The Whelps of the Wolf Part 8

"Jean Marcel! Thank G.o.d!" 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 Andre 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 s.h.a.ggy 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.