Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 9

Toward the last of October when the snow began to make, 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 her 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.

It looked like a good winter for game. Snowshoe rabbits were plentiful, and wherever their runways led in and out of the scrub spruce and fir covers, those furred assassins 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 scraped the snow with their large, round-toed hoofs, and the rabbit snares furnished stew whenever the trappers craved a change from caribou steaks, though no Indian will eat rabbit as a regular diet while he can get red meat.

During these weeks, 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 on a beaten trail. At night, in the tent Marcel had pitched and banked with snow as a halfway-camp on the round of his trap lines, she would sit with hairy ears pointed, watching his every movement, looking unutterable adoration as he scraped his pelts, stretched 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 shaggy 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 be fore the figure of Wallace darkened his life.

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.

Wallace surely 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.

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, 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?” Resting a rabbit-skin mitten on the broad head of the nervous husky, Marcel gazed long at the floor of snow to the north.

“Ah-hah!” he exclaimed, “dey turn dees way.”

Clearer now the stiff breeze carried the call of hunting wolves. Fleur burst into a frenzy of yelping. Seizing her, 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 or five, but the hunting howl which had been brought to him through the hills by the wind 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 keep them from actual starvation—would pull them through to the break-up of the long snows in April. But 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.”

“W’at 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 in t’ree-four days.”

“Ha! Ha! Dat ees good joke, Jean Marcel!” exclaimed Piquet.

“Yes, 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 today,” argued Antoine.

“Yes; to-day de deer are here. But, whiff!”—Jean waved his hand—“an’ dey are gone; for las’ night I hear de white wolves. To-morrow we go!”

Piquet and Beaulieu 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.