Hugh stared at the cord, then at his half-brother. “You were not the first to visit that hole then. What is the meaning of this?” He took the bit of rawhide in his fingers.
“I think it means that the furs have been there, but have been taken away,” was the younger lad’s slow reply. “It is a piece from the thong that bound a bale of furs. That is what I think.”
“Someone has found the cache and taken away the pelts.”
“I fear it,” agreed Blaise. Though he spoke quietly, his disappointment was as strong as Hugh’s.
“That someone is probably one of the Old Company’s men. Then the furs are lost to us indeed. Yet we do not know. How did anyone learn of the cache? It may have been Black Thunder of course, but then what was the meaning of the blood-stained shirt? No, we don’t know, Blaise. Our furs may be gone for good, but we can’t be sure. Father may have put them in there out of reach of the storm and later moved them to some other place, or they may never have been in that hole at all. Some animal may have carried that bit of rawhide there.”
Blaise shook his head. “What animal could go up there?”
“A squirrel perhaps, or a bird, a gull. Anyway we can’t give up the search yet, just because we have found a bit of rawhide in a hole in the rocks. That would be folly. Perhaps the arrow points up the rift to some spot above. We can’t climb up here. We must go back.”
The two returned to the wreck and climbed up the way they had come down. Hugh again in the lead, they followed along the top of the rift to its head. There they sought earnestly for some sign that might lead them to the cache, but found none. When at sunset they gave up the search for that day, their fear that the furs had been stolen from the hole in the rock had grown near to a certainty. Well-nigh discouraged, they went back to the beach in the shallow cove where they had left their boat.
“Why is it, Blaise,” Hugh asked, as they sat by the fire waiting for the kettle to boil, “that no Indians dwell on this big island? It is a beautiful place and there must be game and furs for the hunting.”
Blaise gave his characteristic French shrug. “I know not if there is much game, and Minong is far from the mainland. I have heard that there is great store of copper in the rocks. The Ojibwas say that the island was made by the giant Kepoochikan. Once upon a time the fish quarrelled with Kepoochikan and tried to drown him by making a great flood. But he built a big floating island and made it rich with copper and there he took his family and all the kinds of birds and beasts there are. When the water, which had spread over the whole earth, stopped rising, he told a gull to dive down to the bottom and bring up some mud. The gull could not dive so far, but drowned before he reached the bottom. Then Kepoochikan sent a beaver. The beaver came up almost drowned, but with a ball of mud clutched tight in his hands. Kepoochikan took the mud and made a new earth, but he kept the island Minong for his home. After many years there was another giant, the great Nanibozho, who was chief of all the Indians on the new land Kepoochikan had made. Nanibozho is a good manito and Kepoochikan a bad one. They went to war, and Nanibozho threw a great boulder from the mainland across at Kepoochikan and conquered him. The boulder is here on Minong yet they say. Since then Nanibozho has guarded the copper of Minong, though some say his real dwelling place is on Thunder Cape. Off the shore and in the channels of Minong he has set sharp rocks to destroy the canoes that approach the island, and he has many spirits to help him guard the treasure.”