Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 8

It was the first week in September. This meant a race with the freeze-up back to Whale River, for with the autumn head winds, the journey 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 near to the wavies with the tide and shot a week’s supply of food.

At daylight he went ashore, concealed his canoe behind some bowlders 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 reveled 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 Jean’s blood boiled at the evidence she bore of the breeds’ brutality.

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 Jean 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,” said Jean aloud, and rubbed the gray ears while Fleur’s hairy throat rumbled in delight as though she were struggling to answer: “Some day, Fleur—for you will not forget how I came from the north and brought you home.” And then the muscles of his lean face twisted with pain. “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 white fish for Fleur and salt to cure geese. He started the same night for Fort George. Two days out he was driven ashore by the first northwester and held prisoner, while he added to his supply of geese.

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 somber cliffs by his driftwood fire, with Fleur at his side, he often watched the wonder of the northern lights, marveling at their mystery, as they pulsed and waned and flared again over the sullen bay, then streamed up across the heavens, and in their diffusion veiled the stars which twinkled through with a mystic blue light. The “Spirits of the Dead at Play,” the Eskimos called those dancing phantoms of the skies. He thought of his own dead and wondered if their spirits were at peace.

Later, as he lay a blanketed shape beside his sleeping puppy, came dreams to mock him—dreams of Julie Breton, always gay, 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 head seas and cross winds, often landing to empty his canoe, and so on to the lee of the next island. While his boat would live he traveled, 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 land. And on their heels would follow the nipping nights of the freeze-up which would shackle the waterways and lock the land in a grip of ice.

Past the beetling shoulders of the Black Whale, past the Earthquake Islands and Fort George, leaving Caribou Point astern, the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds at last 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. He rounded the cape, and five days later a drawn-faced, tattered figure with Fleur at his side, he stood at the door of the mission house. It was Julie who greeted him.

“Jean Marcel! Thank God!” she cried, and impulsively kissed the cheeks of the blushing lad. A whine of protest, followed by a smothered rumble at such familiarity with the 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!”

And later, at the trade house, Jean and Fleur were greeted with:

“Nom de Dieu! Jean Marcel! And de dog! He return wid hees dog, by gar!” And Jules Duroc sprang to meet him.

“Welcome back, my lad!” cried Colin Gillies, snatching a hand of Jean from the emotional company man, while Angus McCain, joining in the chorus of congratulations, clapped the helpless Marcel on the shoulder. The perplexed puppy, worried by this uproar of strangers about her master, leaped and tore the back out of McCain’s coat, and was forthwith relegated by Jean to the stockade outside.

“How far did they take you, Jean?” asked the factor. “Did you have a fuss getting your dog?”

“I was one day behind dem at Rupert Bay an’”

“What, you’ve been to Rupert?” interrupted the amazed Gillies.

“I go to Rupert and see M’sieu Cameron. Dey cross to Hannah Bay to hunt goose.”

“And with one paddle you gained a day on them? Lad, you’ve surely got all your father’s staying power. Where did you come up with them?”

Jean related the details of his capture of Fleur to an open-mouthed audience.

“So there’s one less dog stealer on the bay,” dryly commented Gillies, when Marcel had finished his grim tale.

“Why you not put a bullet in dat oder t’ief, Jean?” demanded the bloodthirsty Jules.

“It ees not easy to keel a man—onless he try to keel you and steal your dog. I had de dog. One of dem was enough,” gravely an swered Jean.

“That’s right; you had your dog,” approved Gillies. “But you’ve surely got your father’s 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 reveled 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, would have been all the heaven he asked, after the loneliness of his long journey, 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 down the coast, at East Main, in the keeping of Inspector Wallace.

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 Jean Marcel. 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. For Marcel was not returning from the Ghost at Christmas.

Ambition 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. His partners of the previous winter had agreed to take with them the supplies which he had drawn from the post, but he was certain that they would not net fish for his dog. They would not plan for the dog they had been confident he would not recover. So, with as much cured whitefish as he could carry without being held up on the portages by extra trips, Marcel started with Fleur on the long upriver 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 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 besides, 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.

Although the stinging winds with swirls of fine snow were already driving down the valleys and the ice nightly filmed the eddies and 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 overnight 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 fishhooks, to foil the raids of that archthief and defiler of caches, the wolverene [sic]. 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 snowshoes, 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, as he had expected, had netted no extra whitefish for the dog.

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’ supplies 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.