"Go back, Fleur!" ordered Jean sternly. "You travel de shore; de cano' ees too full wid de pup." So the protesting Fleur turned back to follow the shore. The puppies, yet too young and clumsy to keep abreast of the tide-driven canoe, on the broken beach of the river, had to be freighted.
When the boat was well out in the flood, Marcel waved his cap with a last "A'voir!"
Far up-stream, a half-hour later, rhythmic flashes, growing swiftly fainter and fainter, until they faded from sight, marked for many a long moon the last of Jean Marcel.
September waned, and the laggard rear-guard of the brant and Hutchins geese, riding the first stinging northers, passed south in the wake of the wavies. On the heels of September followed a week of mellow October days lulling the north into temporary forgetfulness of the menace of the bitter months to come. Then the unleashed winds from the Arctic freighted with the first of the long snows beat down the coast and river valleys, locking the land with ice. But far in the Windigo-haunted hills of the forbidden land of the Crees a man and a boy, snug in snow-banked tepee, laughed as the winds whined through November nights and the snow made deep in the timber, for their cache was heaped high with frozen trout, whitefish and caribou.
With the coming of the snow, the puppies, young as they were, soon learned that the life of a husky was not all mad pursuit of rabbit or wood-mouse and stalking of ptarmigan; not all rioting through the "bush," on the trail of some mysterious four-footed forest denizen; not alone the gulping of a supper of toothsome whitefish or trout, followed by a long nap curled in a cosy hole in the snow, gray noses thrust into bushy tails. Although their wolf-blood made them, at first, less amenable than the average husky puppy to the discipline of collar and traces, their great mother, through the force of her example as lead-dog and the swift punishment she meted out to any culprit, contributed as much as Jean's own efforts to the breaking of the puppies to harness.
Jules, the largest, marked like his mother with slate-gray patches on head and back was all dog; but the rogues, Colin and Angus, mottled with the lighter gray of their sire, and with his rangier build, inherited much of his wolf nature. Many a whipping from the long lash of plaited caribou hide, many a sharp nip from Fleur's white teeth, were required to teach the young wolves the manners of camp and trail; to bend their wild wills to the habit of instant obedience to the voice of Jean Marcel. But Fleur was a conscientious mother and under her stern tutelage and the firm but kind treatment of Jean,—who loved to rough and wrestle the puppies in the dry snow, rolling them on their backs and holding them helpless in the grip of his sinewy hands—as the shaggy ruffians grew in the wisdom of trace and trail, so in their wild natures ripened love for the master who fed and romped with them, meting out punishment to him alone who had sinned.
In search of black and silver foxes, whose pelts, worth in the world of cities their weight in gold, are the chief inspiration of the red hunter's dreams, Jean had run his new trap-lines far in the valleys of the Salmon watershed. But to the increasing satisfaction of the still worried Michel, the sole noises of the night which had yet met his fearful ears, had been the scream of lynx, the occasional caterwauling of wolverine and the hunting chorus of timber wolves. But darkness still held potential terror for the lad in whom, at his mother's knee, had been instilled dread of the demon-infested bad-lands north of the Ghost, and he never camped alone.
January came with its withering winds, burning and cracking the faces of the hunters following their trap-lines; swirling with fine snow, which struck like shot, and stung like the lash of whips. Often when facing the drive of a blizzard even the hardy Fleur, wrinkling her nose with pain, would stop and turn her back on the needle-pointed barrage. At times when the fierce cold, freezing all moisture from the atmosphere, filled the air with powdery crystals of ice, the true sun, flanked by sun-dogs in a ringed halo, lifted above the shimmering barrens, dazzlingly bright.
One night when Jean and Michel, camped in the timber at the end of the farthest line of fox traps, had turned into their robes before a hot fire, in front of which in a snow hole they had stretched a shed tent both as windbreak and heat-reflector, a low wail, more sob than cry of night prowler, drifted up the valley.