Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 10

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. 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 the sled. 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 mid-winter 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 lak’.”

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 lak’,” 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 an’ Antoine got no right to dat feesh; you refuse to help me an’ 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 ovair 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.

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 rabbit 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 snowshoe rabbits. Then, leaping to his feet, he cried: “By gar! It ees not dees year. No, no! De ole men at de trade said de nex’ long snow after dees will be de plague.”

“Well, de old men were wrong,” Marcel calmly insisted. “It ees dees year w’en you net leetle feesh, dat de rabbits die. On de last trip to my traps I find four rabbit dead from de plague; an’ since de last snow I cross few fresh tracks.”

“I fin’ none in two days myself,” echoed Antoine thoughtfully.

The stark truth of Marcel’s contention drove itself home. 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 specter which ever hovers over the winter camps in the white silences menaced the shack on the Ghost. The plague, which periodically sweeps the North, would bring starvation to many a tepee of the improvident children of the snows as well.

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 halfway 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. 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.

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 traveled far into the barrens, beaten by the withering January winds, returning with wind-burned, frost-blackened faces.

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 should 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 critical. 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. 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 three at his tent, with his heart high with hope, he 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 snowshoes.

“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 would break with them at once. 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.

“Good evening, 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, in de valley of de spirits!”

Marcel heaped a tin dish from the kettle and, slipping outside, fed Fleur.

“Here, Fleur!” he called, “ees some of de feesh dat Joe has boiled for you. W’at? You lak’ it bettair raw? Well, Joe he lak’ it 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 in de mornin’ for Salmon Riviere country.”

“W’at! You goin’ leeve us, Jean?” cried Antoine, visibly disturbed.

“Yes, 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 fr’en’,” sneered Mar cel. “I net feesh for my dog and you not help me, but laugh; now you tak’ dem from my dog. So! I am tru wid you both! I geeve you de beaver and bid you good day, to-morrow!”

Antoine was worried. He knew what the loss of Marcel would mean to them in the days to come. The sullen Piquet in whom toil and starvation were bringing to the surface traits common to the half-breed, treated Marcel’s going with seeming indifference.

Deep in the night, Marcel waked cold. Lifting his head from the blankets, his face met an icy draft driving through the open door of the shack which framed a patch of sky swarming with frozen stars. Wondering why the door was open, he rose to close it, when the starlight fell on Piquet’s empty bunk.

“Ah-hah! Joe he steal some more, maybe!” he muttered, hastily drawing on his moccasins. Stepping into the thongs of his snowshoes 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 it, 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 all the concentrated fury of the Frenchman. Reeling back against a spruce support to the cache, the dazed half-breed sank to his snowshoes, then, slowly struggling to his knees, lunged wildly with his knife at the man sneering down at him and missed. His thrust carried him headfirst 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.

A few moments later Jean was back at the shack.

“Get up, Antoine!” he called. “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 reappeared shortly, followed by the mumbling Piquet.

“Ah, bo’-jo’! M’sieu Carcajou! You have wake up?” Jean sneered.

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, and looked into the shack where he found the two men arguing excitedly.

“Till we meet, Antoine! Better hide your grub or M’sieu Wolverene weel steal 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.

“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, he 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.