“You had caribou fever, Pete,” suggested Richards.
“Yes,” said Easton, “caribou fever, sure thing.”
“I don’t believe you’d have hit him if he hadn’t winded you,” Stanton remarked. “The trouble with you, Pete, is you can’t shoot.”
“No caribou fever, me,” rejoined Pete, with righteous indignation at such a suggestion. “Kill plenty moose, kill red deer; never have moose fever, never have deer fever.” Then turning to me he asked, “You want caribou, Mr. Wallace?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I wish we could get some fresh meat, but we can wait a few days. We have enough to eat, and I don’t want to take time to hunt now.”
“Plenty signs. I get caribou any day you want him. Tell me when you want him, I kill him,” Pete answered me, ignoring the criticisms of the others as to his marksmanship and hunting prowess. All that day and all the next the men let no opportunity pass to guy Pete about his lost caribou, and on the whole he took the banter very good-naturedly, but once confided to me that “if those boys get up early, maybe they see caribou too and try how much they can do.”
After breakfast Pete and I paddled to the other end of the little lake to pick up the trail while the others broke camp. In a little while he located it, a well-defined path, and we walked across it half a mile to another and considerably larger lake in which was a small, round, moundlike, spruce-covered island so characteristic of the Labrador lakes.
On our way back to the first lake Pete called my attention to a fresh caribou track in the hard earth. It was scarcely distinguishable, and I had to look very closely to make it out. Then he showed me other signs that I could make nothing of at all—a freshly turned pebble or broken twig. These, he said, were fresh deer signs. A caribou had passed toward the larger lake that very morning.
“If you want him, I get him,” said Pete. I could see he felt rather deeply his failure of the morning and that he was anxious to redeem himself. I wanted to give him the opportunity to do so, especially as the young men, unused to deprivations, were beginning to crave fresh meat as a relief from the salt pork. At the same time, however, I felt that the fish we were pretty certain to get from this time on would do very well for the present, and I did not care to take time to hunt until we were a little deeper into the country. Therefore I told him, “No, we will wait a day or two.”
Pete, as I soon discovered, had an insatiable passion for hunting, and could never let anything in the way of game pass him without qualms of regret. Sometimes, where a caribou trail ran off plain and clear in the moss, it was hard to keep from running after it. Nothing ever escaped his ear or eye. He had the trained senses and instincts of the Indian hunter. When I first saw him in New York he looked so youthful and evidently had so little confidence in himself, answering my question as to whether he could do this or that with an aggravating “I don’t know,” that I felt a keen sense of disappointment in him. But with every stage of our journey he had developed, and now was in his element. He was quite a different individual from the green Indian youth whom I had first seen walking timidly beside the railway conductor at the Grand Central Station in New York.