Page:Toilers of the Trails.djvu/28

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waited, while the forests rocked above him, for the storm to blow itself out. Then, after days of toil in the deep snow, the spent dog-team floundered into the post at Lost Lake.

There the factor raised his hands in protest at the purpose of the voyageur to push south in the bitter weather. "There's two feet of new snow. You'll be weeks making Kickendache; wait until the cold lets up and the wind eases the trail."

But the call of the Big Chief still rang in the ears of the Cree, and when his dogs were rested he pushed on. So he journeyed south, harassed by the stinging January winds which cut the faces of dogs and driver like a knife-edge; camping under star-encrusted heavens over which the northern lights pulsed and streamed, while forest and icy shell of river and lake snapped and cracked and boomed in the pinch of the withering cold.

At last a team of gaunt huskies crept out of the north into Weymontechene, where the new Transcontinental, leaving the upper St. Maurice, swings west toward the Gatineau headwaters. The weekly train to Quebec was due in three days, but the Cree would not wait; he had never seen the Iron Horse of the white man and preferred to keep on down the river with his dogs.

One day late in January a sentinel patrolling a road leading to the great training camp at Valcartier, now almost deserted of troops which had been forwarded to England, saw approaching a team of lean huskies hitched to a sled, followed by a tall figure in caribou-