“I’m not sixteen yet.”
“Is it so?” cried Louis. “Then we are the same age, you and me. Fifteen years last Christmas day I was born. So my mother told Père Provencher when I was baptized.”
“My birthday is in February,” Walter replied. “I thought you must be older than that. How long have you been a voyageur for the Company?”
“For the Hudson Bay Company only this summer. This is the first time I have come to Fort York. Last year, after my father died, I went to the Kaministikwia with the Northwest men. But always since I was big enough I have known how to carry a pack and paddle a canoe. The birch canoe,—ah, that is the right kind of boat! These heavy affairs of wood,” Louis shrugged contemptuously. “They are so slow, so heavy to track and to portage. You have the birch canoe in your country? No? Then you cannot understand. When you have voyaged in a birch canoe, you will want no more of these heavy things.”
“Why does the Company use them?”
Louis shrugged again as if the ways of the Hudson Bay Company were past understanding. “The wooden boats will carry greater loads,” he admitted, “and they are stronger, yes. Sometimes you get a hole in a canoe and you must stop to mend it. Yet I think you do not lose so much time that way as in dragging these heavy boats over portages.”
The wavering white bands of the aurora borealis were mounting the northern sky before the camp was ready for the night. The one tent carried by boat number three was given up to the women and children. Walter rolled himself in a blanket and lay down with the other men on a bed of fir branches close to the fire. The air was sharp and cold, and he would have been glad of another blanket. But he had been well used to cold weather in his native country, and had become still more hardened to it during the long voyage in northern waters.
V
THE BLACK MURRAY
Louis’ voice, almost in Walter’s ear, was crying, “Leve, leve,—rise, rise!”
Surely the night could not be over yet. Walter threw off his blanket, scrambled up, shook himself, and pulled out his cherished silver watch. It was ten minutes to five.