"White Brother of the Snow and his friend would find no lodgment there," said she. "It is a place of deceit. But White Brother of the Snow knows how to be patient. Let him and his friend wait. The evil spirits cannot reach up for them where they are. When the sun returns again to the high point in the heavens Manikawan will stand here. Wait."
The next instant she was gone.
"What did she say?" asked Shad.
"She were sayin'," explained Bob, "that if we has patience an' waits she'll be back by noon to-morrow, or thereabouts. An' she says if we waits here we'll be safe, but we couldn't be makin' a footin' on th' rock. She's thinkin' o' some way o' gettin' us off, but I'm not knowin' what 'tis, now."
ON THE TRAIL OF THE INDIANS
None of the three trappers had ever penetrated the region lying between the Big Hill trail and the river. They knew that here, somewhere, Ungava Bob was to lay his new trails, but as to the route the trails were to take they had no information, for this was a circumstance that the local evidences of the existence of fur-bearing animals was to have decided for Bob when he entered the country to make his initial survey of conditions.
Among the Indians who traded at the Eskimo Bay post there was but one, an old man, who had any personal knowledge of the region. When a small boy this Indian had once traversed with his father the now long disused portage trail; and one day when Ungava Bob and Dick Blake met him at the post he had, at their earnest solicitation, described to them the country as he had seen it with the distorted vision of extreme youth, and as his memory, alloyed with the superstitious tales of nearly threescore years, recalled it.
It was, he said, a region of many lakes, over which flitted the phantom canoes of those who had perished in the nearby dwelling place of evil spirits. In the canoes were the ghostly forms of the victims, for ever paddling their phantom crafts around the lakes, vainly striving to escape the torment of mocking, ghoulish spirits which pursued them. Surrounding the lakes were wild marshes and deep black forests, which were peopled by innumerable evil spirits for ever searching for new victims to destroy. Their thunder voices were always to be heard, low and deep, in a terrible frenzy of unceasing anger, ever hungry for men to devour.
In analysing this description Dick Blake eliminated the phantom canoes as the wild creation of imagination, and the thunder voices of evil spirits he set down as nothing more nor less than the roar of the great falls of whose existence the Indians had told.