The store-room was ransacked and the clothing and such damp stuff was hung out to dry. Great strings of geese and swans and ducks passed, northward bound. The rising river burst into a channel; down it floated ice cakes, carrying buffalo, elk and deer. The Indians, running out across the firmer ice, killed them with spears. The canoes were finished and brought out of the timber, and to the bank at the fort. All hands were put at work loading.
This was an anxious time for Peter. Was he to be sent down with the barge, or was he to be taken on, with the captains and Pat and all?
“I go,” announced Chaboneau. “I engage’ as one interpreter, for ze journey to ze Rock Mountains an’ ze salt ocean. I take my young wife, an’ my baby, but I leave my ol’ wife.”
“Do I go, Pat?” queried Peter.
“Well, now, I dunno,” drawled Pat, pausing to wink at Toussaint. “An’ what would we do with a boy, yonder up amongst the white bear an’ the two-headed Injuns? For I hear there be giants, wearin’ two heads on their shoulders. Sure, they’d ate a boy with only one o’ their mouths.”
“I hunt,” asserted Peter.
“Would ye kill bear an’ buff’lo with the bow an’ arrer?” teased Pat. “Ain’t we got Drouillard an’ Fields an’ the captains an’ meself, all handy with the gun?”
“I show you, Pat,” exclaimed Peter.
Two steps he made, and grabbed his bow and quiver, where they were lying on the gunwale of the barge. The quiver was full of iron-pointed arrows, which John Shields had equipped for him. Out he ran, upon the ice of the river. His quick eye had noted a black object floating down the channel aboard a floe. No Indian was after it, yet. He would show that he was as good a hunter as any Indian.
Buffalo? Elk? Deer? Wah! It was crouching, and he could not yet tell. But fast he ran, in the slush, dodging air-holes, and with the ice weaving and bending beneath him. Suddenly, as he approached, heading off the floe, the creature stood. It was no buffalo, or elk, or deer; it was a bear.