The rescue party from Emerson met a man and boy hauling in the stricken priest on a sledge. They had heard him sobbing in the snow.
The Indians doctored him for six weeks until his limbs threatened to drop off, and then sent a runner to St. Boniface to ask Father Lestanc what they would do with him. This happened fifty years ago, but Father Lestanc must walk to the window and look out into the garden for a while before he can trust his voice.
For men and dogs it was a round run of one hundred and forty miles from St. Boniface to Emerson, but in twenty-four hours Goiffon lay in Bishop Taché's palace at St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River. Dr. Bunn, the physician at the Hudson's Bay post across at Fort Garry, awaited his arrival and amputated the already putrefied members. The next morning Goiffon was found to be bleeding to death; the stitches would not hold and the veins were open. Nothing could be done but to calmly await the end.
Father Lestanc broke the news to the household, whereupon the sorrowing but withal practical sister in charge of the kitchen placed a caldron of buffalo tallow on the stove, for, explains my narrator, "a priest's wake requires many, many candles."
The little serving-maids under the sister, doubtless whispering over the sad happenings upstairs, forgot to watch the pot, so that it "swelled much, Madame," over the red-hot stove till all the house was on fire.
Do not scold the girls, but wait till I tell you. Such a thing was never heard of. It was really Le Bon Dieu who permitted the house and cathedral to burn. There is no doubt of it, for, when the priest carried the dying youth out and laid him on the snow, the frost congealed the blood so that his veins ceased to empty themselves.
This was fifty years ago, and last summer, Father Goiffon came up from Petit Canada, near St. Paul, to attend a cathedral service at Winnipeg, on the site of Old Fort Garry.
"Oui, Madame, oui, I comprehend when you say similia similibus curcantur. Literally, eet ees a frost kills, a frost cures. Eet ees a well thing the body ees so adaptive."
... And once Bishop Grandin was lost in the snow. It was in 1863, near Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
With one Indian boy he was crossing the lake on the ice, following in the wake of a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. The Bishop's dogs were tired and fell behind. When a storm blew up he lost the trail. The thermometer was at forty degrees below zero, and the storm was what Father Lestanc calls a "poudrerie"—that is to say, a storm where the snow blows up like fine powder. This does not sound unpleasant, but as an actuality it is, in the extreme North, a sinister snow that bites your face like driven needles.