IN THE TEETH OF THE WINDS
It was the first week in September. This meant a race with the "freeze-up" into Whale River, for with the autumn headwinds, it 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 with the tide on the "wavies" and shot a week's supply of food.
At daylight he went ashore, concealed his canoe behind some boulders, 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 revelled 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 his blood boiled at the evidence she bore of the breeds' brutality. He now regretted that he had not ambushed the confederate of the man he had beaten, and branded him, also, as the puppy had been marked.
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, mused Marcel, as Fleur looked her love of the master through her slant, brown eyes, her head on his knee, he 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," he said aloud, and rubbed the gray ears while Fleur's hairy throat rumbled in delight as though she were struggling to answer: "Some day, Jean Marcel; for Fleur will not forget how you came from the north and brought her home." And then the muscles of his lean face twisted with pain as he went on: "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 whitefish for Fleur, for huskies thrive on whitefish as on no other food, and salt to cure geese; then started the same night for Fort George. Two days out he was driven ashore by the first north-wester and held prisoner, while he added to his supply of geese, which he salted down.
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 sombre cliffs by his drift-wood fire with Fleur at his side, he often watched the wonder of the Northern Lights, marvelling at their mystery, as they pulsed and waned and flared again over the sullen Bay, then streamed up across the heavens, and diffusing, veiled the stars, which twinkled through with a mystic blue light. The "Spirits of the Dead at Play," the Esquimos called those dancing phantoms of the skies; and he thought of his own dead and wondered if their spirits were at peace.
And then, as he lay, a blanketed shape beside his sleeping puppy, came dreams to mock him—dreams of Julie Breton, 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 the head-seas, defying cross-winds; landing to empty his canoe, and then on to the lee of the next island. While his boat would live he travelled, 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 beach. Hard on their heels would follow the nipping nights of the "freeze-up," which would shackle the waterways, locking the land in a grip of ice.
Past the beetling shoulders of the Black Whale, past the Earthquake Islands and Fort George he journeyed, for the brant and blue geese were on the coast and he needed no supplies; leaving Caribou Point astern, at last the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds 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.
Rounding the Cape, in five days he stood, a drawn-faced tattered figure with Fleur at his side, at the door of the Mission House.
"Jean Marcel! Thank God!" and Julie Breton impulsively kissed the lean cheek of the voyageur. A whine of protest followed by a smothered rumble at such familiarity with her 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!"
The appearance of Marcel and Fleur at the trade-house was greeted with:
"Nom de Dieu! Jean Marcel! And de dog! He return wid hees dog, by Gar!" as Jules Duroc sprang to meet him with a bear hug.
"Welcome back, my lad!" cried Colin Gillies, tearing a hand of Jean from the emotional Company man. While Angus McCain, joining in the chorus of congratulations, was clapping the helpless Marcel on the shoulder, the perplexed puppy, worried by the uproar of strangers about her master, leaped, tearing the back out of McCain's coat, and was relegated by Jean to the stockade outside.
"Well, well, how far did they take you, Jean? Did you have a fuss getting your dog?" asked the factor.
"I was one day behind dem at Rupert Bay——"
"What, you've been to Rupert?" interrupted the amazed Gillies.
"Oui, M'sieu. I go to Rupert and see M'sieu Cameron."
"And with one paddle you gained a day on them? Lad, you've surely got your father's staying power. Where did you come up with them?"
Then Jean related the details of his capture of Fleur to an open-mouthed audience.
"So there's one less dog-stealer on the Bay," drily commented Gillies, when Marcel had finished his grim tale.
"Why you not put de bullet een dat oder t'ief, Jean?" demanded the bloodthirsty Jules.
"Eet ees not easy to keel a man, onless he steal your dog an' try to keel you. I had de dog. One of dem was enough," gravely answered the trapper.
"That's right; you had your dog which I thought you'd never see again," approved Gillies. "But your travelling this time of year, with the headwinds and sea, up the coast in thirty days, beats me. I was five weeks, once, making it with two paddles. You must have your father's back, lad. It was the best on this coast in his day; and you've surely got his 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 revelled 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, after the loneliness of his long journey, would have been all the heaven he asked, 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 in the south at East Main in the keeping of Inspector Wallace, to do with it as his manhood prompted. And knowing what he did, Marcel kept silence.
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 the lad who was travelling down the coast on the mad quest of his puppy. 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, as a girl, for Marcel was not returning from the Ghost at Christmas.
His dreams were dead. Ambitions 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. Before he went south his partners of the previous winter had agreed to take with them the supplies, which he had drawn from the post, but that they would not net fish for his dog he was certain. Exasperated at his determination to go south, they would hardly plan for the dog they were confident he would not recover.
So Marcel bade his friends good-bye and with as much cured whitefish as he could carry without being held up on the portages by extra trips, started with Fleur on the long up-river 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 bravely 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 beside, 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.