ests bathed in the August sun held in their silent depths terrors unspeakable; that this soft valley, asleep in the spell of the northern summer, was the lair of demons insatiable and pitiless. But François Hertel was a wise man and no baiter of women, so held his tongue.
While they netted and dried whitefish at the lakes, Hertel cruised the country for a good central location for his cabin. Everywhere he found signs of game. The shores of dead-water and pond were trampled by moose which came to feed on lily-roots and water grasses at sundown. The round-toed hoof-prints of caribou trails networked the mud and moss of the muskeg beyond the valley. Along the streams mink and otter had left numberless tracks. Doubtless the hurrying feet of marauding marten, fox, and fisher would mark the first snow on the ridges. Truly the Cree trappers had given the country a wide berth, for never had the Frenchman seen such evidence of game.
Creeping south from the great bay the first September frosts roamed the valley, edging the river with the red of the willows, leaving a wake of birch ridges aflame against the sombre green of the spruce. The rising sunlifting shrouds of river mist, rolled them back to vanish on the ridges, and later died on western hills, hung with haze.
Long before the first snowfall the Hertels moved from their tent to a cabin of spruce logs, chinked with moss, flanked by a mud-mortared stone chimney. Beside it a pile of birch logs and split wood was heaped
