XXV
THE TRAVELERS WITHOUT SNOWSHOES
After the wolverine was killed trapping had improved for a time. Then the catches began to dwindle, growing smaller and smaller. Louis and Neil agreed that they must either change their hunting grounds or go back to Pembina. They had promised to return early in March. Now March had come, with a thaw that suggested an early spring. The ducks and geese would soon be flying north, spring fishing would begin, and food be plentiful again in the settlement. And perhaps both boys were a bit homesick.
“We go back with less food than we came away with,” said Louis, “but we have not been forced to eat wolf yet. Not once have we been near starving, and we have a good catch of pelts. We will make the rounds of our traps once more, spend the night in the hut near Tête de Boeuf, and start from there.”
The morning was fine and the sun already high, when the boys left the overnight shelter in the rolling hills below Buffalo Head. Neil went ahead to break trail. The two dogs, fresh and eager, pulled willingly. The sled was well loaded with a good store of skins: rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, red fox, and mink, a few otter and beaver, two wildcats, three wolves, a couple of marten, the elk hide, and a fine and valuable silver fox pelt.
The weather was springlike, too springlike for good traveling. The soft, sticky snow clung in sodden masses to the snowshoes, making them heavy and unwieldy. It formed wet balls on the dogs’ feet. Moccasins, warm and comfortable in colder weather, became soaked. The sun glare, reflected from the white expanse, was almost unbearable. Before noon, Walter’s eyes, squinted and screwed nearly shut to keep out the excess of light, were smarting painfully. Neil’s were even worse. He was so snow blind that he dropped behind, following his comrades by hearing instead of by sight. Louis, less troubled by the glare, had to do all the trail breaking.
They had hoped to reach the Red River by night, but the usual four miles an hour were impossible in the sodden, soft snow. Having made a later start than they intended, they permitted themselves no stop at noon. At sundown they made a perilous crossing of a prairie stream on water-covered, spongy ice, that threatened at every step to go down under them, and reached a clump of willows.
“We stop here and have a cup of tea and dry our moccasins,” Louis announced.
The others, tired, hungry, with chilled feet, aching legs, and smarting, swollen eyes, were only too glad of a halt. A fire was soon burning and the kettle steaming over it. The boys, seated on bales of furs, took off their moccasins and held their feet to the blaze. The tired dogs lay in the snow near by, tongues hanging out and eager eyes watching the supper preparations.
The meal was a scanty one. For the boys there was tea and a very small chunk of pemmican, saved for the return trip. One little fish each remained for the dogs. Yet everyone felt better for the food, so much better that Louis proposed going on.
“It will be easier by night,” he asserted. “The snow will freeze over the top.”