Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
The spring trade at Whale River was nearing its end. One by one the tepees in the post clearing disappeared as each day canoes of Cree hunters started upriver for lakes of the interior. Already the umiaks of the Eskimos had followed the ebb tide down to the great bay, bound for their autumn hunting camps along the north coast.
When Jean Marcel had traded his fur and purchased what flour, ammunition, and other supplies he needed to carry him through the long snows of the coming winter, he found that a substantial balance remained to his credit on the books of the company; a nest egg, he hoped, for the day when, perchance, as a voyageur of the company with a house at the post, he might stand with Julie at his side and receive the blessing of the good Père Breton. But Jean realized that that day was far away. Before he might hope to be honored by the company with the position and trust his father had so long enjoyed, he knew he must prove his mettle. For the company crews and dog runners, entrusted with the mails, the fur brigades and company business in general, are men chosen for their intelligence, stamina, and skill as canoemen and dog drivers.
When he had packed his last load of winter supplies from the trade house to the mission, he said with a laugh to Julie:
“Julie, we have made a good start, you and I. We have credit of three hundred dollars with the company.”
The olive skin of Julie Breton flushed to the dusky crown of hair, but she retorted with spirit:
“You are counting your geese before they are shot, M’sieu Jean! Thanks! But I am very happy with Père Henri.”
Père Breton’s laugh interrupted Jean’s reply. “Yes, my son, Julie is right. You are too young, you two, to think of wedding yet.”
“Some day, Julie, I will be a company man and then you will listen to Jean Marcel!” And the lad who had cherished the memory of the girl’s oval face through the long winter and taken it with him into, the dim, blue Ungava hills, left the mission with head erect and swinging stride.
“Jean, when are you going back to the bush?” inquired Gillies, as Marcel entered the trade house.
“My partners an’ I go nex’ week, maybe.”
“Well, I want you to take a canoe to Duck Island for me. We’re short-handed here and you have just come down that coast. I promised some Huskies to leave a cache of stuff there this summer.”
Marcel’s dark features reddened with pride. He had been put in charge of a canoe bound on company business. His crossing to the Big Salmon had marked him at Whale River as a canoeman of daring—a chip of the old block, worthy of the name Marcel.
“Bien, M’sieu Gillies! When we start?”
“To-day, after dinner!”
Returning to the mission elated, Marcel ate his dinner, made up his pack while they wished him, “Bon voyage!” then went out to the stockade. At the gate he was met, simultaneously, by the impact of a shaggy body and the swift licks of an eager tongue. Then Fleur circled him at full speed, yelping her delight, while she worked off the excitement of seeing her playmate again, until, at length, she trotted up and nosed his hand, keen for the daily rubbing of her ears which drew from her deep throat grateful mutterings of content.
“I leave my leetle dog a few days,” he whispered into a hairy ear. “She weel be good dog and obey Mamselle Julie, who weel feed her?”
The puppy broke away and ran to the gate, turning to him with pricked ears as she whined for the daily stroll into the scrub after, snowshoe rabbits.
“No, my leetle one! We walk not to-day!” He stroked the slate-gray back which trembled with her desire for a run with the master; then circling her shaggy neck with his arms, his face against hers, while she fretted as though she knew Jean was leaving her, he said: “Till we meet, Fleur!” and closed the gate.
She stood grieving, her black nose thrust between the slab pickets, the narrow eyes following Marcel’s back until he disappeared. Then she raised her head and, in the manner of her kind, voiced her disappointment in a long howl. And the wail of his puppy struck with strange insistence upon the ears of Jean Marcel—somehow like a premonition of some misfortune which the future held for him.
As the canoe of the company journeyed through the Strait of the Spirit, flocks of gray geese, which were now leading their broods out to the coast islands from the muskegs of the interior, rose ahead, to sail away in their geometric formations, while clouds of pin tail and black duck patrolled the low beaches.
Jean made Duck Island in good time and left his cargo for the Huskies in a stone cache there. But running into a southwester, while homeward bound, he did not reach Whale River for a fortnight. As he approached the post, he made out at the log landing the company steamer Inenew, loaded with trade goods from the depot at Charlton Island. Through the clearing, now almost bare of tepees, for the spring trade was over, he walked to the mission.
The door was opened by Julie Breton.
“Good day, Mamselle Breton!” and he seized the unresponsive hand of the girl. “I am glad to see you home safely, Jean.”
Something in the face and voice of the girl checked him.
“What is the matter, Julie?” he asked. “Père Henri—he is not ill?”
“No. Père Henri is well, but”
“You do not seem glad to see me again, Julie!”
“I am glad. You know that.”
“Well,” he flung out, hurt at the girl’s constrained manner, “I’ll go and see some one who will welcome Jean Marcel with no sober face!”
“Jean!” she said, as he turned away.
“What is it, Mamselle Breton?” He smiled into her troubled eyes. “Fleur has missed me, I know. She will give Jean Marcel a true welcome home.”
“Jean—she is not there—they stole her!”
The face of Jean Marcel twisted with pain.
“Mon Dieu! Stole my Fleur—my puppy!”
“Yes, they took her from the stockade, two nights ago—two men who came up the coast after dogs.”
He turned away to hide the sudden misting of his eyes. The girl rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.
“Poor Jean!”
“I worked so hard to get her, Julie! I loved that puppy—she was my child!”
“I know, Jean. After what you have been through—to have lost her”
“But I have not lost her!” the youth suddenly drew a deep breath and swung around to the girl with features set like stone. “I have not lost her! Julie Breton, I will follow them and bring back my dog if I have to trail those men to Rupert House!”
The tears had gone and in the eyes of Jean Marcel was a glint Julie had never known—a glitter of hate for the men who had taken his dog, of swift hate so intense, so bitter, that she thrilled as she gazed at his transformed face. Instinctively, she realized that the lad who faced her now was no longer the playmate of old to be treated as a boy, but the possessor of a high courage and unbreakable will that men in the future would reckon with.
Jean entered the trade house to find Gillies in conversation with a tall stranger. Jules Duroc, who was there, whispered to Jean that he was Mr. Wallace, the new inspector of the east-coast posts, who had come with the steamer.
When Gillies turned to greet Jean, he knew from the look in his face what was in his mind.
“A few days after you left, Jean,” Gillies explained, after their brief greetings, “two half-breeds dropped in here with the story that they had traveled up the coast from Rupert House to buy dogs from the Huskies. There were no dogs for sale here and they seemed pretty sore at missing the York boat bound south with the dogs bought by the company for East Main and Fort George. Why, we didn’t know, for they couldn’t get any of those dogs, anyway. They were a weasel-faced, mean-looking pair, and when Jules here found them feeding two of our huskies one day, there was trouble.”
“What dey do to you, Jules?” asked Jean, smiling faintly at the big company bowman.
“What did Jules do to them; you mean,” broke in Angus McCain.
“Well,” continued Gillies, “we got outside in time to see Jules break his paddle over the head of one and pile into the other who had a knife out and looked mean. Then I kicked them out of the post. They left that night with your dog, for the next day at Little Bear Island they passed a canoe of goose hunters bound for Whale River, and the Indians noticed the puppy, who seemed to be muzzled and tied.”
Marcel was walking the floor of the trade house, hot with rage.
“French half-breeds, M’sieu Gillies, or Scotch?” he asked.
“Scotch, Jean, medium-sized; one had lost half an ear and the other had a scar on his chin and the first finger gone on his right hand. But you’re not going after them, lad? They’ve two days’ start on you and it’s August.”
“M’sieu Gillies, I took de longue traverse for dat dog. She was de best pup in dees place. I love dat husky, m’sieu! I start to-night!”
“Man alive! You won’t make your trapping grounds before the freeze up, if you head down the coast now. You’re crazy! Besides, they are two days ahead of you, and with two paddles will keep gaining.”
“M’sieu Gillies”—the boy ignored the factor’s protest—“weel you geeve me letter of credit for de company posts?”
“Why, yes, Jean—you’ve got three hundred dollars’ credit here. But man, stop and think! You can’t overhaul those breeds, alone, and if they belong in the East Main or Rupert River country they’ll be back in the bush by the time you reach the posts—even if you can trail them that far. It’s three hundred and fifty miles to Rupert House; you might be a month on the way.”
Jean Marcel shook his head doggedly, determination written in the set muscles of his dark face. Then he suddenly demanded of the factor:
“What would my father, André Marcel, do eef he leeved? Because of de freeze-up would he geeve hees pup to dose dog stealer? I ask you dat, m’sieu?”
Gillies’ honest eyes frankly met the questioner’s. “André Marcel was the best canoeman on this coast, and no man ever did him a wrong who didn’t pay.”
“Well, then, m’sieu?” demanded Jean.
“André Marcel,” Gillies admitted, “would have followed the men who stole his dog down this coast and west to the Barren Grounds.”
Jules Duroc nodded gravely as he added: “By gar! André Marcel, he would trail dose men into de muskegs of hell.”
“Well,” said Jean, smiling proudly at the encomiums of his father’s prowess, “Jean Marcel, hees son, weel start to-night.”
Argument was futile to dissuade him from his mad venture. His partners of the previous winter, Antoine and Joe, who had waited impatiently for his return, refused to delay longer their start for Ghost River and left at once.
Then Jules took Marcel aside and quietly talked to him as would a brother.
“Jean, you stay here wid Mamselle Julie till de steamer go. Dat M’sieu Wallace, he sweet on you’ girl w’en you were up de coast. You stay till he leeve.”
For this Jean had an outward shrug of contempt, but the rumored attentions of Wallace to Julie Breton, during his absence, sickened his heart with fear. Was he to lose her, too, as well as Fleur?
Before supper, at the mission, Père Breton urged him to return to his trapping grounds and spare himself the toil of a hopeless quest down the coast in the face of the coming winter. Julie was adding her objections to her brother’s, when a knock on the door checked her. Her face colored slightly as Jean glanced up when she turned to the door.
“Good evening, monsieur!” she greeted the newcomer, a note of embarrassment in her voice.
“Good evening, mademoiselle.” And Inspector Wallace entered the room. “I hope I’m not late?”
The inspector, a tall, well-built man of thirty-five, was dressed in the garb of civilization and wore shoes, a rarity at Whale River. Chief of the east-coast posts of the great company, he had been sent the year previous from western Ontario and put in command of men older in years and experience who had passed their lives in the Far North. Naturally much resentment had manifested itself among the traders. But that the new chief officer looked and acted like a man of ability the disgruntled factors had been forced to admit.
As Wallace sat talking with Père Breton, who was evidently much pleased by his attentions to Julie, he seemed to Jean Marcel to embody all that the young Frenchman lacked. How, indeed, could he now aspire to the love of Julie Breton, when so great a man chose to smile upon her?
Wallace seemed surprised at the presence of a humble company hunter as a member of the priest’s family, but Père Breton privately informed him that Jean was as a son and brother at the mission.
While the black eyes of Julie flashed in response to the admiring glances of Wallace, Jean Marcel ate in silence his last meal at Whale River for many a long week, torn by his longing for the dog carried down the coast in the canoe of the thieves and by the hopelessness of his love for this girl who was manifestly thrilling to the compliments of a man who knew the world of men and cities, who had seen many women yet found this rose of the North fair. As he ate in silence, the young Frenchman made a vow that should this man, who was taking her from him, treat her innocence lightly, inspector though he was, he should feel the cold steel of the knife of Jean Marcel.
After supper, as Jean prepared to leave, Père Breton renewed his protests against the trip, but in vain. If he had luck, Marcel insisted, he could beat the freeze-up home; if not, he would travel up the coast later, on the ice, or—well, did it matter much what became of Jean Marcel?
So, with the letter of the factor, on which he could draw supplies at the southern posts, Jean Marcel shook the hands of his friends and, sliding his canoe into the ebb tide, started south as the dying sun gilded the flat bay to the west. He waved his hand in farewell to the group of company men on the shore. He saw above them the figures of Julie Breton and the priest. As Julie held aloft something white, she and her brother were joined by a man. It was Inspector Wallace.
Jean swung his paddle to and fro, in response to Julie’s Godspeed, then, dropping to his knees, drove the craft swiftly down stream on the long pursuit which might take him four hundred miles down the coast to the white waters of the great Rupert and beyond. And with him he carried the thought that Julie, his Julie, would daily, for a week, see this great man of the company. It was a heavy heart that Marcel, that night, took down to the sea.
With the vision of Fleur strangely sensing the impending separation from her master, as her wail of despair rose from the stockade the night he left her to go north, constantly before his eyes, Jean Marcel reached the coast and turned south. The thought of his puppy muzzled and bound in the canoe two days ahead of him lent power to every lunge of his paddle. Also, the knowledge that, back at Whale River, instead of walking the river shore in the long twilight with Jean Marcel, as he had dreamed, Julie would have Wallace at her side, added to the viciousness of his stroke.
The sea was flat; and when at daylight he saw looming ahead the cliffs of Big Island, he knew he had won a deserved rest. He went ashore, cooked some food and slept.