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 superst.i.tious 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.