The Whelps of the Wolf
by George Marsh · English · Gutenberg #32465 · 366,664 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Whelps of the Wolf
Author: George Marsh
Release date: May 21, 2010 [eBook #32465]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHELPS OF THE WOLF ***
Produced by Joseph R. Hauser and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.com
THE WHELPS
OF THE WOLF
By GEORGE MARSH
[Illustration]
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with The Penn Publishing Company
Printed in U. S. A.
COPYRIGHT
1922 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY
[Illustration]
The Whelps of the Wolf
Made in the U. S. of A.
Contents
I. THE LAND OF THE WINDIGO 9
II. THE END OF THE TRAIL 16
III. THE FRIEND OF DEMONS 30
IV. HOME AND JULIE BRETON 38
V. THE MOON OF FLOWERS 44
VI. FOR LOVE OF A DOG 51
VII. THE LONG TRAIL TO THE SOUTH COAST 64
VIII. THE MEETING IN THE MARSHES 69
IX. IN THE TEETH OF THE WINDS 79
X. THE CAMP ON THE GHOST 88
XI. THE WARNING IN THE WIND 94
XII. THE WORK OF THE WHITE WOLVES 98
XIII. POOR FLEUR 103
XIV. THE MARK OF THE BREED 108
XV. FOR LOVE OF A MAN 111
XVI. THE STARVING MOON 119
XVII. THE TURN OF THE TIDE 131
XVIII. SPRING AND FLEUR 135
XIX. WHEN THE ICE GOES SOFT 145
XX. THE DEAD MAN TELLS HIS TALE 150
XXI. THE BLIND CLUTCH OF CIRCUMSTANCE 157
XXII. IN THE DEPTHS 170
XXIII. IN THE EYES OF THE CREES 175
XXIV. ON THE CLIFFS 181
XXV. INSPECTOR WALLACE TAKES CHARGE 188
XXVI. THE WHELPS OF THE WOLF 193
XXVII. THE TRAP IS SPRUNG 198
XXVIII. BITTER-SWEET 212
XXIX. THE FANGS OF THE HALF-BREEDS 216
XXX. CREE JUSTICE 224
XXXI. THE WAY OF A DOG 228
XXXII. FROM THE FAR FRONTIERS 234
XXXIII. RENUNCIATION 238
XXXIV. THE VOICE OF THE WINDIGO 243
XXXV. RAW WOUNDS 253
XXXVI. DREAMS 259
XXXVII. FOR LOVE OF A GIRL 264
XXXVIII. THE WHITE TRAIL TO FORT GEORGE 270
XXXIX. THE HATE OF THE LONG SNOWS 280
XL. "HE'S GOT HIS MAN!" 290
XLI. AS YE SOW 296
The Whelps of the Wolf
CHAPTER I
THE LAND OF THE WINDIGO
The solitudes of the East Coast had shaken off the grip of the long
snows. A thousand streams and rivers choked with snow water from bleak
Ungava hills plunged and foamed and raced into the west, seeking the
salt Hudson's Bay, the "Big Water" of the Crees. In the lakes the
honeycombed ice was daily fading under the strengthening sun. Already,
here and there the buds of the willows reddened the river shores, while
the southern slopes of sun-warmed ridges were softening with the pale
green of the young leaves of birch and poplar. Long since, the armies of
the snowy geese had passed, bound for far Arctic islands; while marshes
and muskeg were vocal with the raucous clamor of the nesting gray goose.
In the air of the valleys hung the odor of wood mold and wet earth.
And one day, with the spring, returned Jean Marcel from his camp on the
Ghost, the northernmost tributary of the Great Whale to the bald ridge,
where, in March, he had seen the sun glitter on a broad expanse of level
snow unbroken by trees, in the hills to the north. His eyes had not
deceived him. The lake was there.
From his commanding position on the bare brow of the isolated mountain,
he looked out on a wilderness of timbered valleys, and high barrens
which rolled away endlessly into the north. Among these lay a large body
of water partly free of ice. Into the northeast he could trace the
divide--even make out where a small feeder of the Ghost headed on the
height of land. And he now knew that he looked upon the dread valleys of
the forbidden country of the Crees--the demon-haunted solitudes of the
land of the Windigo, whose dim, blue hills guarded a region of mystery
and terror--a wilderness, peopled in the tales of the medicine men, with
giant eaters of human flesh and spirits of evil, for generations, taboo
to the hunters of Whale River.
There was no doubt of it. The large lake he saw was a headwater of the
Big Salmon, the southern sources of which tradition placed in the
bad-lands north of the Ghost. Once his canoe floated in this lake, he
could work into the main river and find the Esquimos on the coast.
"Bien!" muttered the Frenchman, "I will go!"
Two days later, back in camp on the Ghost, Marcel announced to his
partners, Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, his intention of returning to
the Bay by the Big Salmon.
"W'at you say, Jean; you go home tru de Windigo countree?" cried Piquet,
his swart face blanched by the fear which the very mention of the
forbidden land aroused, while Antoine, speechless, stared wide-eyed.
"Oui, nord of de divide, I see beeg lac. Eet ees Salmon water for sure.
I portage cano' to dat lac and reach de coast by de riviere. You go wid
me an' get some dog?" Marcel smiled coolly into the sober faces of his
friends.
"Are you crazee, Jean Marcel?" protested Antoine. "De spirit have run de
game an' feesh away. De Windigo eat you before you fin' de Salmon, an'
eef he not get you first, you starve."
"Ver' well, you go back by de Whale; I go by Salmon an' meet de Husky. I
nevaire hunt anoder long snow widout dogs."
"Ah-hah! Dat ees good joke! You weel nevaire see de Husky," broke in
Piquet. "W'en _Matchi-Manitou_ ees tru wid you, de raven an' wolf peek
your bones, w'ile Antoine an' Joe dance at de spreeng trade wid de Cree
girl."
Ignoring the dire prediction, Marcel continued: "Good dog are all gone
at Whale Riviere Post from de maladie. De Husky have plenty dog. I meet
dem on de coast before dey reach Whale Riviere an' want too much fur for
dem. Maybe I starve; maybe I drown een de strong-water; maybe de Windigo
get me; but I go."
And he did.
With a shrug of contempt for the tales of the medicine men, dramatically
rehearsed with all the embellishment which the imagination of his
superstitious partners could invent, the following day Marcel started.
"Bo'-jo', Antoine!" he said, as he gripped his friend's hand. "I meet
you at Whale Riviere."
The face of Beaulieu only too patently reflected his thoughts as he
shook his head.
"Bo'-jo', Jean, I nevaire see you again."
"You are dead man, Jean," added Piquet; "we tell Julie Breton dat your
bones lie up dere." And the half-breed pointed north to the dim, blue
hills of dread.
So with fur-pack and outfit, and as much smoked caribou as he dared
carry, Marcel poled his canoe up the Ghost, later to portage across the
divide into the trailless land where, in the memory of living man, the
feet of no hunter of the Hudson's Bay Company had strayed.
It was a reckless venture--this attempt to reach the Bay through an
unknown country. The demons of the Cree conjurors he did not fear, for
his father and his mother's father, who had journeyed, starved, and
feasted in trailless lands, from Labrador to the great Barren Grounds,
had never seen one or heard the wailing of the Windigo in the night. But
what he did fear was the possibility of weeks of wandering in his search
for the main stream, lost in a labyrinth of headwater lakes where game
might be scarce and fish difficult to net. For his smoked meat would
take him but a short way, when his rifle and net would have to see him
through.
But the risk was worth taking. If he could reach the Esquimos on their
spring journey south to the post, before they learned of the scarcity of
dogs at Whale River, he could obtain huskies at a fair trade in fur. And
a dog-team was his heart's desire.
Portaging over the divide to the large lake, now clear of ice, Marcel
followed its winding outlet into the northwest. There were days when,
baffled by a maze of water routes in a network of lakes, he despaired of
finding the main stream. There were nights when he lay supperless by his
fire thinking of Julie Breton, the black-eyed sister of the Oblat
Missionary at Whale River--nights when the forebodings of his partners
returned to mock him as a maniacal mewing broke the silence of the
forest, or, across the valleys, drifted low wailing sobs, like the
grieving of a Cree mother for her dead child.
But in the veins of Jean Marcel coursed the blood of old
_coureurs-de-bois_. His parents, victims of the influenza which had
swept the coast the year previous, had left him the heritage of a
dauntless spirit. Lost and starving though he was, he smiled grimly as
the roving wolverine and the lynx turned the night into what would have
been a thing of horror to the superstitious breeds.
When, gaunt from toil and the lack of food, Marcel finally found the
main stream and shot a bear, he knew he would reach the Esquimos. Two
hundred miles of racing river he rapidly put behind him and one June day
rounded the bend above a long white-water. The _voyageur_ ran the
rapids, rode the "boilers" at the foot of the last pitch and shot into
deep water again. But as he swung inshore to rid the craft of the slop
picked up in the churning "strong-water" behind him, Marcel's eyes
widened in surprise. He was nearer the sea than he had guessed. His last
rapids had been run. He had reached his goal, for on the shore stood the
squat skin lodges of an Esquimo camp, and moving about on the beach, he
saw the shaggy objects of his quest.
The lean face of the youth who had bearded the dreaded Windigo in their
lair shaped a wide smile. He, too, would dance at the spring trade at
Whale River, and lashed to stakes by his tent in the post clearing, a
pair of priceless Ungavas would add their howls to the chorus when the
dogs pointed their noses at the new moon.
CHAPTER II
THE END OF THE TRAIL
In his joy at his good luck, Marcel had momentarily forgotten the
ancient feud between the Esquimo and the Cree. Then he realized his
position. These rapids of the Salmon were an age-old fishing ground of
the Esquimos, who, with their dogs, are called "Huskies." No birch-bark
had ever run the broken waters behind him--no Indian hunted so far
north. If among these people there were any who traded at Whale River
where Cree and Esquimo met in amity, they would recognize the son of the
old Company head man, André Marcel, and welcome him. But should they
chance to be wild Huskies who did not come south to the post, they would
mistake him for a Cree, and resenting his entering their territory,
attack him.
Drawing his rifle from its skin case, he placed it at his feet and poled
slowly toward the shore where a bedlam of howls from the dogs signalled
his approach. The clamor quickly emptied the lodges scattered along the
beach. A group of Huskies, armed with rifle and seal spear, now watched
the strange craft. So close was the canoe that only by a miracle could
Marcel hope to escape down-stream if they started shooting.
Alive to his danger, the Frenchman snubbed his boat, leaning on his
pole, while his anxious eyes searched for a familiar figure in the
skin-clad throng, who talked and gesticulated in evident excitement. But
among them he found no friendly face.
Was it for this he had slaved overland to the Salmon and starved through
the early spring--a miserable death; when he had won through to his
goal--when the yelps of the dogs he sought rang in his ears? Surely,
among these Huskies, there were some who traded at the post.
"Kekway!" he called, "I am white man from Whale River!"
The muscles of Jean Marcel set, tense as wire cables, as he watched for
a hostile movement from the Huskies, silenced by his shout. Seemingly
surprised by his action, no answer was returned from the shore. Slowly
his hopes died. They were wild Esquimos and would show no mercy to the
supposed Cree invader of their hereditary fishing ground.
But still the movement which the Frenchman's roving eyes awaited, was
delayed. Not a gun in the whispering throng on the beach was raised;
not a word in Esquimo addressed to the stranger. Mystified, desperate
from the strain of the suspense, Marcel called again, this time in post
Husky:
"I am white man, from the fort at Whale River. Is there one among you
who trades there?"
At the words, the tension of the sullen group seemed to relax. Pointing
to a thick-set figure striding up the beach, a Husky shouted:
"There is one who goes to Whale River!"
The _voyageur_ expelled the air from his lungs with relief. Too long,
with pounding heart, he had steeled himself to face erect, swift death
from the near shore. A wrong move, and a hail of lead would have emptied
his canoe. Then to his joy he recognized the man who approached.
"Kovik!" he shouted. "Eet ees Jean Marcel from Whale Riviere!"
The Husky waved his hand to Marcel, joined his comrades, and, for a
space, there was much talk and shaking of heads; then he called to Jean
to come ashore.
Grounding his canoe, Marcel gripped the hand of the grinning Kovik while
the Huskies fell back eying them with mingled curiosity and fear.
"Husky say you bad spirit, Kovik say you son little chief, Whale River.
W'ere you come?"
It was clear, now, why the Esquimos had not wiped him out. They had
thought him a demon, for Esquimo tradition, as well as Cree, made the
upper Salmon the abode of evil spirits.
"I look for hunteen ground, on de head of riviere," explained Jean, for
the admission that he was in search of dogs would only defeat the
purpose of his journey.
"Good dat Kovik come," returned the Esquimo. "Some say shoot you; some
say you eat de bullet an' de Husky."
To this difference of opinion Marcel owed his life.
As Kovik finished his explanation, Jean laughed: "No, I camp wid no
Windigo up riviere; but I starve."
At this gentle hint, Marcel was invited to join in the supper of boiled
seal and goose which was waiting at the tepee. When Kovik had prevailed
upon some of the older Esquimos to forget their fears and shake hands
with the man who had appeared from the land of spirits, Jean stowed his
outfit on the cache of the Husky, freed his canoe of water and placing
it beside his packs, joined the family party. Shaking hands in turn with
Kovik's grinning wife and children, who remembered him at Whale River,
Marcel hungrily attacked the kettle, into which each dipped fingers and
cup indiscriminately. Finishing, he passed a plug of Company
nigger-head to his hosts and lit his own pipe.
"W'ere you' woman?" abruptly inquired the thick-set mother of many.
"No woman," replied Marcel, thinking of three spruce crosses in the
Mission cemetery at Whale River.
"No woman, you? No dog?" pressed the curious wife of Kovik.
"No famile." And Jean told of the deaths of parents and younger brother,
from the plague of the summer before. But he failed to mention the fact
that most of the dogs at the post had been wiped out at the same time.
"Ah! Ah!" groaned the Huskies at the Frenchman's tale of the scourge
which had swept the Hudson's Bay posts to the south.
"He good man--Marcel! He fr'en' of me!" lamented Kovik. Sucking his
pipe, he gravely nodded again and again. Surely, he intimated, the
Company had displeased the spirits of evil to have been so punished.
Then he asked: "W'ere you dog?"
"On Whale Riviere," returned Jean grimly, referring to their bones; his
eyes held by the great dogs sprawled about the beach. No such sled-dogs
as these had he ever seen at the post, even with the Esquimos. But his
grave face betrayed no sign of what was in his mind.
Massive of bone and frame, with coats unusually heavy, even for the
far-famed Ungava breed, Jean noted the strength and size of these
magnificent beasts as a horseman marks the points of a blooded colt.
Somewhat apart from the other dogs of Kovik, tumbling and roughing each
other, frolicked four clumsy puppies, while the mother, a great
slate-gray and white animal, lay near, watching her progeny through eyes
whose lower lids, edged with red, marked the wolf strain. While those
slant eyes kept restless guard, to molest one of her leggy, yelping imps
of Satan would have been the bearding of a hundred furies. The older
dogs, evidently knowing the power in the snap of her white fangs,
avoided the puppies.
One, in particular, Marcel noticed as they romped and roughed each other
on the shore, or with a brave show of valor, noisily charged their
recumbent mother, only to be sent about their business with the mild
reprimand of a nip from her long fangs. Larger, and of sturdier build
than her brothers, this puppy, in marking, was the counterpart of the
mother, having the same slate-gray patches on head and back and wearing
white socks. As he watched her bully her brothers, Jean resolved to buy
that four-months'-old puppy.
As the northern twilight filled the river valley, the Huskies returned
to the lodge, where Jean squeezed in between two younger members of the
family whose characteristic aroma held sleep from the fatigued
_voyageur_ long enough for him to decide on a plan of action. Before he
started to trade for dogs he must learn if the Esquimos knew that they
were scarce at the fur-posts. If rumor of this relayed up the coast from
Husky hunting party to hunting party, had reached them, he would be
lucky to get even a puppy. They would send their spare dogs to the
posts.
The following morning, at the suggestion of Kovik, Marcel set his
gill-net for whitefish on the opposite shore of the wide river, as the
younger Esquimos showed unmistakably by their actions that his presence
at the salmon fishing, soon to begin, was resented. But Jean needed food
for his journey down the coast and for the dogs he hoped to buy, so
ignored the dark looks cast at the mysterious white man, the friend of
Kovik. But not until evening did he casually suggest to the Husky that
he had more dogs than he could feed through the summer.
The broad face of Kovik widened in a mysterious smile as he asked: "You
geeve black fox for dog?"
Marcel's hopes fell at the words. It was an unheard of price for a dog.
The Husky knew.
Masking his chagrin, the Frenchman laughed in ridicule:
"I geeve otter for dog."
Kovik shook his head, his narrowed eyes wrinkling in amusement. "No
husky W'ale Riv'--For' Geor'. Me trade husky W'ale Riv'."
It was useless to bargain further. The Husky knew the value of his dogs
at the posts, and Jean could not afford to rob his fur-pack to get one.
There was much that he needed at Whale River--and then there was Julie.
It was necessary to increase his credit with the Company to pay for the
home he would some day build for Julie and himself. So, when Kovik
promptly refused a valuable cross-fox pelt for a dog, the disheartened
boy gave it up.
But after the toil and lean days of the long trail he had taken to meet
the Esquimos, he could not return to Whale River empty handed. He
coveted the slate-gray and white puppy. Never had he seen a husky of her
age with such bone--such promise as a sled dog. And her spirit--at four
months she would bare her puppy fangs at an infringement of her rights
by an old dog, as though she already wore the scars of many a brawl.
Handsomer than her brothers, leader of the litter by virtue of a build
more rugged, a stronger will, she was the favorite of Kovik's children.
That they would object to parting with her; that the Husky would demand
an exorbitant price he now knew; but he was determined to have the
puppy. However, he resolved to wait until the following day, renew the
bargaining for a grown dog, then suddenly make an offer for the puppy.
The next morning Jean Marcel again offered a high price for a dog, but
the smiling Husky would not relent. Then Marcel, pointing at the female
puppy, offered the pelt of a marten for her.
To Jean's surprise, the owner refused to part with any of the litter.
They would be better than the adult dogs--these children of the
slate-gray husky--he said, and he would sell but one or two, even at
Whale River, where the Company needed dogs badly and would pay more than
Marcel could offer.
It was a bitter moment for the lad who had swung his canoe inshore at
the Husky camp with such high hopes. And he realized that it would be
useless to turn north from the mouth of the Salmon in search of dogs.
Now that they had learned of conditions at the fur-posts, no Esquimos
bound south for the spring trade would sell a dog at a reasonable price.
As the disheartened Marcel watched with envious eyes the puppies, which
he realized were beyond his means to obtain, the cries from the shore of
the eldest son of his host aroused the camp. Above them, in the chutes
at the foot of the white-water, flashes of silver marked the leaping
vanguards of the salmon run, on their way to spring-fed streams at the
river's head.
Seizing their salmon spears the Esquimos hurried up-stream to take their
stands on rocks which the fish might pass. Having no spear Jean watched
the younger Kovik wade through the strong current out to a rock within
spearing reach of a deep chute of black water. Presently the crouching
lad drove his spear into the flume at his feet and was struggling on the
rock with a large salmon. Killing the fish with his knife, he threw it,
with a cry of triumph, to the beach. Again he waited, muscles tense, his
right arm drawn back for the lunge. Again, as a silvery shape darted up
the chute, the boy struck with his spear. But so anxious was he to drive
the lance home, that, missing the fish, his lunge carried him head-first
into the swift water.
With a shout of warning to those above, Jean Marcel ran down the beach.
His canoe was out of reach on the cache with the Husky's kayak, and the
clumsy skin umiak of the family was useless for quick work. In his
sealskin boots and clothes the lad would be carried to the foot of the
rapids and drowned. Jean reached the "boilers" below the white-water
before the body of the helpless Esquimo appeared. Plunging into the
ice-cold river he swam out into the current below the tail of the
chute, and when the half-drowned lad floundered to the surface, seized
him by his heavy hair. As they were swept down-stream an eddy threw
their bodies together, and in spite of Marcel's desperate efforts, the
arms of the Husky closed on him in vise-like embrace. Strong as he was,
the Frenchman could not break the grip, and they sank.
The _voyageur_ rose to the surface fighting to free himself from the
clinging Esquimo, but in vain; then his sinewy fingers found the throat
of the half-conscious boy and taking a long breath, he again went down
with his burden. When the two came up Marcel was free. With a grip on
the long hair of the now senseless lad he made the shore, and dragging
the Husky from the water, stretched exhausted on the beach.
Shaking with cold he lay panting beside the still body of the boy, when
the terrified Esquimos reached them.
The welcome heat of a large fire soon thawed the chill from the bones of
Marcel; but the anxious parents desperately rolled and pounded the
Husky, starting his blood and ridding his stomach of water, before he
finally regained his voice, begging them to cease.
With the boy out of danger they turned to his rescuer, and only by
vigorous objection did Marcel escape the treatment administered the
Husky. He would prefer drowning, he protested with a grimace, to the
pounding they had given the boy.
"You lak' seal in de water," cried the relieved father with admiration,
when he had lavished his thanks upon Jean; for the Esquimos, although
passing their lives on or near the water, because of its low
temperature, never learn to swim.
"My fader taught me to swim een shallow lak' by Fort George," explained
the modest Frenchman.
"He die, eef you no sweem lak' seal," added the grateful mother, her
round face oily with sweat from the vigorous rubbing of her son, now
snoring peacefully by the fire.
Then the Huskies returned to their fishing, for precious time was being
wasted. The boy's spear was found washed up on the beach and loaned to
Jean, who labored the remainder of the day spearing salmon for his
journey down the coast.
That evening, after supper, Jean sat on a stone in front of the tepee
watching the active puppies. Inside the skin lodge the Esquimo and his
wife conversed in low tones. Shortly they appeared and Kovik, grinning
from long side-lock to side-lock, said:
"You good man! You trade dat dog?" He pointed at the large slate-gray
puppy sprawled near them.
The dark features of Jean Marcel lighted with eagerness.
"I geeve two marten for de dog," he said, rising quickly.
The Husky turned to the woman, shaking his head.
Marcel's lip curled at the avarice of these people whose son he had so
recently snatched from death.
Then Kovik, seemingly changing his mind, seized the puppy by the loose
skin of her neck and dragged her, protesting vigorously, to Jean, while
the mother dog came trotting up, ears erect, curious of what the master
she feared was doing with her progeny.
"Dees you' dog!" said the Esquimo.
Marcel patted the back of the puppy, still in the grasp of her owner,
while she muttered her wrath at the touch of the stranger. Although they
owed him much, he thought, yet these Huskies wished to make him pay
dearly for the dog. Still he was glad to get her, even at such a price.
So he went to the cache, loosened the lashings of his fur-pack, and
returned with two prime marten pelts, offering them to the Esquimo.
Again Kovik's round face was divided by a grin. The wrinkles radiated
from the narrow eyes which snapped.
"You lak' seal in riv'--ketch boy. Tak' de dog--we no want skin." And
shaking his head, the Husky pushed away the pelts.
Slowly the face of Marcel changed with surprise as he sensed the import
of Kovik's words. They were making him a present of the dog.
"You--you geeve to me--dese puppy?" he stammered, staring into the
grinning face of the Esquimo, delighted with the success of his little
ruse.
Kovik nodded.
"T'anks, t'anks!" cried Jean, his eyes suspiciously moist as he wrung
the Husky's hand, then seized that of the chuckling woman. "You are good
people; I not forget de Kovik."
He had done these honest Esquimos a wrong. Now, after the fear of
defeat, and the bitterness, the puppy he had coveted was his. He was not
to return to Whale River empty handed, the laughing-stock of his
partners. It had been indeed worth while, his plunge into the bad-lands,
for in two years he would have the dog-team of his dreams. Some day this
four-months-old puppy should make the fortune of Jean Marcel.
But little he realized, as he exulted in his good luck, how vital a part
in his life, and in the life of Julie Breton, this wild puppy with the
white socks was to play.
CHAPTER III
THE FRIEND OF DEMONS
When Marcel put his canoe into the water the following morning, to cross
to his net, three young Esquimos, who had been loitering near Kovik's
lodge, followed him to the beach, and as he left the shore, hurled at
his back a torrent of Husky abuse.
What he had hoped to avoid had come. It would have been better to listen
to Kovik's warning against delaying his departure and attempting to fish
at the rapids after the salmon arrived. The use of the boy's spear, the
day previous, had brought the feeling among the younger men to a head.
They meant to drive him down river.
Removing the whitefish and small salmon, Jean lifted his net and
stretching it to dry on the shore, recrossed the stream. On the beach
awaiting his return were the Huskies. Clearly, they had decided that he
was possessed of no supernatural powers and could now be bullied with
impunity. As he did not wish to embroil his friend Kovik in his defense,
when he had smoked his last catch he would leave. But the blood of the
fighting Marcels was slowly coming to a boil. If these raw fish-eaters
thought that they could frighten the grandson of the famous Étienne
Lacasse, and the son of André Marcel, whose strength was a tradition on
the East Coast, he could show them their mistake. Still, avoid trouble
he must, for a fight would be suicide.
So ignoring the Huskies, who talked together in low tones, Marcel
landed, cleaned some fish for the Koviks' kettle, and carried them up to
the tepee where the family were still asleep. Returning, the hot blood
rose to the bronzed face of the Frenchman at what he saw.
The three Esquimos were coolly feeding his fish to the dogs.
Reckless of the consequences, in the blind rage which choked him, Marcel
reached the pilferers of his canoe before they realized that he was on
them. Seizing one by his long hair, with a wrench he hurled the
surprised Husky backward into the water and sent a second reeling to the
stony beach with a fierce blow in the face. The third, retreating from
the fury of the attack of the maddened white man, drew his skinning
knife; but seizing his paddle, Marcel sent the knife spinning with a
vicious slash which doubled the screaming Husky over a broken wrist.
Turning, he saw his first victims making down the beach toward the
tepees, while the uproar of the dogs was swiftly arousing the camp.
Then, as his blood cooled and his judgment returned, the youth, who had
suffered and dared much that he might have dogs for the next long snows,
realized the height of his folly. They had baited him into furnishing
them with an excuse for attacking him. Now even the faithful Kovik would
be helpless against them. He would never see Whale River and Julie
Breton again. Already the Huskies were emerging from their tepees, to
hear the tale of his late antagonists. There was no time to lose before
they rushed him.
Bounding up the beach to Kovik's tepee for his rifle, he rapidly
explained the situation to the Esquimo, while in his ears rang the
shouts of the excited Huskies and the yelping of the dogs. Jean did not
hope to escape alive from this bedlam, but of one thing he was sure, he
would die like a Marcel, with a smoking gun in his hands.
Urging Jean to get his fur-pack and smoked fish to his canoe at once,
Kovik hurried down the shore to the knot of wildly excited Esquimos.
With the aid of the grateful wife and son of Kovik, Marcel's canoe was
swiftly loaded and his treasured puppy lashed in the bow. But the rush
up the beach of an infuriated throng bent on his death, which Marcel
stoically awaited beside a large boulder, was delayed. Not a hundred
yards distant, the doughty Kovik, the center of an arguing mob, was
fighting with all the wits he possessed for the man who had saved his
son. For Marcel to attempt to escape by water would only have drawn the
fire of the Huskies and nullified Kovik's efforts, and their kayaks,
faster than any canoe, were below him. A break for the "bush," even if
successful, in the end, meant starvation. So with extra cartridges
between his teeth, and in his hands, Jean Marcel grimly fingered the
trigger-guard of his rifle, as he waited at the boulder for the turn of
the dice down the shore.
Minutes, each one an eternity to the man at bay, passed. But Kovik still
held his men, and Marcel clearly noted a change in the manner of the
Huskies. The shouting had ceased. His friend was winning.
Shortly, Kovik left the group and walked rapidly toward Marcel, followed
at a distance by his people.
"Dey keel you, but Kovik say you fr'en' wid spirit; he come down riv'
an' eat Husky," explained the worried defender of Jean. "Kovik say you
shoot wid spirit gun, all de Husky; so you go, queek!"
The broad face of Kovik split in a grim smile as he gripped the hand of
the relieved Marcel and pushed off his canoe. Thus, doubly, had the
loyal Esquimo paid for the life of his son.
With the emotions of a man suddenly reprieved from a sentence of death,
Marcel poled his canoe out into the current. Behind him, the Esquimos
had already joined Kovik on the shore, when, warned by a shout from his
friend, Marcel instinctively ducked as a seal spear whistled over his
head. Some doubter was testing the magic of the white demon.
Seizing his paddle Jean swiftly crossed the river and secured his
precious net. But he was not yet rid of his enemies. If the young men,
conquering their fear of his friendship with demons, at once launched
their kayaks, they could overhaul his loaded canoe. But once clear of
the last tepees, with his pursuers behind him, he was confident that he
could pick them off with his rifle as fast as they came up in their
rocking craft.
With all the power of his iron back and shoulders, Jean drove his canoe
on the strong current; but Kovik had the Huskies in hand and they did
not follow. Shortly he had passed the last lodge on the shore and the
camp was soon in the distance. It seemed like a dream--his peril of the
last hour; and now, a free man again, with his puppy in the bow, he was
on his way to the coast and Julie Breton.
Suddenly two rifles cracked in the rocks on the near beach. The paddle
of Marcel dropped from his limp hands. Headlong he lurched to the floor
of the canoe. Again the guns spat from the boulders. Two bullets whined
over the birch-bark. But save for the yelping puppy in the bow, there
was no movement in the canoe, as it slid, the cat's-paw of the current.
Waving their arms in triumph at the collapse of the feared white man,
whose magic had been impotent before their bullets, the Huskies hurried
along shore after the canoe. Carried by breeze and current, with its
whimpering puppy and silent human freight the craft grounded a half-mile
below the ambush. On came the chattering pair of assassins, already
quarrelling over the division of the outfit of the dead man--delirious
with the sweetness of their vengeance for the rough handling the
stricken one in the canoe had meted out to them but an hour before. The
dog, although lashed to the bow thwart, had managed to crawl out of the
boat and was struggling with the thongs which held her, when the Huskies
came running up. Staring into the birch-bark, they turned to each other
gray faces on which was written ghastly fear.
The canoe was empty!
The white man they had thought to find a bloodied heap, was, after all,
a maker of magic--a friend of demons. Kovik had told the truth. They
were lost!
Palsied with dread, their feet frozen to the beach, the young ruffians
awaited the swift vengeance of their enemy. And it came.
Hard by, a rifle crashed in the boulders. With a scream, a Husky reeled
backward with a shattered hand, as his gun, torn from his grasp by the
impact of the bullet, rattled on the stones. A second shot, splintering
the butt of his rifle, hurled the other to his knees. Then with a
demonical yell, Marcel sprang from his ambush.
Running like caribou jumped by barren-ground wolves, the panic-stricken
Huskies fled from the place of horror, pursued by the ricochetting
bullets of the white demon, until they disappeared up the shore.
"A'voir, M'sieurs!" cried Marcel. "De nex' tam you ambush cano', don'
let eet dref behin' de point." And shaking with laughter, turned to his
yelping puppy, frenzied with excitement.
"De Husky t'ink we not go to Whale Riviere, eh?" he said, stroking the
trembling shoulders of the worrying dog. "But Jean and hees petite
chienne, dey see Julie Breton jus' de same."
Putting his puppy in the canoe, Marcel continued on down the river.
When the shots from ambush whined past his face, Marcel had flattened to
the floor of the craft, both for cover and to deceive the Huskies. The
second shots convinced him that he had but two to deal with. Slitting
the bark skin near the gunwale, that he might watch the shore without
betraying the fact that he was conscious, and thereby draw their fire,
while they were protected from his by the boulders, he learned that the
craft was working toward the beach.
His plan was swiftly made. Driven by the racing current, the canoe had
already left the Esquimos, following the shore, in the rear. He would
allow the craft to ground and hold his fire until they were on top of
him. But the boat finally reached the beach at a point hidden from the
pursuing Huskies. With a bound Marcel was out of the canoe and concealed
among the rocks. Great as was the temptation to leave the men who had
ambushed him in cold blood, shot upon the beach, a sinister warning to
their fellows, the thought of Kovik's position at the camp forced him to
content himself with disarming and sending them shrieking up the shore
with his bullets worrying their heels.
Often, during the day, as Marcel put mile after mile of the Salmon
between himself and the camp at the rapids, the puppy cocked curious
ears as the new master ceased paddling, to roar with laughter at the
memory of two flying Esquimos.
CHAPTER IV
HOME AND JULIE BRETON
That night Marcel camped at the river's mouth and watched the gray
waters of the great Bay drown the sinking sun. Somewhere, far down the
bold East Coast the Great Whale emptied into the salt "Big Water" of the
Crees. He remembered having heard the old men at the post say that the
Big Salmon lay four "sleeps" of fair weather to the north--four days of
hard paddling, as the Company canoes travel, if the sea was flat and the
wind light. But if he were wind-bound, as was likely heading south in
the spring, it might take weeks. He had a hundred pounds of cured fish
and could wait out the wind, but the thought of Julie, who by this time
must have learned from his partners of his mad journey, made Jean
anxious to reach the post. He preferred to be welcomed living than
mourned as dead. He wondered how deeply she would feel it--his death.
Ah, if she only cared for him as he loved her! Well, she should love him
in time, when he had become a _voyageur_ of the Company, with a house at
the post, he told himself, as he patted his shy puppy before turning
into his blankets.
The second day out he was driven ashore under gray cliffs by a
south-wester and spent the succeeding three days in overcoming the
shyness of the hulking puppy, who, in the gentleness of the new master,
found swift solace for the loss of her shaggy kinsmen of the Husky camp.
Already she had learned that the human hand could caress as well as
wield a stick, and for the first time in her short existence, was
initiated into the mystery and delight of having her ears rubbed and
back scratched by this master who did not kick her out of the way when
she sprawled in his path. And because of her beauty, and in memory of
Fleur Marcel, the mother he had loved, he named her Fleur.
When the sea flattened out after the blow, Marcel launched his canoe,
and, with his dog in the bow, continued south. Not a wheeling gull,
flock of whistling yellow-legs, or whiskered face of inquisitive seal,
thrust from the water only as quickly to disappear, escaped the notice
of the eager puppy. Passing low islands where teal and pin-tail rose in
clouds at his approach, driving Fleur into a frenzy of excitement, at
last he turned in behind a long island paralleling the coast.
For two days Jean travelled down the strait in the lee of this island
and knew when he passed out into open water and saw in the distance the
familiar coast of the Whale River mouth, that he had travelled through
the mystic Manitounuk, the Esquimos' Strait of the Spirit. The following
afternoon off Sable Point he entered the clear water of the Great Whale
and once again, after ten months' absence, saw on the bold shore in the
distance the roofs of Whale River.
There was a lump in the throat of Jean Marcel as he gazed at the distant
fur-post. That little settlement, with its log trade-house and church of
the Oblat Fathers, the last outpost of the Great Company on the bleak
East Coast, which for two centuries had defied the grim north, stood for
all he held most dear--was home. There, in the church burial ground
enclosed by a slab fence, three spruce crosses marked the graves of his
father, mother and brother. There in the Mission House, built by Cree
converts, lived Julie Breton.
As the young flood swept him up-stream he wondered if already he had
been counted as lost by his friends at the post--for it was July;
whether the thoughts of Julie Breton sometimes wandered north to the lad
who had disappeared into the Ungava hills on a mad quest; or if, with
the others, she had given him up as starved or drowned--numbered him
with that fated legion who had gone out into the wide north never to
return.
Nearing the post, the canoe began to pass the floats of gill-nets set
for whitefish and salmon. He could now see the tepees of the Whale
River Crees, dotting the high shores, and below, along the beach, the
squat skin lodges of the Huskies, with their fish scaffolds and umiaks.
The spring trade was on.
Beaching his canoe at the Company landing, where he was welcomed as one
returned from the dead by two post Crees, Marcel, leading his dog by a
rawhide thong, sought the Mission House.
At his knock the door was opened by a girl with dusky eyes and masses of
black hair, who stared in amazement at the _voyageur_.
"Julie!" he cried.
Then she found her voice, while the blood flushed her olive skin.
"Jean Marcel! _vous êtes revenu!_ You have come back!" exclaimed the
girl, continuing the conversation in French.
"Oh, Jean! We had great fear you might not return." He was holding both
her hands but, embarrassed, she did not meet his eager eyes seeking to
read her thoughts.
"Come in, _M'sieu le voyageur_!" and she led him gayly into the Mission.
"Henri, Père Henri!" she called. "Jean Marcel has returned from the
dead!"
"Jean, my son!" replied a deep voice, and Père Breton was vigorously
embracing the man he had thought never to see again.
"Father, your greeting is somewhat warmer than that of Julie," laughed
the happy youth, as the bearded priest surveyed him at arm's length.
"Ah, she has spoken much of you, Jean, this spring. None the worse for
the long voyage, my son?" he continued. "You will be the talk of Whale
River; the Crees said you could not get through. And you got your dogs?
We have only curs here, except those of the Huskies, and they are very
dear."
"The Huskies would not sell their dogs, Father. They were bringing them
to Whale River."
Then Marcel sketched briefly to his wondering friends the history of his
wanderings and his meeting with the Huskies on the Big Salmon.
As he finished the tale of his escape from the camp with his puppy, and
later from the ambush, Julie Breton's dark eyes were wet with tears.
"Oh, Jean Marcel, why did you take such risks? You might have
starved--they might have killed you!"
His eyes lighted with tenderness as they met the girl's questioning
face.
"I had to have dogs, Julie. I must save my credit with the Company. It
was the only way."
"Let me see your puppy! Where is she?" demanded the girl.
Jean led his friends outside the Mission, where he had fastened his
dog. The wild puppy shrank from the strangers, the hair bristling on her
neck, as Julie impulsively thrust a hand toward the dog's handsome head.
"Oh, but she is cross!" she exclaimed. "What is her name?"
"Fleur; it was my mother's."
"Too nice a name for such an impolite dog!"
Jean stroked Fleur's head as she crouched against his legs muttering her
dislike of strangers. At his caress, her warm tongue sought his hand.
"There," he said proudly, his white teeth flashing in a grin at Julie,
"you see here is one who loves Jean Marcel."
At the invitation of Père Breton, the _voyageur_ shut his dog in the
Mission stockade, where she would be free from attack by the post
Huskies and safe from some covetous Cree, and gladly took possession of
an empty room in the building.
CHAPTER V
THE MOON OF FLOWERS
As the grim fastnesses reaching away to the north and east and south in
limitless, ice-locked solitude, had wakened to the magic touch of
spring, so the little post at Whale River had quickened with life at the
advent of June with the spring trade. For weeks, before the return of
Marcel, the canoes of the Crees had been coming in daily from winter
trapping grounds in far valleys. Around the tepees, which dotted the
post clearing like mushrooms, groups of dark-skinned women, heads
wrapped in gaudy shawls, laughed and gossiped, while the shrill voices
of romping children filled the air, for the lean moons of the long snows
had passed and the soft days returned.
Swart hunters from Lac d'Iberville, half-breed Crees from the Whispering
Hills and the Little Whale watershed, belted with colored Company
sashes, wearing beaded leggings and moccasins, smoked and talked of the
trade with wild _voyageurs_ from Lac Bienville, the Lakes of the Winds,
and the Starving River headwaters in the caribou barrens. From a hundred
unmapped valleys they had journeyed to the Bay to trade their fox and
lynx, their mink and fisher and marten, for the goods of the Company.
Below, along the beach, Huskies from Richmond Gulf and the north coast,
from the White Bear and the Sleeping Islands, who had brought ivory of
the walrus, pelts of the white fox, seal, and polar bear, and sealskin
boots, which only their women possess the art of making waterproof, were
camped in low skin tepees, their priceless dogs tied up and under
constant guard. But while the camp of the Esquimos was a bedlam of noisy
huskies, the quarters of the Crees in the post clearing, formerly
overrun by brawling sled-dogs, were now a place of peace. The plague of
the previous summer had left the Indians but a scattering of curs.
Carrying his fur-pack and outfit to the Mission, Marcel sought the
trade-house. Passing the tepees of the Crees, he was forced to stop and
receive the congratulations of the admiring hunters on his safe return
from his "_longue traverse_" through the land of demons, which had been
the gossip of the post since the arrival of Joe and Antoine.
When his partners appeared, to stare in amazement at the man they had
announced as dead, Jean made them wince as he gripped their hands.
"Bo'-jo', Joe! Bo'-jo', Antoine!" he laughed. "You see de Windigo foun'
Jean Marcel too tough to eat! He ees good fr'en' to me now. De Husky
t'ink me devil too."
"I nevaire t'ink to see you alive at Whale Riviere, Jean Marcel!" cried
the delighted Antoine.
"Did you get de dog?" asked the practical Piquet.
"Onlee one petite pup; de Husky would not trade." Then Jean hurriedly
described his weeks on the Salmon.
As he entered the door of the long trade-house he was seized by a giant
Company man.
"By Gar! Jean Marcel!" cried Jules Duroc, his swart face lighting with
joy as he crushed the wanderer in a bear hug. "We t'ink you sure starve
out een de bush! You fin' de Beeg Salmon headwater? You see de Windigo?"
"Oui, I fin' de riviere for sure, Jules; but de Windigo he scared of me.
I tell heem Jean Marcel ees fr'en' of Jules Duroc."
The laughter in the doorway drew the attention of two men descending the
ladder from the fur-loft.
"Well, as I live, Jean Marcel!" cried Colin Gillies, the factor, and he
wrung the hand of the son of his old head man until Marcel grimaced with
pain.
"You're sure good for sore eyes, Jean; we were about giving you up!"
added Andrew McCain, the clerk, seizing Jean's free hand.
"Bon jour, M'sieu Gillies! Bon jour, Andrew! Dey say I leeve my bones on
de Beeg Salmon; de Husky shoot at me; but--Tiens! I am here!"
"What? You had trouble with the Huskies?"
"Oui, dey t'o't I was a devil, because I come down riviere from de
Bad-Lands, but Kovik, he talk to dem an' I stay. Tell dem I come from
Whale Riviere. Den dey get mad because I feesh salmon at de rapide and
mak' trouble; and poor Kovik, he tell dem dat I am bad spirit, so I can
get away."
Jean laughed heartily at the memory of Kovik's dilemma. "Dey mus' t'ink
poor Kovik ees damn liar by dees tam." Then he added soberly, "But he
save my life."
Seated with his three friends, Marcel told of his struggle to reach the
Salmon, his meeting with the Esquimos, and escape with his dog.
"So you got a dog after all, Jean? But you were crazy to take a chance
with those Huskies; they won't stand trespassing on their fisheries and
they were shy of you because you came from the headwaters. I'm glad you
didn't kill that pair, much as they deserved it. It would have made
trouble later."
"Good old Kovik! We won't forget him," added McCain.
"No, that we will not," agreed Gillies. "He thought a lot of your
father, Jean."
"Wal," said Jean proudly, "I weel have good dog-team een two year. Dat
pup, she ees wort' all de work an' trouble to get her."
"You're lucky," said Gillies. "It's mighty hard on our hunters not to
have good dogs, but they couldn't pay the Huskies' price. The Crees only
took three for breeding purposes, and six cost us a thousand in trade.
The rest were taken to Fort George and East Main."
The days at the Mission with Père Breton and Julie raced by--hours of
unalloyed happiness for Jean after ten months in the "bush." Not a day
passed that did not find him romping with the great puppy who had
learned to gaze at her tall master through slant eyes eloquent with
love. Each morning when he visited the Mission fish nets and his own,
the puppy rode in the bow of the canoe. Each afternoon, often
accompanied by Julie Breton, they went for a run up the river shore. Man
and dog were inseparable.
When he heard that Kovik had arrived, Jean brought Fleur down to the
shore, to find the family absent from their lodge. To Marcel's
amazement, his puppy at first failed to recognize her brothers, who,
yelping madly, rushed her in a mass.
With flattened ears, and mane stiffened on neck and back, their doughty
sister met them half-way. Bowling one over, she shouldered another to
the ground, where she threatened him with a fierce display of teeth. And
not until their worried mother, made fast to a stake, had recognized her
lost daughter and lured her within reach of her tongue, did the nose of
Jean's puppy reveal to her the identity of her kin. Then there was a mad
frolic in which she bullied and roughed her brothers as in the forgotten
days before the master with the low voice and the hand that never struck
her, took her away in his canoe.
When Kovik appeared in his umiak with his squat wife and family, there
was a general handshaking.
"How you leeve my fr'en' on de Salmon, Kovik?"
The Husky gravely shook his head.
"Kovik have troub' wid young men you shoot. Dey say Kovik bad spirit
too. You not hurt by dem?"
"Dey miss me an' I dreef down riviere an' ambush dem. I could keel dem
easy but eet mak' eet bad for you. Here ees tabac, an' tea an' sugar for
de woman. I tell M'sieu Gillies w'at you do for Jean Marcel."
When Jean had distributed his gifts, Fleur came trotting up, but to his
delight refused to allow Kovik to touch her.
"Huh! Dat you' dog!" chuckled the Husky.
"Oui, she ees my dog, now," laughed Jean, and his heart went out to the
puppy who already knew but one allegiance.
CHAPTER VI
FOR LOVE OF A DOG
The spring trade at Whale River was nearing its end. One by one the
tepees in the post clearing disappeared as, each day, canoes of Cree
hunters started up-river for lakes of the interior, to net fish for the
coming winter. Already the umiaks of the Esquimos peopled with women and
children had followed the ebb-tide down to the great Bay, bound for
their autumn hunting camps along the north coast.
When Jean Marcel had traded his fur and purchased what flour, ammunition
and other supplies he needed to carry him through the long snows of the
coming winter, he found that a substantial balance remained to his
credit on the books of the Company; a nest egg, he hoped, for the day
when, perchance, as a _voyageur_ of the Company with a house at the
post, he might stand with Julie at his side and receive the blessing of
the good Père Breton. But Jean realized that that day was far away.
Before he might hope to be honored by the Company with the position and
trust his father had so long enjoyed, he knew he must prove his mettle
and his worth; for the Company crews and dog-runners, entrusted with
the mails, the fur-brigades and Company business in general, are men
chosen for their intelligence, stamina and skill as canoemen and
dog-drivers.
When he had packed his last load of winter supplies from the trade-house
to the Mission, he said with a laugh to Julie:
"Julie, we have made a good start, you and I. We have credit of three
hundred dollars with the Company."
The olive skin of Julie Breton flushed to the dusky crown of hair, but
she retorted with spirit:
"You are counting your geese before they are shot, M'sieu Jean. Merci!
But I am very happy with Père Henri."
Père Breton's laugh interrupted Jean's reply. "Yes, my son. Julie is
right. You are too young, you two, to think of anything but your souls."
"Some day, Julie, I will be a Company man and then you will listen to
Jean Marcel," and the lad who had cherished the memory of the girl's
oval face through the long winter and taken it with him into the dim,
blue Ungava hills, left the Mission with head erect and swinging stride.
"Jean, when are you going back to the bush?" inquired Gillies, as Marcel
entered the trade-house.
"My partners and I go next week, maybe."
"Well, I want you to take a canoe to Duck Island for me. We're
short-handed here, and you have just come down that coast. I promised
some Huskies to leave a cache of stuff there this summer."
Marcel's dark features reddened with pride. He had been put in charge of
a canoe bound on Company business. His crossing to the Big Salmon had
marked him at Whale River as a canoeman of daring--a chip of the old
block, worthy of the name Marcel.
"Bien! M'sieu Gillies, when do we start?"
"To-day, after dinner!"
Returning to the Mission elated, Marcel ate his dinner, made up his pack
while they wished him "Bon-voyage!" then went out to the stockade.
At the gate he was met simultaneously by the impact of a shaggy body and
the swift licks of an eager tongue. Then Fleur circled him at full
speed, yelping her delight, while she worked off the excitement of
seeing her playmate again, until, at length, she trotted up and nosed
his hand, keen for the daily rubbing of her ears which drew from her
deep throat grateful mutterings of content.
"I leave my petite chienne for a few days," he whispered into a hairy
ear. "She will be a good dog and obey Ma'm'selle Julie, who will feed
her?"
The puppy broke away and ran to the gate, turning to him with pricked
ears as she whined for the daily stroll into the scrub after snow-shoe
rabbits.
"Non, ma petite! We walk not to-day!" He stroked the slate-gray back
which trembled with her desire for a run with the master, then circling
her shaggy neck with his arms, his face against hers, while she fretted
as though she knew Jean was leaving her, said: "A'voir, Fleur!" and
closed the gate.
She stood grieving, her black nose thrust between the slab pickets, the
slant eyes following Marcel's back until he disappeared. Then she raised
her head and, in the manner of her kind, voiced her disappointment in a
long howl. And the wail of his puppy struck with strange insistence upon
the ears of Jean Marcel--like a premonition of misfortune which the
future held for him and which he often recalled in the weeks to come.
As the canoe of the Company journeyed through the Strait of the Spirit,
flocks of gray geese, which were now leading their broods out to the
coast islands from the muskegs of the interior, rose ahead, to sail away
in their geometric formations, while clouds of pin-tail and black duck
patrolled the low beaches.
Jean left his cargo for the Huskies in a stone cache and running into a
south-wester, while homeward bound, did not reach Whale River for a
fortnight. As he approached the post, he made out at the log landing
the Company steamer _Inenew_, loaded with trade goods from the depot at
Charlton Island. Through the clearing, now almost bare of tepees, for
the trade was over, he walked to the Mission. The door was opened by
Julie Breton.
"Bon-jour, Ma'm'selle Breton!" and he seized the unresponsive hand of
the girl.
"I am glad to see you home safely, Jean." Something in the face and
voice of the girl checked him.
"What is the matter, Julie?" he asked. "Père Henri; he is not ill?"
"No, Jean. Père Henri is well, but----"
"You do not seem glad to see me again, Julie!"
"I am glad. You know that----"
"Well," he flung out, hurt at the girl's constrained manner, "I'll go
and see someone who will welcome Jean Marcel with no sober face----"
"Jean!" she said as he turned away.
"What is it, Ma'm'selle Breton?" and he smiled into her troubled eyes.
"Fleur has missed me, I know. She will give Jean Marcel a true welcome
home."
"Jean--she is not there--they stole her!"
The face of Jean Marcel twisted with pain.
"Mon Dieu! Stole my Fleur--my puppy?"
"Yes, they took her from the stockade, two nights ago--two men who came
up the coast after dogs."
With face buried in his arms to hide the tears misting his eyes, he
leaned against the door jamb, while the girl rested a sympathetic hand
on his shoulder.
"Poor Jean!"
"I worked so hard to get her. I loved that puppy, Julie; she was my
child," he groaned.
"I know, Jean, how you feel; after what you have been through--to have
lost her----"
"But I have not lost her!" the boy exclaimed fiercely, drawing a deep
breath and facing the girl with features set like stone. "I have not
lost her, Julie Breton! I will follow them and bring back my dog if I
have to trail those men to Rupert House."
The tears had gone and in the eyes of Jean Marcel was a glint she had
never known--a glitter of hate for the men who had taken his dog, so
intense, so bitter, that she thrilled inwardly as she gazed at his
transformed face. Instinctively, Julie Breton knew that the lad who
faced her was no longer the playmate of old to be treated as a boy, but
the possessor of a high courage and unbreakable will that men in the
future would reckon with.
Jean entered the trade-house to find Gillies in conversation with a tall
stranger, who, Jules whispered, was Mr. Wallace, the new inspector of
the East Coast posts, who had come with the steamer.
"A few days after you left, Jean," explained Gillies, "two half-breeds
dropped in here with the story that they had travelled up the coast from
Rupert House to buy dogs from the Huskies. There were no dogs for sale
here, and they seemed pretty sore at missing the York-boat bound south
with the dogs bought by the Company for East Main and Fort George. Why,
we didn't know, for they couldn't get any of those dogs. They were a
weazel-faced, mean-looking pair and when Jules found them feeding two of
our huskies one day, there was trouble."
"What did they do to you, Jules?" asked Jean, smiling faintly at the big
Company bowman.
"What did Jules do to them, you mean," broke in Angus McCain.
"Well," continued Gillies, "we got outside in time to see Jules break
his paddle over the head of one and pile into the other who had a knife
out and looked mean.
"Then I kicked them out of the post. They left that night with your dog,
for the next day at Little Bear Island they passed a canoe of
goose-hunters bound for Whale River and the Indians noticed the puppy
who seemed to be muzzled and tied."
During the recital, Marcel walked the floor of the trade-house, his
blood hot with rage.
"French half-breeds, M'sieu Gillies, or Scotch?" he asked.
"Scotch, Jean, medium sized; one had lost half an ear and the other had
a scar on his chin and the first finger gone on his right hand. But
you're not going after them, lad; they've two days' start on you and
it's August!"
"M'sieu Gillies, I took de _longue traverse_ for dat dog. She was de
best pup in dees place. I love dat husky, M'sieu. I start to-night."
The import and finality of Jean's words startled his hearers.
"Why, you won't make your trapping-grounds before the freeze-up, if you
head down the coast now. You're crazy, man! Besides, they are two days
ahead of you, to start with, and with two paddles will keep gaining,"
objected the factor.
"M'sieu Gillies," the boy ignored the factor's protest, "will you geeve
me letter of credit for de Company posts?"
"Why, yes, Jean, you've got three hundred dollars credit here, but, man,
stop and think! You can't overhaul those breeds alone, and if they
belong in the East Main or Rupert River country they'll be back in the
bush by the time you reach the posts, even if you can trail them that
far. It's three hundred and fifty miles to Rupert House; you might be a
month on the way."
Jean Marcel shook his head doggedly, determination written in the
stone-hard muscles of his dark face. Then he suddenly demanded of the
factor:
"What would my father, André Marcel, do eef he leeved? Because of de
freeze-up would he geeve hees pup to dose dog-stealer? I ask you dat,
M'sieu?"
Gillies' honest eyes frankly met the questioner's.
"André Marcel was the best canoeman on this coast, and no man ever did
him a wrong who didn't pay." The factor hesitated.
"Well, M'sieu!" demanded Jean.
"André Marcel," Gillies continued, "would have followed the men who
stole his dog down this coast and west to the Barren Grounds."
Jules Duroc nodded gravely as he added: "By Gar! André Marcel, he would
trail dose men into de muskegs of Hell."
"Well," said Jean, smiling proudly at the encomiums of his father's
prowess, "Jean Marcel, hees son, will start to-night."
Argument was futile to dissuade Marcel from his mad venture. His
partners of the previous winter who had waited impatiently for his
return refused to delay longer their start for Ghost River and left at
once.
Then Jules took Marcel aside and quietly talked to him as would a
brother.
"Jean, you stay here wid Ma'm'selle Julie till de steamer go. Dat M'sieu
Wallace, he sweet on you' girl w'en you were up de coast. You stay till
he leeve."
For this Jean had an outward shrug of contempt, but the rumored
attentions of Wallace to Julie Breton, during his absence, sickened his
heart with fear. Was he to lose her, too, as well as Fleur?
Before supper, at the Mission, Père Breton urged him to return to his
trapping grounds and spare himself the toil of a hopeless quest down the
coast in the face of the coming winter. Julie was adding her objections
to her brother's, when a knock on the door checked her. Her face colored
slightly as Jean glanced up, when she turned to the door.
"Bon soir, Monsieur!" she greeted the newcomer, a note of embarrassment
in her voice.
"Good evening, Mademoiselle. I hope I'm not late?" And Inspector Wallace
entered the room.
The Inspector, a handsome, well-built man of thirty-five, was dressed in
the garb of civilization and wore shoes, a rarity at Whale River. Chief
of the East Coast posts of the Great Company, he had been sent the year
previous, from western Ontario, and put in command of men older in years
and experience who had passed their lives in the far north. And
naturally much resentment had manifested itself among the traders. But
that the new chief officer looked and acted like a man of ability, the
disgruntled factors had been forced to admit.
As Wallace sat conversing of the great world outside with Père Breton,
who was evidently much pleased by his attentions to Julie, he seemed to
Jean Marcel to embody all that the young Frenchman lacked. How, indeed,
he asked himself, could he now aspire to the love of Julie Breton when
so great a man chose to smile upon her?
Wallace seemed surprised at the presence of a humble Company hunter as a
member of the priest's family, but Père Breton privately informed him
that Jean was as a son and brother at the Mission.
While the black eyes of Julie flashed in response to the admiring
glances of Wallace, Jean Marcel ate in silence his last meal at Whale
River for many a long week, torn by his longing for the dog carried down
the coast in the canoe of the thieves and by the hopelessness of his
love for this girl who was manifestly thrilling to the compliments of a
man who knew the world of men and cities, who had seen many women, yet
found this rose of the north fair. But as he ate in silence, the young
Frenchman made a vow that should this man, who was taking her from him,
treat her innocence lightly, Inspector though he was, he should feel
the cold steel of the knife of Jean Marcel.
After the meal, as Jean prepared to leave, Père Breton renewed his
protests against the trip, but in vain. If he had luck, Marcel insisted,
he could beat the "freeze-up" home; if not, he would travel up the
coast, later, on the ice, or--well, it did not much matter what became
of Jean Marcel.
So, with the letter of the factor, on which he could draw supplies at
the southern posts, Jean Marcel shook the hands of his friends and,
sliding his canoe into the ebb tide, started south as the dying sun
gilded the flat Bay to the west. He waved his hand in farewell to the
group of Company men on the shore, when he saw above them the figures of
Julie Breton and the priest. As Julie held aloft something white, she
and her brother were joined by a man. It was Inspector Wallace. Jean
swung his paddle to and fro, in response to Julie's Godspeed, then
dropping to his knees, drove the craft swiftly down-stream on the long
pursuit which might take him four hundred miles down the coast to the
white-waters of the great Rupert and beyond, he knew not where. And with
him he carried the thought that Julie, his Julie, would daily, for a
week, see this great man of the Company. It was a heavy heart that
Marcel that night took down to the sea.
With the vision of Fleur, strangely sensing the impending separation
from her master, as her wail of despair rose from the stockade the night
he left her to go north, constantly before his eyes, Jean Marcel reached
the coast and turned south. The thought of his puppy muzzled and bound
in the canoe two days ahead of him lent power to every lunge of his
paddle. While the knowledge that, back at Whale River, instead of
walking the river shore in the long twilight with Jean Marcel, as he had
dreamed, Julie would have Wallace at her side, added to the viciousness
of his stroke. The sea was flat and when at daylight he saw looming
ahead the shores of Big Island, he knew he had won a deserved rest, so
went ashore, cooked some food and slept.
CHAPTER VII
THE LONG TRAIL TO THE SOUTH COAST
A day's hard paddle past Big Island the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds
thrust its bold buttresses far out into the sea toward the White Bear,
and Marcel knew that wind here meant days of delay, for no canoe could
round this grim headland feared by all _voyageurs_, except in fair
weather. So, after a few hours' sleep, he toiled all day down the coast
and at midnight had put the gray cape behind him.
Two days later when Marcel went ashore on the Isle of Graves of the
Esquimos, to boil his kettle, he found, to his delight, a Fort George
goose-boat on the same errand. The Crees who had just left the post to
shoot the winter's supply of gray and snowy geese, or "wavies," as they
are called from their resemblance in flight to a white banner waving in
the sun, had met, two nights before off the mouth of Big River, the
canoe he was following. The dog-thieves, who were strangers, did not
stop at the post, but had continued south.
With two paddles they were not holding their lead, he laughed to
himself, but were coming back. If he hurried he would overhaul them
before they reached Rupert. He did not know the Rupert River, and if
once they started inland he would be caught by the "freeze-up" in a
strange country, so he continued on late into the night.
Then followed day after day of endless toil at the paddle, for he knew
he must travel while the weather held. He could not hope to make Rupert,
or even East Main before the wind changed; which might mean idling for
days on a beach pounded by seas in which no canoe could live. At times,
with a stern breeze, he rigged a piece of canvas to a spruce pole and
sailed. But one thought dominated him as mile after mile of the gray
East Coast slid past; the thought of having his puppy once more in his
canoe, fretting at the gulls and ducks and geese, as he headed north.
Only through necessity did he stop to shoot geese, whose gray and white
legions were gathering on the coast for the annual migration. At dawn
the "gou-luk!" of the gray ganders marshalling their families out to the
feeding grounds, which once sent his blood leaping, now left him cold.
He was hunting bigger game, and his heart hungered for his puppy, beaten
and half-starved, in all likelihood, travelling somewhere ahead down
that bleak coast in the canoe of two men who did not know that close on
their heels followed an enemy as dogged, as relentless, as a wolf on
the trail of an old caribou abandoned by the herd.
And so, after days of ceaseless dip and swing, dip and swing, which at
night left his back and arms stiff and his fingers numb, Jean Marcel
turned into the mouth of the East Main River and paddled up to the post,
where he learned that the canoe of the half-breeds had not been seen,
and that no hunters of their description traded there. So he turned
again to the Bay and headed south for Rupert House. Off the Wild Geese
Islands he met what he had for days been dreading, the first September
north-wester, and was driven ashore. For the following three days he
rested and hunted geese, and when the storm whipped itself out, went on,
and at last, crossing Boatswain's Bay, rounded Mount Sherrick and
paddled up Rupert Bay to the famous old post, which, since the days of
the Merry Monarch and his favorite, Prince Rupert, the first Governor of
the "Company of Merchants-Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay," has
guarded the river mouth--an uninterrupted history of two centuries and a
half of fair dealing with the red fur-hunters of Rupert Land.
"So you're the son of André Marcel? Well, well! Time does fly! Why,
André and I made many a camp together in the old days. There was a man,
my lad!"
Jean straightened his wide shoulders in pride at this praise of his
father by Alec Cameron, factor at Rupert. When he had explained the
object of his long journey south in the fall, the latter raised his
bushy eyebrows in amazement.
"You mean to tell me that you paddled from Whale River in fifteen days,
after a dog?"
"Oui, M'sieu Cameron."
"Well, you didn't waste the daylight or the moon either. You're sure a
son of André Marcel. It must be a record for a single paddle; and all
for a pup, eh?"
"Oui, all for a pup!"
"You deserve to get that dog. Now, these half-breeds you describe
dropped in here in June behind the Mistassini brigade, and traded their
fur. Then they started north after dogs."
"Dey were onlee a day ahead of me up de coast."
"Queer I haven't seen 'em here yet. Pierre!" Cameron called to a Company
man passing the trade-house. "Have those two Mistassini strangers who
went north in June, got back yet?"
"No, but Albert meet dem in Gull Bay two day back. Dey have one pup dey
trade from Huskee!"
"There you are, Marcel! Your men crossed over to Hannah Bay to hunt
geese. They'll be here in a week or two on their way up-river. You wait
here and we'll get your dog when they show up."
"T'anks, M'sieu Cameron!" The dark eyes of Jean Marcel snapped. At last
he was closing in on his quarry. "I weel go to Hannah Bay now and get my
dog."
"Two to one, lad! They may get the best of you, and I've no men to
spare; they're all away goose hunting. You'd better wait here."
"M'sieu, André Marcel would go alone and tak' his dog. I, hees son, also
weel tak' mine."
"Good Lord! André Marcel would have skinned them alive--those two. Well,
good luck, Jean! but I don't like your tackling those breeds alone."
Jean shook hands with the factor.
"Bon-jour, M'sieu Cameron, and t'anks!"
"If you don't drop in here on your way back, give my regards to Gillies
and his family, and be careful," said the factor as Marcel left him.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEETING IN THE MARSHES
Two days later, after rounding Point Comfort, Marcel was crossing the
mud-flats of Gull Bay. At last the stalk was on, for somewhere in the
vast marshes of the Hannah Bay coast, camped the men he had followed
four hundred miles to meet face to face and fight for his dog. Somewhere
ahead, through the gray mist, back in the juniper and alder scrub beyond
the wide reaches of tide-flats and goose-grass, was Fleur, a prisoner.
That night in camp at East Point, while he cleaned the action and bore
of his rifle, the clatter of the geese in the muskeg behind the far
lines of spruce edging the marshes, filled him with wonder. Never on the
bold East Coast had he heard such a din of geese gathering for the long
flight. At dawn, for it was windy, lines of gray Canadas passing
overhead bound out to the shoals, waked him with their clamor. The tide
was low, and he carried his canoe across the mud-flats through flocks of
plover, snipe and yellow-legs, feeding behind the ebb, while teal and
black-duck swarmed along the beaches.
As he poled his canoe south through the shoals, he recalled the tales
his father had told him of the marshes of Hannah Bay, the greatest
breeding ground of the gray goose and black duck in all the wide north.
Everywhere along the bars and sand-spits the gray Canadas were idling,
always with an erect, keen-eyed sentinel on guard. Farther out, white
islands of snowy geese flashed in the sun, as here and there a "wavy"
rose on the water to flap his black-tipped wings. Just in from their
Arctic breeding-grounds, they were lingering for a month's feast on
toothsome south-coast goose-grass before seeking their winter home on
the great Gulf two thousand miles away.
Slowly throughout the morning Marcel travelled along the mud-flats bared
for miles by the retreating tide. At times the breeze carried to his
ears the faint sound of firing, but there were goose-boats from Moose
and Rupert House on the coast, and it meant little. That night as the
tide covered the marshes he ran up a channel of the Harricanaw delta
seeking a camp-ground on its higher shores.
Landing he was looking for drift-wood for his fire when suddenly he
stopped.
"Ah! You have been here, my friends."
In the soft mud of the shore ran the clearly marked tracks of a man and
dog. The footprints of the dog seemed large for Fleur, but Marcel had
not seen her in six weeks and the puppy was growing fast.
"Fleur!" he said aloud, "will you remember Jean Marcel after all these
weeks with them?"
He had seen no smoke of a fire and the tracks were at least two days
old. His men were doubtless on the west shore of the bay where the water
for miles inland to the spruce networked the marshes, and the rank grass
grew to the height of a man's head; but he would find them. The guns of
the hunters would betray their whereabouts.
He drew a long breath of relief. At last he had reached the end of the
trail. He could now come to grips with his enemies. To the thief, the
law of the north is ruthless, and ruthlessly Jean Marcel was prepared to
exact, if need be, the last drop of the blood of these men in payment
for this act. It was now his nerve and wit against theirs, with Fleur as
the stake. The blood of André Marcel and the _coureurs-de-bois_, which
stirred in his veins, was hot for the fight which the days would bring.
Before dawn Jean was taking advantage of the high tide, and when the
first light streaked the east, was well on his way. As the sun lifted
over the muskeg behind the bay he saw, hanging in the still air, the
smoke of a fire.
Quickly turning inshore, he ran his canoe up a waterway and into the
long grass. There he waited until the tide went out, listening to the
faint reports of the guns of the hunters. At noon, having eaten some
cold goose and bannock, he took his rifle and started back over the
marsh. Slowly he worked his way, keeping to the cover of the grass and
alders, circling around the wide, open spaces, pock-marked with
water-holes and small ponds.
Knowing that the breeds would not take the dog with them to their blinds
but would tie her up, he planned to stalk the camp up-wind, in order not
to alarm Fleur, who might betray his presence to his enemies if by
accident they were in camp, in the afternoon, when the geese were
moving. After that--well, he should see.
At last he lay within sight of the tent, which was pitched on a tongue
of high ground running out into the rush-covered mud-flats. The camp was
deserted. His eyes strained wistfully for the sight of the shaggy shape
of his puppy. Pain stabbed at his heart. She was not there. What could
it mean? Distant shots from the marsh to the west marked the absence of
at least one of the breeds. But where was Fleur?
Marcel was too "bush-wise" to take any chances. Still keeping to cover,
he made his approach up-wind until he lay within a stone's throw of the
tent, when a shift in the breeze warned a pair of keen nostrils that
some living thing skulked not far off.
The heart of Jean Marcel leaped as the howl of Fleur betrayed his
presence, for huskies never bark. Grasping his rifle, he waited. The
uproar of the dog brought no response. The breeds were both away.
Rising, he ran to the excited puppy lashed to a stake back of the tent.
"Fleur! _Ma petite chienne!_" Dropping his rifle, he approached his dog
with outstretched arms. With flattened ears, the puppy crouched,
growling at the stranger, her mane bristling.
"Fleur! Don't you know me, pup?" continued Marcel in soothing tones,
holding out his hand.
The puppy's ears went forward. She sniffed long at the hand that had
once caressed her. Slowly the growl died in her throat.
"Fleur! Fleur! My poor puppy! Don't you remember Jean Marcel?"
Again the puzzled dog drew deep whiffs through her black nostrils. Back
in her brain memory was at work. Slowly the soothing tones of the voice
of Marcel stirred the ghosts of other days; vague hints, blurred by the
cruelty of weeks, of a time when the hand of a master caressed her and
did not strike, when a voice called to her as this voice--then another
sniff, and she knew. With a whimper her warm tongue licked his hand, and
Jean Marcel had his puppy in his arms. Mad with joy, the yelping husky
strained at her rawhide bonds as her anxious master examined a great
lump on her head, and her ribs, ridged with welts from kick and blow.
"So they tied her up and beat her, my Fleur? Well, she not leave Jean
Marcel again. Were he go, Fleur go!"
Suddenly in his ears were hissed the words:
"W'at you do wid dat dog?" And a fierce blow on the back of the head
hurled the kneeling Marcel flat on his face.
For a space he lay stunned, his numbed senses blurred beyond thought or
action. Then, as his dazed brain cleared, the realization that life hung
on his presence of mind, for he would receive no mercy from the thieves,
held him limp on the ground as though unconscious.
Snarling curses at the crumpled body of his victim, the half-breed was
busy with the joining of some rawhide thongs. Then Jean's dizziness
faded. Cautiously he raised an eyelid. The breed was bending over him
with a looped thong. Not a muscle moved as the Frenchman waited. Nearer
leaned the thief. He reached to slip the looped rawhide over one of
Marcel's outstretched hands, when, with a lunge from the ground, the
arms of the latter clamped on his legs like a sprung trap. With a
wrench, the surprised thief was thrown heavily.
Cat-like, the hunter was on his man, bearing him down. And then began a
battle in which quarter was neither asked nor given. Heavier but slower
than the younger man, the thief vainly sought to reach Marcel's throat,
for the Frenchman's arms, having the under grip, blocked the half-breed
from Jean's knife and his own. Over and over they rolled, locked
together; so evenly matched in strength that neither could free a hand.
Near them yelped Fleur, frantic with excitement, plunging at her stake.
Then the close report of a gun sounded in Marcel's startled ears. A
great fear swept him. The absent thief was working back to camp. It was
a matter of minutes. Was it to this that he had toiled down the coast in
search of his dog--a grave in the Harricanaw mud? And the face of Julie
Breton flashed across his vision.
Desperate with the knowledge that he must win quickly, if at all, he
strained until the fingers of his left hand reached the haft of the
breed's knife. But a twinge shot through his shoulder like the stab of
steel, as the teeth of his enemy crunched into his flesh, and he lost
his grip. Maddened by pain, Marcel wrenched his right arm free and had
his own knife before the fingers of the thief closed on his wrist,
holding the blade in the sheath. Then began a duel of sheer strength.
For a time the straining arms lifted and pushed, at a dead lock. With
veins swelling on neck and forehead, Marcel fought to unsheath his
knife; but the half-breed's arm was iron, did not give. Again a gun was
fired--still nearer the camp.
With help at hand, the thief, safe so long as he held his grip, snarled
in triumph in the ear of his trapped enemy. But his peril only increased
the Frenchman's strength. The fighting blood of the Marcels boiled in
his veins. With a fierce heave of the shoulders the hand gripping the
knife moved upward. The arm of the thief gave way, only to straighten.
Then with a wrench that would not be denied, Jean tore the blade from
the sheath.
Frantically now, the breed, white with sudden fear, fought the sinewy
wrist, advancing inexorably, on its grim mission. In short jerks, Marcel
hunched the knife toward its goal. As he weakened, the knotted features
of the one who felt death creeping to him, inch by inch, went gray. The
hand fighting Marcel's wrist dripped with sweat. Panting hoarsely, like
a beast at bay, the thief twisted and writhed from the pitiless steel.
Then in his ears rang the voice of the approaching hunter.
With a cry of despair, the doomed half-breed called to the man who had
come too late. Already the knuckles of Marcel were high on his ribs.
With a final wrench, the blade was lunged home.
The cry was smothered in a cough. The man who had beaten his last puppy
gasped, quivered convulsively; then lay still.
Bathed in sweat, shaking from the strain and exertion of the long
battle, Marcel got stiffly to his feet and seized his rifle. Again the
camp was hailed from the marsh. It was evident that the goose-hunter had
not sensed the cry of his partner or he would not have betrayed his
position. Doubtless he was poling up a reed-masked waterway with a load
of geese.
Jean smiled grimly, for the thief would have only his shotgun loaded
with fine shot, for large shot is not used for geese in the north.
Hurriedly searching the tent, he found a rifle which he threw into the
rushes; then loosed Fleur.
The half-breed was in his power, but he wanted no prisoner. To stay and
beat this man as Fleur had been beaten would have been sweet, but of
blood he had had enough. For an instant his eyes rested on the ghastly
evidence of his visit, awaiting the return of the hunter; then he took
Fleur and started across the marsh for his canoe.
To the dead man, who, to the theft of Fleur would have lightly added the
death of her master, Marcel gave no thought. As for the other, when he
found his dead partner, fear of an ambush would prevent him from
following their trail.
Reaching his canoe, Jean divided a goose with Fleur and, when it became
dark, started for East Point. That the half-breed's partner might
attempt to follow him and seek revenge, he had no doubt, but with the
shotgun alone, for Jean had taken the only rifle at their camp, the
thief's sole chance would be to stalk Marcel while he slept. However, as
the sea was flat and the tide ebbing, Marcel was confident that daylight
would find him well up the coast toward Point Comfort.
CHAPTER IX
IN THE TEETH OF THE WINDS
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
regretted that 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
the same 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 the head-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 the _voyageur_. 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, we have 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 returned _voyageur_,
"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 her dusky 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 was nothing 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.
CHAPTER X
THE CAMP ON THE GHOST
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 as leader 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 facing seven 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 returned to 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 and
strength, 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 went ceaselessly 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.
CHAPTER XI
THE WARNING IN THE WIND
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 pack slowly 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 the white 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.
CHAPTER XII
THE WORK OF THE WHITE WOLVES
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 over the 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.
CHAPTER XIII
POOR FLEUR
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
travelled far 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 Salmon waters. 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.
CHAPTER XIV
THE MARK OF THE BREED
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 bunk and 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.
CHAPTER XV
FOR LOVE OF A MAN
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 the dog 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 low branches 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 de _revanche_, 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 to wake 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.
CHAPTER XVI
THE STARVING MOON
March, the Crees' "Moon of the Crust on the Snow," was old. Camped on a
chain of lakes in the Salmon country Marcel had been following the few
traps for which he had bait and at the same time hunting widely for
food. Soon, the sun, mounting higher and higher each day at noon, would
begin to soften the surface of the snow which the freezing nights would
harden into crust. Then he could travel far and fast. With much
searching he had found another beaver lodge, postponing for a space the
days when man and dog would have not even half rations to stay their
hunger. The Frenchman's drawn face and loose capote evidenced the weeks
of under-nourishment; but, though Fleur's great bones and the ropes of
muscle, banding her back and shoulders, thrust through her shaggy coat
with undue prominence, still she had as yet suffered little from the
famine. So long as Jean Marcel had had fish or meat, his growing puppy
had received the greater share, for she had already attained in that
winter on the Ghost a height and bulk of bone equal to that of her
slate-gray mother now far on the north coast.
For days Jean had been praying for the coming of the crust. With it he
planned to make a wide circle back into the high barrens in search of
returning caribou. Once the crust had set hard, travelling with the sled
into new country would be easy. Food he must accumulate to take them
through the April thaws, or perish miserably, with no one to carry the
news of their fate to Whale River. Since the heart-breaking days when
the white wolves drove the caribou south and the rabbits disappeared, he
had, in moments of depression, sat by the fire at night, wondering, when
June again came to Whale River and one by one the canoes of the Crees
appeared, if, by chance, a pair of dark eyes would ever turn to the
broad surface of the river for the missing craft of Jean Marcel--whether
in the joy of her love for another the heart of the girl would sadden
for one whose bones whitened in far Ungava hills.
At last the crust came. With eyes shielded by snow goggles made by
cutting slits in flat pieces of spruce, for the glare of the sun on the
barrens was intense, Jean started with his dog. All the food he had was
on his sled. He had burned his bridges, for if he failed in his hunt,
they would starve, but as well starve in the barrens, he thought, as
back at camp.
They were passing through the thick spruce of a sheltered valley,
travelling up-wind, when Fleur, sniffing hard, grew excited. There was
something ahead, probably fur, so he did not tie his dog. Shortly Fleur
started to bolt with the sled and Jean turned her loose. Following his
yelping husky, who broke through the new crust at every leap, Marcel
entered a patch of cedar scrub. There Fleur distanced him.
Shortly, a scream, followed by a din of snarls and squalls filled the
forest. Close ahead a bitter struggle of creatures milling to the death
was on. "Tiens!" exclaimed Jean, fearing for the eyes of his raw puppy,
battling for the first time with the great cat of the north. He broke
through the scrub to see the lynx spring backward from the rush of the
dog and leap for the limbs of a low cedar. But the cat was too slow, for
at the same instant, Fleur's jaws snapped on his loins, and with a
wrench of her powerful neck, the husky threw the animal to the snow with
a broken back. In a flash she changed her grip, the long fangs crunching
through the neck of the helpless beast, and with a quiver, the lynx was
dead.
Hot with the lust of battle, Fleur worried the body of her enemy.
Reaching her, Jean proudly patted his dog's back.
"My Fleur! She make de _loup-cervier_ run!" he cried, delighted with
the courage and power of his puppy.
Then he anxiously examined the slashes of rapier claws on Fleur's muzzle
and shoulders.
"Bon!" he said, relieved. "De lynx he very weak or he cut you deeper dan
dese scratch."
As Jean hastily skinned the dead cat he marvelled at its emaciation.
"Ah! He also miss de rabbit. Lucky he starve or you get de beeg scratch,
Fleur."
For answer the hot tongue of the dog sought his hands as she raised her
brown eyes to his. With arms around her shaggy shoulders her proud
master muttered into the ears of the delighted husky love words that
would have been strange indeed to any but Fleur, who found them sweet
beyond measure.
"My Fleur, she grow to be de dog, de most _sauvage_!" he cried. "Some
day she keel de wolf, eh?"
Owing to the weakened condition of the lynx, Fleur's were but surface
scratches. So furious had been the husky's assault on the starved cat
that she had left no opening to the knife-like claws of the powerful
hind legs.
Continuing east, four days later Marcel camped in a valley on the flank
of a great barren. In the morning, tying Fleur with a rawhide thong
which she could have chewed through with ease but had been taught to
respect, he followed the scrub along the edge of the barren searching
for caribou signs. Often he stopped to gaze out across the white waste
reaching away east to the horizon, seeking for blue-gray objects whose
movements in scraping away the snow to the moss beneath, would alone
mark them as caribou. In places the great winds had swept the plateau
almost bare, beating down the snow to a depth of less than a foot. All
day he skirted the barren but at last turned back to his camp sick at
heart and spent with the long day on the crust, following his meagre
breakfast. Deep in the shelter of the thick timber of the valley, he had
dug away the snow for his fire and sleeping place, lashing above his bed
of spruce boughs a strip of canvas which acted both as windbreak and
heat reflector. When they had eaten their slim supper, he freshened the
fire with birch logs, and sat down with Fleur's head between his knees.
The "Starving Moon" of the Montagnais hung over Jean Marcel.
"Fleur, you know we got onlee two day meat left? W'en dat go, Jean
Marcel go too--een few day, a week maybe; and Fleur, w'at she do?"
The husky's slant eyes shone with her dog love into the set face of her
master. She whined, wrinkling her gray nose, then her jaw dropped,
which was her manner of laughing, while her hot breath steamed in the
freezing air. Vainly she waited for the smile that had never failed to
light Marcel's face in the old days at such advances.
Dropping his mittens Jean held the massive head between his naked hands.
"Jean Marcel feel ver' bad to leave Fleur alone. Wid no game she starve
too, w'en he go," he said.
Fleur's deep throat rumbled in ecstasy as the hands of the master rubbed
her ears.
"Back on de Ghost, Fleur, ees some feesh and meat Joe and Antoine left;
not much, but eet tak' us to Whale Riviere, maybe."
The lips of Fleur lifted from her white teeth at the names of Jean's
partners.
"You remember Joe Piquet, Fleur? Joe Piquet!"
The husky growled. She knew only too well the name, Joe Piquet.
"Eet ees four--five sleep to de Ghost, Fleur, shall we go? W'at you
t'ink?"
The strained face in the fur-lined hood approached the dog's, whose eyes
shifted uneasily from the fixed look of her master.
"We go back to de Ghost, Fleur, or mak' one beeg hunt for de deer?"
The perplexed husky, unable to meet Marcel's piercing eyes, sprang to
her feet with a yelp.
"Bon!" he cried. "We mak' de beeg hunt!" He had had his answer and on
the yelp of his dog had staked their fate. To-morrow he would push on
into the barrens and find the caribou drifting north again, or flicker
out with his dog as men for centuries had perished, beaten by the long
snows.
In the morning he divided his remaining food into four parts; a
breakfast and a supper for himself and Fleur, for two days. After
that--strips of caribou hide and moss, boiled in snow water, to ease the
throbbing ache of their stomachs.
Eating his thin stew, he shortened his belt still another hole over his
lean waist, and harnessing Fleur, turned resolutely east into country no
white man had ever seen, on his bold gamble for food or an endless sleep
in the blue Ungava hills.
In his weakened state, black spots and pin-points of light danced before
his eyes. Distant objects were often magnified out of all proportion. So
intense was the glare of the high March sun on the crust that his wooden
goggles alone saved him from snow-blindness. He travelled a few miles
until dizziness forced him to rest. Later he continued on, to rest
again, while the black nose of Fleur, who was still comparatively
strong, sought his face, as she wondered at the reason for the master's
strange actions.
By noon he had crossed no trail except that of a wolverine seeking food
like himself, and finally went down into the timbered valley of a brook
where he left Fleur and the sled. Then he started again on his hopeless
search. As the streams flowed northeast, he was certain that he had
crossed the Height of Land to the Ungava Bay watershed, and was now in
the headwater country of the fabled River of Leaves, the Koksoak of the
Esquimos, into which no hunter from Whale River had ever penetrated.
Marcel was snow-shoeing through the scrub at the edge of the plateau
when far out on the barren he saw two spots. Shortly he was convinced
that the objects moved.
"By Gar, deer! At last they travel nord!" he gasped, gazing with
bounding pulses at the distant spots almost indistinguishable against
the snow. Meat out there on the barren awaited him--food and life, if
only he could get within range.
Cutting back into the scrub, that he might begin his stalk of the
caribou from the nearest cover with the wind in his face, he moved
behind a rise in the ground slowly out into the barren. With a caution
he had never before exercised, lest the precious food now almost within
reach should escape him, the starving man advanced.
At last he crawled up behind a low knoll, and stretched out on the snow.
Cocking and thrusting his rifle before him, he wormed his way to the
top of the rise and looked.
There a hundred yards off, playing on the crust, were two arctic foxes.
Distorting their size, the barren ground mirage had cruelly deceived
him.
With a groan the spent hunter dropped his head on his arms. "All dees
for fox!" he murmured. Then, because foxes were meat, he took careful
aim and shot one, wounding the other, which he killed with the second
bullet. Hanging the carcasses in a spruce, Marcel continued to skirt the
barren toward the east.
As dusk fell he returned to Fleur and made camp. Cutting up and boiling
one of the foxes, he and the dog ate ravenously of the rank flesh, but
hope was low in the breast of Jean Marcel. A day or two more of half
rations and he was done. The spring migration of the caribou was not yet
on. And when the deer did come, it would be too late. Jean Marcel would
be past aid and Fleur--what would become of her? True, she could live on
the flanks of the caribou herds like the wolves, but the wolves would
find and destroy her.
Tortured by such thoughts, he sat by his fire, the husky's great head on
his knee, her eyes searching his, mutely demanding the reason for his
strange silence.
Another day of fruitless wandering in which he had pushed as far east
as his fading strength would take him, and Jean shared the last of the
food with his dog. He had fought hard to find the deer, had already
travelled one hundred miles into the barrens, but he felt that it was no
use; he was beaten. The spirit of the coureurs whose blood coursed his
veins would drive him on and on, but without food the days of his
hunting would be few. Henceforth it would be caribou hide boiled with
moss from the barrens to ease the pinch of his hunger, but his strength
would swiftly go. Then, when hope died, rather than leave his dog to the
wolves, he would shoot Fleur and lying down beside her in his blanket,
place the muzzle of his rifle against his own head.
Two days, in which Marcel and Fleur drank the liquor from stewed caribou
hide and moss while he continued to hunt, followed. As he staggered into
camp at the end of the second day the man was so weak that he scarcely
found strength to gather wood for his fire. Fleur now showed signs of
slow starvation in her protruding ribs and shoulders. Her heavy coat no
longer shone with gloss but lay flat and lusterless. Vainly she
whimpered for the food that her heart-sick master could not give her.
With the dog beside him, Marcel lay by the fire numbed into indifference
to his fate. The torment of hunger had vanished leaving only great
weakness and a dazed brain. He thought of the three wooden crosses at
Whale River; how restful it would be to lie beside them behind the
Mission, instead of sleeping far in the barrens where the great winds
beat ceaselessly by over the treeless snows. There Julie Breton might
have planted forest flowers on the mound that marked the grave of Jean
Marcel. But no, he had forgotten; Julie Breton would not be at Whale
River. Julie would live at East Main and some day at her feet would play
the children of Wallace. Julie would be married in the spring at Whale
River, while the wolves and ravens were scattering the whitened bones of
Jean Marcel over the valley, and there would be no rest--no rest.
What hopes he had had of a little house of their own at Whale River when
he entered the service of the Company and drove the mail packet down the
coast, with the team that Fleur would give him. How often he had
pictured that home where Julie and the children would wait his return
from summer voyage and winter trail; Julie Breton, whom he had loved
from boyhood and whom, he had once prided himself, should love him, some
day, when he had proved his manhood among the swart men of the East
Coast.
All a dream--a dream. Julie was happy. She would soon marry the great
man at East Main, while in a few days Jean Marcel was going to snuff
out--smoulder a while, as a fire from lack of wood, dying by inches--by
inches; and then two shots.
Poor Fleur! It had all come to pass because he had dared to follow and
bring her home--had had no time to cache fish and game in the fall. She
would have been better off with the half-breeds on the Rupert, where the
caribou had gone. They would have kicked her, but fed her too. Yes, she
would have been better there. Now he would take her with him, his own
dog, when the time came. No more starvation for her, and a death in the
barrens when she met the white wolves. Yes, he would take her with him.
So rambled the thoughts of Jean Marcel, as he lay with his dog facing
the creeping death his rifle would cheat, until kindly sleep brought him
surcease--sleep, followed by dreams of the wide barrens trampled by
herds of the returning caribou, of juicy steaks sizzling over the fire,
while Fleur gnawed contentedly at huge thigh bones.
CHAPTER XVII
THE TURN OF THE TIDE
Before dawn, a cold nose nuzzling his face buried in his robe, waked
Marcel.
"Fleur, hungry? Eet ees better to sleep w'en dere ees no breakfast," he
protested.
The warm tongue sought the face of the drowsy man, and the dog, not to
be put off, thrust her nose roughly into his robe, whimpering as she
pulled at his capote.
"Poor Fleur!" he muttered. "No more meat for de pup! Lie down! Jean ees
ver' tired."
But the dog, bent on arousing the master, grew only the more insistent.
Seizing an arm in her jaws, she dragged Marcel from his rabbit-skin
blankets.
As he sat upright, wide awake, Fleur sniffed long at the frosty air,
then dashed yelping into the dusk up the trail toward the barren.
Turning, she ran back to camp, whining excitedly.
"Tiens! W'at you smell, Fleur?" cried Marcel tearing his rifle with
shaking hands from its skin case and cramming cartridges into a pocket.
Could it be, he wondered, could it be the deer at last? No, only a
starving wolf or lynx, prowling near the camp, likely. But still he
would go! The love of life was yet strong in Jean Marcel now that a
gleam of hope warmed his heart.
Slipping his toes into the thongs of his snow-shoes, he made Fleur fast
to a tree, and started. He was so weak from lack of food that often he
was forced to stop in the climb, shaken by his hammering heart. At last,
exhausted, he dragged himself to the shoulder of the barren and on
unsteady legs moved along the edge of the scrub, his eyes straining to
pierce the wall of dusk which shut the plateau from his sight. But the
shadows still blanketed the barren; so testing the light wind, that he
might move directly out toward the game when the light grew stronger, he
sat down to save his strength for the stalk. Only too clearly, his
weakness warned him that it was his last hunt. By another day, even
though he managed the climb, his trembling hands would prevent the
lining of his sights on game.
As opal and rose faintly streaked the east, the teeth of the hunter,
waiting to read the fate daylight would disclose, chattered in the
stinging air. But a space now, and he would know whether he were to
creep back to his blankets and wait for stark despair to steady the hand
which would bring swift release for Fleur and himself, or whether meat,
food, life, were scraping with round-toed hooves the snow from the
caribou moss out there in the dim dawn.
Daylight filtered over the floor of snow to meet Marcel lying at the top
of a rise out on the barren, waiting. As the light at length opened up
the treeless miles, a sob shook the lean frame of the hunter. Tears
welled in the deep-set eyes to course down and freeze upon his face, for
there, on the snow before him, were the _blue-gray shapes of caribou_.
Three deer were feeding almost within range while farther out, gray
patches, moving on the snow, marked other bands. At last the spring
migration had reached him, and barely in time. He would see Whale River
again when June came north. And Fleur, fretting back there in camp at
his absence, after the lean days would revel and grow gigantic on deer
meat.
Painfully Marcel crawled within easy range of the nearest caribou. As he
attempted to line his sights in order to hit two with the first shot, as
he had often done, the waving of his gun barrel in his trembling hands
swept him cold with fear. The exertion of crawling to his position had
cruelly shaken his nerves. So he rested.
Then he carefully took aim. As he fired, his heart skipped a beat, for
he thought he had missed. But to his joy a caribou bounded from the
snow, ran a few feet and fell, while another, stopping to scent the air
before circling up-wind, gave him a second shot. The deer was badly hit
and the next shot brought it down.
The tension of the crisis passed, the shattered nerves relaxed, and for
a space the starving hunter lay limp in the snow. But warned by his
rapidly numbing fingers, he forced himself to his feet and went to the
deer. Out on the barren beyond the sound of his rifle scattered bands of
caribou were feeding. Meat to take them through the big "break-up" of
April was at hand. The lean face of Jean Marcel twisted into a grim
smile.
_He had beaten the long snows._
Stopping only to take the tongues and a piece of haunch, Marcel returned
to his hungry dog. Frantic with the faint scent of caribou brought by
the breeze off the barren, the famished Fleur chafed and fretted for his
return.
"Here, Fleur, see what Jean Marcel got for you!"
The husky, maddened by the scent of the blood-red meat, plunged at her
leash, her jaws dripping with slaver. Throwing her a chunk of frozen
haunch which she bolted greedily, Marcel filled his kettle with snow and
putting in a tongue and strips of steak to boil, lay down by his fire.
CHAPTER XVIII
SPRING AND FLEUR
At intervals during the day Jean drank the strengthening broth, too
"bush-wise" to sicken himself by gorging. By late afternoon he was able
to drive the rejuvenated Fleur to the barren and bring back the meat on
the sled. The days following were busy ones. At first his weakness
forced him to husband his strength while the stew and roasted red meat
were thickening his blood, but as the food began to tell, he was able to
hunt farther and farther into the barrens where the main migration of
the caribou was passing. When he was strong enough, he took Fleur with a
load of meat back to his old winter camp, returning with traps. These he
set at the carcasses he had shot, for foxes, lynxes and wolverines were
drawn from the four winds to his kill. So while he hunted meat to carry
him through April, and home, at the same time he added materially to his
fur-pack.
Toward the end of March, before the first thaws softened his back trail
and made sled-travel heart-breaking for Fleur, Jean began relaying west
the meat he had shot. He had now, cached in the barrens, ample food to
supply Fleur and himself until the opening of the waterways when fish
would be a most welcome change. His sledding over, he returned to his
camp in the barrens to get his traps and take one last hunt, for the
lean weeks of the winter had made him over-cautious and he wished to
make the trip back with a loaded sled.
By the coming of April, Fleur, in whom an abundance of red caribou meat
had swiftly worked a metamorphosis, had increased in bone and weight. As
Jean watched her throw her heavy shoulders into her collar and trot
lightly off over the hard trail with a two hundred pound load his heart
leaped with love of the beautiful beast who worshipped him with every
red drop in her shaggy body. What a team she would give him some day! he
thought. There would be nothing like them south of Hudson's Straits. And
the Company would need them for the winter mail packet, with Jean Marcel
to drive them.
Lately he had noticed a new trait in his dog. Several times, deep in the
night when he waked to renew the fire, he had found that Fleur was not
sleeping near him but had wandered off into the "bush." As she needed no
food, he thought these night hunts of the husky peculiar. But at dawn,
he always found Fleur back in camp sleeping beside him.
It was Marcel's last night in the barren-ground camp. Leaving Fleur, he
had, as usual, hunted all day, returning with a sled load of meat which
he drew himself. As he approached the camp he crossed the trail of a
huge timber wolf and hurried to learn if his dog had been attacked, for
tied as she was, she would fight with a cruel handicap. But Fleur
greeted him as usual with yelps of delight. In the vicinity of the camp
there were no tracks to show that the wolf had approached the husky.
However, Marcel decided that he would not leave her again bound in camp
unable to chew through the rawhide thongs in time to protect herself
from sudden attacks of the wolves which roamed the country.
After supper man and dog sat by the fire, but Fleur was manifestly
restless. Time and again she left his side to take long sniffs of the
air. Not even the rubbing of her ears which usually brought grunts of
pleasure had the magic to hold her long.
The early moon hung on the white brow of a distant ridge, and Jean,
finishing his pipe, was about to renew his fire and roll into his
blankets, when a long, wailing howl floated across the valley.
Fleur bounded to her feet, her quivering nostrils sucking in the keen
air. Again the call of the timber wolf drifted out on the silent night.
Fleur, alive with excitement, trotted into the "bush." In a moment she
returned to the fire, whimpering. Then sitting down, she pointed her
nose at the stars and her deep throat swelled with the long-drawn howl
of the husky. Shortly, when the timber wolf replied, the lips of Fleur
did not lift from her white fangs in a snarl nor did her thick mane rise
as her ears pricked eagerly forward.
At dawn Jean waked with a sense of loneliness. Pushing together the
embers of his fire, he put on fresh wood, and not seeing Fleur, called
to her but she did not appear. She had a habit of prowling around the
neighboring "bush" at dawn, inspecting fresh tracks of mice, searching
for ptarmigan or for the snow-shoe rabbits that were not there. But when
Marcel's breakfast was cooked Fleur was still absent. Thinking that a
fresh game trail had led her some distance, he ate, then started to
break camp. Finally he put his index and middle fingers between his
teeth and blew the piercing whistle which had never failed to bring her
leaping home. Intently, he listened for her answer somewhere in the
valley of the stream or on the edge of the barren, but the yelp of his
dog did not come to his straining ears.
Curious as to the cause of her absence Jean smoked his pipe and waited.
He was anxious to start back with his traps and meat; but where was
Fleur? Becoming alarmed by the middle of the morning, he made a wide
circle of the camp hoping to pick up her trail. Two days previous there
had been a flurry of snow sufficient to enable him to follow her tracks
on the stiff crust. In the vicinity of the camp were traces of Fleur's
recent footprints but finally, at a distance, Marcel ran into a fresh
trail leading down into the brook-bottom. There he lost it, and after
hours of search returned to camp to wait for her return. But the day
wore away and the husky did not appear. Night came and visions of his
dog lying somewhere stiff in the snow slashed and torn by wolves,
tortured his thoughts. If only he could pick up her trail at daylight,
he thought, for she might still live, crippled, unable to come to him,
waiting for Jean Marcel who had never failed her.
As he sat brooding by his fire, he came to realize, now that he had lost
her, what a part of him the dog had become. His thoughts drifted back
over their life together, months of gruelling toil and--delight. Tears
traced their way down the wind-burned cheeks of Marcel as he recalled
her early puppy ways and antics, how she had loved to nibble with her
sharp milk teeth at his moccasins and sit in the bow of the canoe, on
their way down the coast, scolding at the seals and ducks; with what mad
delight she had welcomed his visits to the stockade at Whale River
circling him at full speed, until breathless and panting, she leaped
upon him, her hot tongue seeking his hands and face. Then on the long
trail home from the south coast marshes, how closely she would snuggle
to his back as they lay on the beaches, as if fearing to lose him while
she slept. And the winter on the Ghost, with its ghastly end--what a
rock his dog had been when his partners failed him! In the moment of his
peril, how savagely she had battled for Jean Marcel! Through the lean
weeks of starvation when hope had died, to the dawn when she had waked
him at the coming of the caribou, his thoughts led him. And now, when
spring and Whale River were near, it was all over. Their life together
with its promise of the future had been snapped short off. He should
never again look into the slant, brown eyes of Fleur. He had lost his
all; first Julie, and now, Fleur. There was nothing left.
At daybreak, without hope, he took up the search along the stream. Where
the wind had driven, the crust now stiff with alternate freezing and
thawing and swept clean of snow, would show little sign of the passing
of the dog, but in the sheltered areas where the crust was softer and
the young snow lay, he hoped to cross the tracks of Fleur. At length,
miles from the camp, he picked up the trail of the dog in some light
drift. Following the tracks across the brook-bottom and into the scrub
of the opposite slope, he suddenly stopped, wide-eyed with amazement at
the evidence written plainly in the light covering of the crust. Fleur's
tracks had been joined by, and ran side by side with, the trail of a
wolf.
"By Gar!" gasped the surprised Frenchman. "She do not fight wid de
wolf!"
As he travelled, he found no marks of battle in the snow, simply the
parallel trails of the two, dog and wolf, now trotting, now lengthening
out into the long, wolf lope.
"Fleur leave Jean Marcel for de wolf!" the trapper rubbed his eyes as
though suspicious of a trick of vision. His Fleur, whom he loved as his
life and who adored Jean Marcel, to desert him this way in the
night--and for a timber wolf.
It was strange indeed. Yet he had heard of such things. It was this way
that the Esquimos kept up the marvellous strain to which Fleur belonged.
He recalled the peculiar actions of the dog during the previous
days--the wolf tracks near the camp; her excitement of the night before
when the call had sounded over the valley. This wolf had been dogging
their trail for a week and Fleur had known it.
"Ah!" he murmured, nodding his head. "Eet ees de spreeng!"
Yes, the spring was slowly creeping north and the creatures of the
forest had already answered its call. It was April, and Fleur, too, had
succumbed to an urge stronger for the moment than the love of the
master. April, the Crees' "Moon of the Breaking of the Snow-Shoes,"
when, at last, the wind would begin to shift to the south and the nights
lose their edge, only to shift back again, with frost. Then the snow
would melt hard at noon, softening the trails, and later on, rain and
sleet would drive in from the great Bay turning the white floor of the
forest to slush, flooding the ice of the rivers which later would break
up and move out, overrunning the shell of pond and lake which late in
May would honeycomb and disappear.
Marcel followed the trails of wolf and dog until he lost them on the
wind-packed snow of the barren. There was nothing to do but wait. He
knew his dog had not forgotten him--would come home; but when? It was
high time for his return to the camp in the Salmon country, to his
precious cache of meat, which would attract lynxes and wolverines for
miles around. The bears would soon leave their "washes" and the uprights
of his cache were not proof against bear. But he would not go without
Fleur, and she was away, somewhere in the hills.
Three days he waited, continuing to hunt that he might take a full
sled-load back to his cache. But the weather was softening and any day
now might mean the start of the big "break-up." It was deep in the
third night that a great gray shape burst out of the forest and pounced
upon the muffled figure under the shed-tent by the fire. As the dog
pawed at the blanketed shape, Marcel, drugged with sleep and bewildered
by the attack, was groping for his knife, when a familiar whine and the
licks of a warm tongue proclaimed the return of Fleur, and the man threw
his arms around his dog.
"Fleur come back to Jean?" Breaking from him, in sheer delight, the dog
repeatedly circled the fire, then rearing on her hind legs put her
fore-paws on his chest.
"Fleur bad dog to run away wid de wolf!" Marcel seized her by the jowls
and shook the massive head, peering into the slant eyes in the dim
starlight. And Fleur, as though ashamed of her desertion of the master,
pushed her nose under his arm, the rumbling in her throat voicing her
joy to be with him again. Then Marcel gave her meat from the cache which
she bolted greedily.
It had not entered his mind once he had found her tracks that Fleur
would not return to him, but during her long absence the condition of
the snow had been a source of worry. Each day's delay meant the chance
of the bottom suddenly falling out of the trail before he could freight
his load of meat and traps back to his old camp far to the west. Once
the big thaw was on, all sledding would be over. So, hurriedly eating
his breakfast, he started under the stars, for at noon he would be held
up by the softening trail. Toward mid-afternoon, when it turned colder,
he would again travel.
Back at his old camp, Marcel found that the fish-hook necklace with
which he had circled each of the peeled spruce uprights of his cache had
baffled the wolverines and lynxes lured for miles by the odor of meat.
Resetting short trap-lines, he waited for the "break-up" with tranquil
mind, for his cache groaned with meat.
CHAPTER XIX
WHEN THE ICE GOES SOFT
The snows were fading fast before the rain and sleet of the big thaw.
Often, at night, the softening winds shifted, to drive in raw from the
north, again tightening the land with frost. But each day, as May
neared, the sun swung higher and higher, slowly scattering the snow to
flood the ice of myriad lakes and rivers. Already, Marcel had thrilled
to the trumpets of the gray vanguards of the Canadas. On fair days the
sun flashed from white fleets of "wavies," bound through seas of April
skies to far Arctic ports.
With May the buds of birch and poplar began to swell, later to light
with the soft green of their young leaves the sombre reaches of upland
jack-pine and spruce. Rimming the rivers with red, the new shoots of the
willows appeared. At dawn, now, from dripping spires, white-throats and
hermit thrush, fleeter than the spring, startled the drowsing forest
with a reveille of song.
One afternoon in May on his return from picking up a line of traps to be
cached for use the following winter, Marcel went to the neighboring
pond to lift his net. For safety on the rapidly sponging ice he wore his
snow-shoes and carried a twelve-foot spruce pole. He had reset the net
and was lashing an anchor line to a stake when suddenly the honeycombed
shell crumbled beneath his feet.
As he sank, he lunged for the pole he had dropped to set the net, but
the surface settled under his leap carrying him into the water. Fighting
in the mush ice for the pole almost within reach, to his horror he found
his right foot trapped. He could not move farther in that direction. The
snow-shoe was caught in the net.
Marcel turned back floundering to the edge of firm ice, where he held
himself afloat. Fast numbing with cold, as he clung, caught like a
beaver in a trap, he knew that it was but a matter of minutes. Fleur, if
only Fleur were there! But Fleur was hunting in the "bush."
With a great effort he braced himself on his elbows, got his frozen
fingers between his teeth, and blew the signal, once heard, his dog had
never failed to answer.
To the joy of the man slowly chilling to the bone, a yelp sounded in the
forest. Rallying his ebbing strength, again Marcel whistled. Shortly
Fleur appeared on the shore, sighted the master and bounded through the
surface slop out to the fishing hole. Reaching Marcel, the husky seized
a skin sleeve of his capote and arching her great back, fought the
slippery footing in a mad effort to drag him from the water. But the net
held him fast.
"De stick, Fleur! De stick dere!" Marcel pointed toward the pole.
Sensing his gesture, the dog brought the pole to the ice edge. Then with
the pole bridging the hole, its ends on firm ice, Marcel worked his way
to the submerged net, but the sinkers had hopelessly tangled the meshes
with his snow-shoe. Under his soggy capote was his knife. His stiff
fingers fumbled desperately with the knot of his sash but failed to
loose it. Again Fleur seized his sleeve and pulled until she rolled
backward with a patch of the tough hide in her teeth.
The situation of the trapped man seemed hopeless. The chill of the water
was fast numbing his senses. Already his heart slowed with the torpor of
slow freezing. With difficulty now he kept the excited Fleur from
plunging beside him into the mush ice.
Then with a final effort he got his free leg with its snow-shoe, over
the pole, and seizing the husky's tail with both hands, cried:
"Marche, Fleur! Marche!"
Settling low between wide-spread fore-legs, the dog dug her nails into
the soft ice and hurled her weight into a fierce lunge. As her feet
slipped, the legs of the husky worked like piston rods showering
Marcel's face with water, her nails gouging the ice, while she fought
the drag of the net.
At last, something gave way, Marcel felt himself move. Slowly the great
dog drew her master over the pole and upon the ice with the net still
anchored to his right foot.
Still gripping Fleur's tail in his left hand, with the other he finally
reached his knife and groping in the icy water slashed the heel thong of
the caught shoe. Free, Marcel limped to his camp, Fleur, now leaping
beside him, now marching proudly with his sleeve in her teeth.
The heat of the fire and the hot broth soon started the blood of the
half-frozen Frenchman, who lay muffled in a blanket. Near him sprawled
the husky, who had sensed only too acutely on the ice the danger
menacing her master and would not now leave his sight, but with head on
paws watched the blanketed figure through eyes which spoke the thoughts
she could not express: "Jean may need Fleur again. She will stay with
him by the fire."
Once too often, Marcel mused, he had gambled with the rotten spring ice,
and now had barely missed paying for his rashness. To drown in a hole
like a muskrat, after pulling out of the starvation days with a cache
heavy with meat and fish, was unthinkable. But, after all, what did it
matter? Life would be of small value now with Julie out of it.
CHAPTER XX
THE DEAD MAN TELLS HIS TALE
When, late in May, the snow had left the open places reached by the sun
and the ice cleared the rivers, Marcel was ready to make his first trip
to the camp on the Ghost. Poor Antoine would have to lie content in a
shallow grave among the boulders of the river shore, for the frost was
still in the ground. Before the weather softened Jean had smoked the
remainder of his meat and now he faced a ten-mile portage with his
outfit. Before the trails went bad he could have freighted on the sled
sufficient food for his journey home but had preferred to face the
"break-up" in his own camp near a fish-lake and relay his meat over on
his back in May. The memories of the winter aroused by the camp on the
Ghost were too grim to attract him to the comfortable shack.
One morning at sunrise, after lashing a pack on Fleur's broad back, he
threw his tump-line over a bag of smoked meat and swinging it to his
shoulders, started over the trail. In the middle of the forenoon he
walked into the clearing on the Ghost and pushing off the head strap of
his line, dropped his load.
Glancing at the cache where he had left the body of Antoine Beaulieu
lashed in canvas with the fur-packs and rifles of the dead men, Marcel
muttered in surprise:
"By Gar! Dat ees strange t'ing!"
The scaffold was empty; the body of Antoine had been removed and not a
vestige remained of the fur-packs and outfits of Jean's partners.
Neither wolverines, lynxes nor bears, had they been able to overcome the
fish-hook barriers guarding the uprights, would have stripped the
platform in such fashion. Searching the soft earth, he found the faint
tracks of moccasins which the recent rain had not obliterated. But down
on the river shore the mud told the story. A canoe had landed there
within a week, for in spite of the rain the deep impress of the feet of
men carrying heavy loads still marked the beach. Since the ice went out
someone who knew that the three men were wintering there, had travelled
up the Ghost from the Whale, but why? They could not have been starving,
for fish could then be had on the Whale for the setting of a net.
Evidently they had buried Antoine and taken the fur-packs, rifles, and
outfits of the two men to Whale River. Marcel searched for a message, in
the phonetic writing employed throughout the north, burned into a blazed
tree, or on a scrap of birch-bark, left in the shack, but found
nothing. The cabin was as he had last seen it. They had thought him,
also, dead somewhere in the "bush" and had left no word, or----Then the
situation opened to him from the angle of view of the Cree visitors.
A camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a
dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him;
also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his
relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had
them in his possession. Of the third man, who was to winter with them,
no trace at the camp. Two dead and the third, possibly alive, if he had
not starved out. And that third man was Jean Marcel.
That was the grim tale which was travelling down the river ahead of him
to the spring trade. Who killed Antoine Beaulieu, and where is Piquet?
This was the question he would have to answer. This the factor and the
kinsmen of his partners would demand of the third man, if he survived to
reach the post. Yes, Whale River would anxiously await the return of
Jean Marcel that spring, but would Whale River believe his story? Of the
people of the post he had no doubt. Julie, Père Breton, the factor,
Angus, Jules, he could count on. They knew him--were his friends. But
the Crees, and half-breds; would they believe that Joe Piquet had been
the evil genius of the tragedy on the Ghost, Joe Piquet, now dead and
helpless to speak in his own defense? Would they believe in the
innocence of the man who alone of the three partners had fought free of
the long famine? Marcel's knowledge of the Indians' mental make-up told
him that since the visit of the Crees to the camp his case was hopeless.
They would readily believe that he had killed his partners for the
remaining food, and, not anticipating the coming of a canoe in the
spring to the camp, had gone after caribou, planning to secrete the body
of Antoine, with its evidence of violence, on his return.
Of those who had peopled the canoes starting for the up-river summer
camps in July, many a face would now be absent when the Crees returned
for this year's trade. Famine surely had come to more than one camp of
the red hunters that winter; and doubtless, swift death in the night,
also, among some of those, who, when caught by the rabbit plague and the
absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet, went mad with hunger.
Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many
a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepee in the silent
places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January
winds.
To the red hunters, starvation and tragic death wore familiar faces. In
the wide north they were common enough. So, when in the spring, men
loosed from the maw of the pitiless snows returned without comrade, wife
or child, seeking succor at the fur-posts, with tales of death by
starvation or disease, the absence of witnesses or evidence compelled
the acceptance of their stories however suspicious the circumstances.
There being no proof of guilt, and because, moreover, their tales were
often true, there could be no punishment, except the covert condemnation
of their fellows or the secret vengeance of kinsman or friend in the
guise of a shot from the "bush" or knife thrust in the dark. He recalled
the cases he knew or which he had heard discussed over many a camp-fire,
of men on the East Coast, sole survivors of starvation camps, who would
go to their graves privately branded as murderers by their fellows.
Grim tales of his father returned to him; of the half-breed from
Nichicun who, it was commonly believed, had eaten his partner; of Crees
who had appeared in the spring at the posts without parents, or wives
and children, to tell conflicting stories of death through disease or
starvation; of the Frenchman at Mistassini--still a valued servant of
the Company--who was known from Fort Albany to Whale River and from
Rupert to the Peribonka, as the squaw-man who saved himself on the
Fading Waters by deserting his Montagnais girl wife. These and many
more, through lack of any proof of guilt, had escaped the long arm of
the government which, through the fur-posts, reached to the uttermost
valleys of the north.
And so it must have been with Jean Marcel, however suspicious his story,
had he buried Antoine somewhere in the snow, as he had Piquet, instead
of lashing the body on the cache with its telltale death wound. As it
was he already saw himself, though innocent, condemned in the court of
Cree opinion as the slayer of his friend.
As he came to a realization of how his case would look, even to the
whites at Whale River, he cursed the dead man Piquet for bringing all
this upon a guiltless man--for leaving him this black legacy of
suspicion.
Well, he swore to himself, they should believe his story at the post,
for it was the truth; and if any man, white or red, openly doubted his
innocence, he would have to answer to Jean Marcel. To be branded on the
East Coast as the assassin of his partners was a bitter draught for the
palate of the proud Frenchman. For generations the Marcels had borne an
honored name in the Company's service and now for the last of them to be
suspected of foul murder, was disgrace unthinkable.
So ran his thoughts as he hurried back over the trail to his camp. Of
one thing he felt sure. The situation brought about by the visit of the
Crees demanded his presence at the post as soon after their arrival as
his paddle could drive his canoe. From the appearance of the tracks on
the beach they already had a good start and it would take two days for
him to pack to the Ghost what meat and outfit he needed for the trip,
besides his furs. The rest he could cache.
CHAPTER XXI
THE BLIND CLUTCH OF CIRCUMSTANCE
Three days later, he had run the strong-water of the Ghost to Conjuror's
Falls, where he exchanged Beaulieu's canoe for his own, cached the
previous fall, and continued on to the Whale until the moon set, when he
camped.
Then next morning, long before the rising sun, reaching the smoking
surface in his path, rolled the river mists back to fade on the
ridges, Marcel, with Fleur in the bow, was well started on his
three-hundred-mile journey. Travel as he might, he could not hope to
overtake the canoe bearing the tale of the tragedy to Whale River; but
each day when once the news had reached the post, the story, passed
from mouth to mouth among the Crees, would gather size and distortion
with Marcel not present to refute it. There was great need for speed,
so he drove his canoe to the limit of his strength, running all rapids
which skill and daring could outwit.
Different, far, from the home-coming he had pictured through the last
weeks, would be his return to Whale River. True, there would have been
no long June days with Julie Breton, as in previous summers, no walks
up the river shore when the low sun turned the Bay to burnished copper,
and later, the twilight held deep into the night. If she were not
already married her days would be too full to spare much time to her old
friend Jean Marcel. But there would have been rest and ease, after the
months of toil and famine--long talks with Jules and Angus, with worry
behind him in the hills. Instead he was returning to his friends branded
as a criminal by the evidence of the cache on the Ghost.
At times, when the magic of the young spring, in the air, the forest,
the hills, for a space swept clean his troubled brain of dark memory, he
dreamed that the water-thrushes in the river willows called to him:
"Sweet, sweet, sweet, Julie Breton!" That yellow warblers and friendly
chickadees, from the spruces of the shore, hailed him as one of the
elect, for was he not also a lover? That the kingfishers which scurried
ahead of his boat gossiped to him of hidden nests. Deeply, as he
paddled, he inhaled the scent of the flowering forest world, the
fragrance of the northern spring, while his birch-bark rode the choked
current. And then, the stark realization that he had lost her, and the
shadow of his new trouble, would bring him rough awakening.
Meeting no canoes of Cree hunters bound for the trade, for it was yet
early, in nine days Marcel turned into the post. He smiled bitterly as
he saw in the clearing a handful of tepees. Around the evening fires
they had doubtless already convicted Jean Marcel, alive or dead.
Familiar with the half-breed weakness for exaggeration, he wondered in
what form the story of the cache on the Ghost had been retailed at the
trade-house. Well, he should soon know.
The howling of the post dogs announced his arrival, stirring Fleur after
her long absence from the sight of her kind to a strenuous reply.
Leaving his canoe on the beach Marcel went at once to the Mission, where
the door was opened by the priest.
"Jean Marcel!" The bearded face of the Oblat lighted with pleasure as he
opened his arms to the wanderer. "You are back, well and strong? The
terrible famine did not reach you?" he asked in French.
Jean's deep-set eyes searched the priest's face for evidence of a change
toward him but found the same frank, kindly look he had always known.
"Yes, Father, I beat the famine but I have bad news. Antoine is dead. He
was----"
"Yes, I know," Père Breton hastily broke in. "They brought the word. It
is terrible! And Piquet, is he dead also?"
"Yes, Father," Marcel said quietly. "Joe Piquet was killed by Fleur,
here, after he stabbed Antoine!"
"_Juste Ciel!_ Killed by Fleur after he stabbed Antoine?" repeated the
priest, staring at the husky.
"Yes, I wish to tell you all first, Father, before I go to the
trade-house--and Julie?" Jean inquired, his voice vibrant with fear of
what the answer might be.
"Put the dog in the stockade and I will call Julie."
Ah, then she was not married. Marcel breathed with relief.
"We have been very sad here, wondering whether you had starved--were
alive," continued the priest. "The tale Piquet's uncle, Gaspard Lelac,
and sons brought in day before yesterday made us think you also might
have----"
"Did they say Antoine had been stabbed?" interrupted Marcel, for the
priest had avoided mention of the cause of Beaulieu's death.
"They said they found his body." Père Henri still shunned the issue.
"Where?" demanded Marcel.
"Buried on the river shore!"
"They lie!" As Marcel had anticipated, the half-breeds had embellished
the sufficiently damning evidence of the cache. He realized that he
faced a battle with men who would not scruple to lie when the stark
facts already looked badly enough.
"They never were truthful people, my son. We have hoped and prayed for
your coming to clear up the mystery."
Jean put Fleur in the stockade and returned to the house. Julie Breton
stood in the doorway.
"Welcome home, Jean!" she cried in French, giving him both hands.
"Why--you are not thin!" She looked wonderingly at his face. "We
thought--you also--had starved." Her eyes filled with tears as she gazed
at the man already numbered with the dead.
Swept by conflicting emotions, Marcel swallowed hard. Were these
sisterly tears of joy at his safe return or did she weep for the Jean
Marcel she once knew, now dishonored?
"There, there! _Ma petite!_" consoled Père Henri, stroking the dark
head. "We have Jean here again, safe; all will be well in time."
"Julie had you starved out in the 'bush,' Jean, when we heard their
story," explained the priest.
But the puzzled youth wondered why Père Henri did not mention the
charges that the half-breeds must have made on reaching Whale River.
Recovering her self-control Julie excused herself to prepare supper.
Then before asking what the Lelacs had told the factor, Marcel related
to the priest the grim details of the winter on the Ghost; of the
deaths of Antoine and Piquet, of his fortunate meeting with the
returning caribou, and of his discovery, on his return to the old camp,
of the visit of the Lelacs' canoe.
"Father, it looks bad for me. They found Antoine stabbed and Piquet's
fur and outfit. I brought his rifle back to the camp and cached it with
his stuff and Antoine's to bring it all down river in the spring to
their people."
At this the heavy brows of the priest lifted in surprise. Marcel
continued:
"The cache was empty. It was a starvation camp. Antoine was dead, and
Piquet also, for his outfit was there. Seeing these things, what could
anyone think? That the third man, Jean Marcel, did this and then went
into the barrens for caribou. There he starved out, or else found meat
and would return, when he could clear himself if able. Father, it was my
wish to tell you my story before I heard the tale the Lelacs brought to
the post. Then you could judge between us."
The priest leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands on Marcel's
shoulders. His eyes sought those of the younger man which met his gaze
unwaveringly. "Jean Marcel," he said, "I have known you since your
father brought you to Whale River as a child. You have never lied to me.
True, the circumstances are unfortunate; but you have told me the
truth. We did not believe that you had killed your comrades; you would
have starved first; nor did Gillies or McCain or Jules believe in the
truth of the charge of the Lelacs. They are waiting to hear your story.
Also, since hearing your side, I see why the Lelacs are anxious to have
it believed at the trade-house that you were responsible for the deaths
of these men. They are grinding an axe of their own. It is not alone
because they are kin of Piquet that they wish to discredit and injure
you."
"How do you mean, Father?" Marcel asked, curious as to the significance
of the priest's last statement.
"I will tell you later, my son. You should report at the trade-house
now. They are waiting for you."
Cheered with the knowledge that his old friends were still staunch, that
the factor had waited for his return before expressing even an opinion,
Marcel hurried to the trade-house.
Meeting no one as he passed the scattered tepees, he flung open the
slab-door of the log-building and with head high, entered.
"Jean Marcel! By Gar, we hear you arrive!" roared the big Jules, rushing
upon the youth with open arms. "You not starve out, eh?"
Then Gillies and McCain, wringing his hand, added their welcome. Surely,
he thought, with choked emotion, these men had not turned against him
because of the tales of Lelac.
"Jean, you had a hard winter with the rabbits gone," suggested Gillies.
"You must have found the caribou this spring?"
"Yes, I find de caribou, M'sieu, but I travel far for dem; eet was hard
time een Mars."
"And the dog, you didn't have to eat your dog, Jean?" asked McCain.
Marcel's face hardened.
"De dog and Jean, dey feast and dey starve togeder. I am no Cree
dog-eater. Dat dog she save my life, one, two tam, dees winter, M'sieu."
Never had the thought of sacrificing Fleur as a last resort entered the
mind of Marcel in the lean days on the barrens.
"Well, my lad," said Gillies heartily, "we are sure glad to have you
back alive. We hear there was much starvation on the East Coast this
year, with the rabbit plague and the scarcity of deer."
They also, Marcel saw, were waiting to hear his story before alluding to
the charges of the half-breed kinsmen of Piquet.
"M'sieu Gillies," Jean began. "I weesh to tell you what happen on de
Ghost. De Lelacs bring a tale to Whale Riviere dat ees not true."
"We have paid no attention to them, Jean, trusting you would show up and
could explain it all then. I know you and I know the Lelacs. I was sorry
to hear about Antoine and Piquet but I don't think you had any part in
it, lad. Be sure of that!"
"T'anks, M'sieu." Then slowly and in great detail Marcel related to the
three men, sitting with set faces, the gruesome history of the past
winter. When he came to the night that Fleur had destroyed the crazed
Piquet, the Hudson's Bay men turned to each other with exclamations of
wonder and admiration.
"That's a dog for you! She got his wind just in time!" muttered Gillies.
"Tiens! Dat Fleur she is lak de wolf," added Jules.
"You ask eef I eat her, M'sieu," Marcel turned on McCain grimly. "Could
you eat de dog dat save your life?"
"No, by God! I'd starve first!" thundered the Scotchman.
"I love dat dog," said Jean quietly, and went on with his tale.
Breathless, they heard how he had pushed deeper and deeper beyond the
hunting grounds of the Crees into the nameless barrens until he reached
streams flowing northeast into Ungava Bay, and at last met the
returning caribou; how the great strength of Fleur beat the drag of the
net, when he was slowly freezing in the lake; and then he came to his
return to the Ghost.
In detail Marcel enumerated the articles belonging to Antoine and Piquet
which he had placed on the stage of the cache beside Beaulieu's body
when he left for the Salmon country and which had been taken by the
Lelacs to Whale River.
"I lashed Antoine een hees shed-tent and put heem on de cache, for the
wolverine and lynx would get heem een de snow." As Marcel talked McCain
and Gillies exchanged significant looks.
"Um!" muttered the factor, when Jean had finished. "Something queer
here!"
"What, M'sieu?" Marcel demanded.
"Why, Lelac says he found the body of Antoine buried under stones on the
shore and that there was nothing on the cache except the empty grub
bags."
"Dey say de fur and rifle was not dere?"
"Yes, nothing on the cache!"
"Den I must have de rifle and de fur; ees dat eet?"
"Yes, that's what they insinuate."
"Ah-hah!" Marcel scowled, thinking hard. "Dey say dey fin' noding, so do
not turn over to you de rifle and fur-pack."
"Yes, they claim you must have hidden them as you hid the body."
"Den how do dey know Piquet ees dead too?" Marcel's dark features
relaxed in a dry smile. It was not, then, solely the desire for
vengeance on the murderer of their kin that had prompted the half-breeds
to distort the facts.
"They say his extra clothes and his outfit were in the cabin, only his
rifle and fur missing. Now, Jean," he continued, "I am perfectly
satisfied with your story. I believe every word of it. I knew your
father and I know you. The Marcels are not liars. But the Lelacs are
going to make trouble over the evidence they found at your camp.
Suspicion always points to the survivor in a starvation camp, and you
know the circumstances are against you, my lad."
"M'sieu," Marcel protested. "Eef I keel Antoine, I would tak' heem into
de bush and hide heem, I would not worry ovair de fox and wolverine."
"Of course you would have hidden the body somewhere. We appreciate that.
But as they are trying to put this thing on you they ignore that side of
it. What you admit they found,--Antoine's body with a stab wound, and
Piquet's outfit, makes it look bad to people who don't know you as we
do. They won't believe that the famine got Piquet in the head. They'll
say that's a tale you made up to get yourself off."
Marcel went hot with anger. His impulse was to seek the Lelacs and have
it out, then and there. But he possessed the cool judgment of a long
line of ancestors whose lives had often depended on their heads, so he
choked back his rage.
"Now I don't want it carried down the coast that you killed your
partners, Jean," went on Gillies. "Young as you are, you'll never live
it down. And besides, there's no knowing what the government might do.
I'll have to make a report, you know. So we've got to do some tall
thinking between us before the hunters get in."
While the factor talked, the swift brain of Marcel had struck upon a
plan to trap and discredit the Lelacs, but he wished to think it over,
alone, before proposing it at the trade-house, so held his tongue. When
he was ready he would ask the factor to hold a hearing. Then he could
put some questions to his accusers that would make them squirm. One
question he did ask before packing his fur and outfit from the beach up
to the Mission.
"Have de Lelac traded dere fur, M'sieu?"
"No, we haven't started the trade yet."
"W'en dey trade dere fur weel you hold it from de oder fur, separate?"
"Why, yes, I'll do that for you, but you can't hope to identify skins,
Jean."
A corner of Marcel's mouth curled in a quizzical smile. "Wait, M'sieu
Gillies; I tell you later," and with a "Bon-soir!" he went out.
CHAPTER XXII
IN THE DEPTHS
Although it would have been pure suicide for anyone to attempt to take
Fleur from the stockade against her will, Marcel feared that some dark
night those who wished his disgrace might loose their venom in an injury
to his dog. So, refusing a room in the Mission House, he pitched his
tent on the grass inside the spruce pickets where Fleur might lie beside
him.
Here his staunch friend Jules sought Jean out. It seemed that Inspector
Wallace had been up the coast at Christmas, had stayed a week, and
although no one knew exactly what had transpired, whether he had as yet
become a Catholic, there was no doubt in the minds of the curious that
the Scotchman would shortly remove the sole obstacle to his marriage to
Julie Breton.
With head in hands, Jean Marcel listened to the news, none the less
bitter because anticipated. The loyal Jules' crude attempt to console
the brokenhearted hunter went unheard. Fate had made him its cat's-paw.
Not only had he lost his heart's desire, but his name was now a byword
at Whale River; the woman he held dear and his honor, both gone. There
was nothing left to lose. He was indeed bankrupt.
During supper, Jean was plied with questions by Julie, who, in his
absence, had had his story from her brother. To the half-breeds she
never once alluded, seemingly interested solely in the long hunt for
caribou on the barrens and in Fleur's rescue of her master from the
lake.
For the delicacy of the girl in avoiding the tragedy which was plainly
claiming his thoughts, he was deeply grateful. Clearly from the first,
she had believed in the honor of Jean Marcel. But with what was
evidently a forced gaiety, the girl sought, on the night of his return,
to banish from his mind thoughts of the cloud blackening the future--of
the trying days ahead.
"Come, Jean Marcel," she laughed, speaking to him, as always, in French,
"are you not glad to see us that you wear a face so dismal? You have not
told me how you like this muslin gown." She pirouetted on her shapely
moccasined feet challenging his approval. "Henri says I'm growing thin.
Is it not becoming? No? Then I shall eat and grow as fat as big Marie,
the Montagnais cook at the Gillies'."
The sober face of Jean Marcel lighted at her pleasantry. His brooding
eyes softened as they followed the trim figure in the simple muslin
gown. It was a rare picture indeed for a man who had but just finished
seven months in the "bush," half the time with the spectre of starvation
haunting his heels--this girl with the dusky eyes and hair, the vivid
memory of whose face he had carried with him into the nameless barrens.
But she belonged to another and he, Jean Marcel, was branded as a
murderer at Whale River, even if he escaped the law.
Presently, when Père Breton was called from the room to minister to a
Cree convert, Julie became serious.
"Jean Marcel, I have much to say to you; but it is hard--to begin."
"I should think you would have little to say to Jean Marcel."
"Why, because some half-breeds have brought a story to Whale River which
was not true?"
"Well, enough of it is true, Julie, to make the Indians believe, when
they hear it, that Jean Marcel killed his partners to save himself from
starvation."
"Not if Père Breton and Monsieur Gillies have any influence with the
Crees. They will not allow them to believe such a cruel falsehood,"
protested Julie, vehemently.
Marcel smiled indulgently at the girl's ignorance of Cree psychology.
"The harm is already done," he said. "One man is found stabbed; also the
outfit of another gone. The third man comes back. No matter what M'sieu
Gillies and Père Henri tell them they will believe the man guilty who
got out alive."
"They will not believe these Lelacs, when they are shown to be liars,"
she insisted, stamping her foot impatiently.
"They have lied about the rifle and fur only, Julie. They are telling
the truth when they say they found Antoine and some of Piquet's outfit.
The rest does not matter except to make me a thief as well as murderer."
"Oh, but it is all so unjust, so terrible to be accused like this when
because of your good heart you wished to bury Antoine decently in the
spring instead of leaving him in the snow where they would never have
found him. It is too----" Julie Breton's voice broke with emotion.
Through tears her dark eyes flashed in protest at the pass to which a
blind fate had brought an innocent man.
Marcel was deeply touched by this revelation of the girl's loyalty; but
her tears roused his heart to a wild beating. Unable to speak, he faced
her, his dark features illumined with the gratitude and love he could
not voice. For a space he sat fighting for the mastery of his emotions.
Then he said huskily:
"Julie Breton, you give me great happiness--when you say you believe
me--are still my friend."
"Oh, la, la! Nonsense!" she cried, dabbing with, a handkerchief at her
wet eyes as she recovered her poise, "you are a boy, so foolish, Jean.
Do you think that we, your friends who know you, will permit this thing?
It is impossible!" And changed the subject, nor did she allow him to
return to it.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN THE EYES OF THE CREES
Day by day the ebb-tide brought in the canoes of returning Crees.
Gradually tepees filled the post clearing. And with the coming of the
hunters from the three winds, was heard many a tale of famine in far
valleys; of families blotted out; of little victims of starvation and
disease; of the aged too frail to endure through the lean moons of the
rabbit-plague until the return of the caribou, which had spelt life to
those who waited.
Tragedy there had been, as in every winter of famine; but however
sinister were the secrets which, that spring, many a mute valley held
locked in its green forests, no rumors of such, except the tale of the
murders on the Ghost, had reached Whale River. Pitiless desertion of the
aged and the helpless, death by violence, doubtless, the starving moon
had shone upon; but none had lived to tell the tale, none had seen the
evidence, except those who had profited with their lives, and their lips
were forever sealed. And so, as Marcel had foreseen, to the gathering
families of Crees who themselves had but lately escaped the maw of the
winter, the tale of the Lelacs, expanding as it travelled, found ready
acceptance.
As yet, Jean, chafing under the odium of his position at the post, had
not faced his accusers. But the plan of his defense which had been
decided on after a conference with Gillies and Père Breton, depended for
its success on the trading of their fur by the Lelacs, and the uncle and
cousins of Joe Piquet for some reason had traded no fur. So the proud
Frenchman went his way among the hunters at Whale River with a high head
and silent tongue.
Many of those who, the spring previous, had lauded his daring in
entering the land of the Windigo and voyaging to the coast by the Big
Salmon, now, at his appearance exchanged significant glances, avoiding
the steady eyes of the man they had condemned without a hearing. Shawled
women and girls, who formerly, at the trade, had cast approving glances
at the wide-shouldered youth with the clean-cut features, now whispered
pointedly as he passed and children often shrank from him in terror as
from one defiled. But Marcel had been prepared for the effect of the
tale of the Lelacs upon the mercurial red men, in the memories of many
of whom still lurked the ghosts of deeds of their own whose ghastly
details the ears of no man would ever hear.
Since his return he had not once met the Lelacs face to face. Always
they had hastily avoided him when he appeared on the way to his canoe or
the trade-house. Jean had been strictly ordered by Gillies under no
circumstances to seek trouble with his accusers or their friends, so he
ignored them. And their disinclination to encounter the son of the
famous André Marcel had not gone unmarked by the keen eyes of more than
one old hunter. Many a red man and half-breed, friends of the father,
who respected the son, had frankly expressed to him their disbelief in
the charges of the Lelacs, accepting his story which Gillies had
published to the Crees, that Beaulieu had been stabbed by Joe Piquet
while Marcel was absent and Piquet killed later by the dog. Strongly
they had urged him to make the Lelacs eat their lies, promising their
support; but Jean had explained that it was necessary to wait; later his
day would come.
Occasionally when Marcel crossed the post clearing, pulsing with the
varied life of the spring trade, to descend the cliff trail to his
canoe, there marched by his side one whose name, also, was anathema with
many of the Crees. That comrade was Fleur. The story of Piquet's death
as told by Jean at the trade-house, though scouted by the Lelacs, had,
nevertheless, left a deep impression; and the great dog, now called the
"man-killer," who towered above the scrub huskies of the Indians as a
mastiff over a poodle, was given a wide berth. But to avoid trouble
with the Cree dogs, Jean kept Fleur for the most part in the Mission
stockade. There Gillies and McCain and Jules had come to admire the bulk
and bone of the husky they had last seen as a lumbering puppy, now in
size and beauty far surpassing the Ungavas bought by the Company of the
Esquimos. There, Crees, still friendly to Jean, lingered to gossip of
the winter's hardships and stare in admiration at his dog. There, too,
Julie romped with Fleur, grown somewhat dignified with the gravity of
her approaching responsibilities. For, to the delight of Jean, Fleur was
soon to present him with the dog-team of his dreams.
Then when the umiaks of the Esquimos began to arrive from the coast,
packed with tousle-headed children and the priceless sled-dogs, taking
Fleur, Jean sought out his old friend Kovik of the Big Salmon. As he
approached the skin lodge on the beach, beside which the kin of Fleur
were made fast to prevent promiscuous fighting with strange dogs, she
answered their surly greeting with so stiff a mane, so fierce a show of
fangs, that Jean pulled her away by her rawhide leash, lest her
reputation suffer further by adding fratricide to her crimes.
Playmates of her puppyhood, mother who suckled her, she had forgotten
utterly; vanished was all memory of her kin. She held but one
allegiance, one love; the love approaching idolatry she bore the young
master who had taken her in that far country from the strange men who
beat her with clubs; who had brought her north again through wintry
seas; who had companioned her through the long snows and in the dread
days of the famine had shared with her his last meat. The center and sum
of her existence was Jean Marcel. All other living things were as
nothing.
"Kekway!" cried the squat pair of Huskies, delighted at the appearance
of the man who had given them back their first born. "Kekway!" chuckled
a
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