Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 11

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, he had gradually lost all confidence in their capacity to fight through until spring brought back the fishing. The 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 it should henceforth 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 would close the trails to all travel. Somehow, he and Fleur would pull through and see Whale River again. But it meant the need of a dogged will and, day after day, many a white mile of drudgery for himself and the dog he loved.

The February dusk hung in the spruce surrounding the halfway camp of Marcel. It was beside a pond in the hills that divided 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. Fleur had already bolted her fish, more supper than her master allowed himself, for Fleur was still growing fast and her need was greater. 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 dog for a fortnight.

As the dusk slowly blanketed the forest, stars here and there pricked out of the dark canopy of sky to light the white hills rolling to the dread valleys of the forbidden land of the Crees to the north. 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 northern lights flickered and glowed, fitfully; at length, loosing their bonds, snakelike ribbons of light writhed and twisted from the sky line to the high heavens, in grotesque traceries.

For a space Jean stood outside the tepee watching this never-ceasing wonder of the aurora; then sending Fleur to her bed, sought his blankets. Fleur slept outside under the low branches of a fir, and when it snowed, waked warm beneath a white blanket of her own. Inured to the cold, the husky knows no winter shelter and needs none, sleeping curled up through the bitter nights, nose in bushy tail, in a hole dug in the snow.

The northern lights had dimmed and faded. Sentinel stars alone were guarding the white solitudes when, from the gloom of the spruce out into the lighted snow moved a dark shape. The muffled snowshoes of the skulker advanced noiselessly. 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. 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 and 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 the prowler’s scream of terror.

Again and again the long fangs of the husky slashed at the throat of the writhing thing beneath her. 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. 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 revange, 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 take good care of Jean Marcel while he sleep! Piquet, he thought he keel us both in de tent.” 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 forepaws 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.

As Fleur drew him swiftly over the trail, ice-hard from much traveling, 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. 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 swung back the slab door of the shack and peered into the dim interior.

The half-breed lay in his bunk.

“Wake up, Antoine!”

Marcel approached the bunk. The faint light coming through 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 an’ fur, den he tell dem at Whale Riviere we starve out. Poor Antoine!”

Jean sat down beside the dead man, his head in his hands. He regretted bitterly now 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 repeated.

In the cold sunrise he lashed the body of his boyhood friend, which he had sewed in some canvas, up on the food cache, so 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.