THE CAMP ON THE GHOST
Although the stinging winds with swirls of fine snow were already driving down the valleys, and nightly the ice filmed the eddies and the backwaters, yet the swift river remained open to the speeding canoe until, one frosty morning, Marcel waked in camp at the Conjuror's Falls to find that the ice had over-night closed in on the quiet reaches of the Ghost just above, shackling the river for seven months against canoe travel.
Caching his boat and supplies on spruce saplings, he circled each peeled trunk with a necklace of large inverted fish-hooks, to foil the raids of that arch thief and defiler of caches, the wolverine. That night he reached the camp of his partners.
Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, like Marcel, had lost their immediate families in the plague, and the year before, had been only too glad to join the Frenchman in a trapping partnership of mutual advantage. For while Marcel, son of the former Company head man, with a schooling at the Mission, and a skill and daring as canoeman and hunter, beyond their own, was looked upon as leader by the half-breeds, Antoine was a good hunter, while Joe Piquet's manual dexterity in fashioning snow-shoes, making moccasins and building bark canoes rendered him particularly useful. Marcel's feat of the previous spring in finding the headwaters of the Salmon and his appearance at Whale River with a pure bred Ungava husky, to the amazement of the Crees, had increased his influence with his partners; but his determination to go south after his dog when it was already high time for the three men to start for their trapping-grounds had left them in a sullen mood. Because they could use them, if he did not return from the south, they had packed his supplies over the portages of the Whale and up the Ghost to their camp, but had netted no extra whitefish for the dog they felt he would not bring home.
That night they sat long over the fire in the shack they had built the autumn previous, listening to Marcel's tale of the rescue of Fleur and of the great goose grounds of the south coast.
In the morning Jean waked with the problem of a supply of fish for Fleur and himself troubling him, for one of the precepts of André Marcel had been, "Save your fish for the tail of the winter, for no one knows where the caribou will be." Down at Conjuror's Falls, he had cached less than two months' rations for his dog, and they were facing seven months of the long snows. To be sure, she could live on meat, if meat was to be had, but a husky thrives on fish, and Marcel determined that she should have it.
Confident of finding game plentiful, his partners, with the usual lack of foresight of the Crees, had netted less than three months' supply of whitefish and lake-trout. This emergency store Marcel knew would be consumed by February, however plentiful the caribou proved to be, for the Crees seldom possess the thrift to save against the possible spring famine. So he determined to set his net at once.
Borrowing Joe's canoe, he packed it through the "bush" to a good fish lake where he set the net under the young ice, and baited lines; then taking Fleur, he started cruising out locations for his trap-lines in new country, far toward the blue hills of the Salmon watershed, where game signs had been thick the previous spring.
Toward the last of October when the snow began to make deep, 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 the 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. On his return, Antoine and Joe derided his labors when the caribou trails networked the muskegs, but Marcel ignored them.
It looked like a good winter for game. Snow-shoe rabbits were plentiful and wherever their runways led in and out of the scrub-spruce and fir covers, there 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. But no Indian will eat rabbit as a regular diet while he can get red meat. This varying hare of the north, which, so often, in the spring, from Labrador to the Yukon, stands between the red trapper and starvation, has a flavor which quickly palls on the taste, and never quite seems to satisfy hunger. The Crees often speak of "starving on rabbits."
During these weeks following the trap-lines, 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 into camp, on a beaten trail. At night in the tent Marcel had pitched and banked with snow, as a half-way 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, stretching 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 before 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. Should he ever see her again as Julie Breton? he asked himself. Wallace 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.