sky to light gradually the white hills rolling away north to the dread valleys of the forbidden land of the Crees. Later, as the night deepened, the Milky Way drew its trail across the swarming stars. In the pinch of the strengthening cold, spruce and jack-pine snapped in the encircling forest, while the ice of lake and river, contracting, boomed intermittently, like the shot of distant artillery.
On the northern horizon, the camp-fires of the giants flickered and glowed, fitfully; then, at length, loosing their bonds, snake-like ribbons of light writhed and twisted from the sky-line to the high heavens, in grotesque traceries; and across the white wastes of the polar stage swept the eerie "Dance of the Spirits."
For a space Jean stood outside the tepee watching the never-ceasing wonder of the aurora; then sending Fleur to her bed, sought his blankets. But no sting of freezing air might keep the furred and feathered marauders of the night from their hunting; for faintly on the tense silence floated the "hoo-hoo!" of the snowy owl, patrolling the haunts of the wood-mice. Out of the murk of a cedar swamp rose the scream of a starving lynx. Presently, over star-lit ridges drifted the call of a mating timber wolf.
The Northern Lights had dimmed and faded. Sentinel stars alone guarded the white solitudes, when, from the gloom of the spruce out into the lighted snow moved a dark shape. Noiselessly the muffled racquettes of the skulker advanced. As the figure crept nearer the tent, it suddenly stopped, frozen into rigidity, head forward, as though listening. After a space, it stirred again. Something held in the hands glinted in the starlight, like steel. It was the action of a rifle, made bright by wear.
When the creeping shape reached the banking of the tepee, again it stopped, stiff as a spruce. The seconds lengthened into minutes. Then a hand reached out to the canvas. In the hand was a knife. Slowly the keen edge sawed at the frozen fabric. At last the tent was slit.
Leaning forward the hunter of sleeping men enlarged the opening and pressed his face to the rent. Long he gazed into the darkened tepee. Then withdrawing his hooded head, he shook it slowly as if in doubt. Finally, as though decided on his course,he thrust the barrel of his rifle through the opening and dropped his head as if to aim; when, from the rear a gray shape catapulted into his back, flattening him on the snow. As the weight of the dog struck the crouching assassin, his rifle exploded inside the tent, followed by a scream of terror.
Again and again the long fangs of the husky slashed at the throat of the writhing thing in the snow. Again and again the massive jaws snapped and tore, first the capote, then the exposed neck, to ribbons. Then with cocked rifle the dazed Marcel, waked by the gun fired in his ears, reached them.
With difficulty dragging his dog from the crumpled shape, Marcel looked, and from the bloodied face grimacing horribly in death above the mangled throat, stared the glazed eyes of Joe Piquet.
"By Gar! You travel far for de grub and derevanche, Joe Piquet," he exclaimed. Turning to the dog, snarling with hate of the prowling thing she had destroyed, Jean led her away.
"Fleur, ma petite!" he cried, "she took good care of Jean Marcel while he sleep. Piquet, he thought he keel us both in de tent. He nevaire see Fleur under de fir." The great dog trembling with the heat of battle, her mane stiff, yelped excitedly. "She love Jean Marcel, my Fleur; and what a strength she has!" Rearing, Fleur placed her massive fore-paws on Marcel's chest, whining up into his face; then seizing a hand in her jaws, proudly drew him back to the dead man in the snow. There, raising her head, as if in warning to all enemies of her master, she sent out over the white hills the challenging howl of the husky.
When Jean Marcel had buried the frozen body of Joe Piquet in a drift over the ridge, where the April thaws would betray him to the mercy of his kind, the forest creatures of tooth and beak and claw, he started back to the Ghost with Fleur, taking Piquet's rifle to be returned to his people with his fur and outfit. Confident that Antoine had had no part in the attempt to kill him and get his provisions, he wished Beaulieu to know Piquet's fate, as Antoine would now in all probability make for Whale River and could carry a message. Furthermore if anything had by chance happened to Beaulieu, Marcel wished to know it before starting north.
As Fleur drew him swiftly over the trail, ice-hard from much travelling, Jean decided that if Antoine wished to fight out the winter in the Salmon country, for the sake of their old friendship he would overlook the half-breed's weakness under Piquet's influence, and offer to take him.
Dawn was wavering in the gray east when Marcel reached the silent camp. He called loudly towake the sleeping man inside; but there was no response.
Marcel's heavy eyebrows contracted in a puzzled look.
"Allo, Antoine!" Still no answer. Was he to find here more of the work of Joe Piquet? he wondered, as he swung back the slab-door of the shack and peered into the dim interior.
There in his bunk lay the half-breed.
"Wake up, Antoine!" Marcel cried, approaching the bunk; then the faint light from the open door fell on the gray face of Antoine Beaulieu, stiff in death.
"Tiens!" muttered Marcel. "Stabbed tru de heart w'en he sleep. Joe Piquet, he t'ink to get our feesh and beaver and fur, den he tell dem at Whale Riviere we starve out. Poor Antoine!"
Sick with the discovery, Jean sat beside the dead man, his head in his hands. Bitterly now, he regretted that he had refused the hand of his old friend in parting; that he had not taken him with him when he left the Ghost. It was clear that before starting to stalk Marcel's camp, Piquet had deemed it safer to seal the lips of Beaulieu forever as to the fate of the man he planned to kill.
"Poor Antoine!" Marcel sadly repeated. Outside, Fleur, fretting at the presence of death, whined to be off.
In the cold sunrise, Jean lashed the body of his boyhood friend, which he had sewed in some canvas, on the food cache, that it might rest in peace undefiled by the forest creatures, until on his return in May he might give it decent burial. Beside it he placed the fur-packs, rifles and outfits of the two men.
"Adieu, Antoine!" he called, waving his hand at the shrouded shape on the cache, and turned north.