"Lucky Fleur!" Jean said to his friends.
"It's sure worth while being a dog, sometimes," drawled Angus McCain with a grimace. But Julie Breton ignored the remarks, wishing Marcel Godspeed.
Through the day as they travelled Marcel looked on the high shores of the Salmon with unseeing eyes, for in them was the vision of a girl bending over a great dog.
CHAPTER XXXVI
DREAMS
Christmas was but a week distant. For the first time in years Jean Marcel possessed a dog-team, and through the long December nights he had come to a decision to talk to Julie Breton once more, as in the old days, before she left Whale River forever.
Led by Fleur, Colin, Angus and Jules, now grown to huge huskies, already abreast of their mother in height and bulk of bone, and showing the wolf strain in their rangy gait and in red lower-lids of their amber eyes, were jingling down the river trail to the festivities at the post. For, from Fort Chimo, west across the wide north, to Rampart House, Christmas and New Years are kept. From far and wide come dog-teams of the red hunters down the frozen river trails for the feasting and merrymaking at the fur-posts. Two weeks, "fourteen sleeps" on the trail, going and coming, is not held by many a hardy hunter and his family too high a price to pay for a few short days of trading and gossip and dancing. There are many who trap too far from the posts and in country too inaccessible to make the journey possible, but throughout the white desolation of the fur lands the spirit of Christmas is strong and yearly the frozen valleys echo to the tinkling of the bells of dog-teams and the laughter of the children of the snows.
Over the beaten river trail, ice-hardened by the passage of many sleds preceding them, romped Fleur and her sons, toying with the weight of the two men and the food bags on the sled. At times, Jean and Michel ran behind the team to stretch their legs and start their chilled blood, for it was forty below zero. But to the dogs, travelling without wind at forty below on a beaten trail, was sheer delight. Often, on the high barrens of the Salmon they had slept soundly in their snow holes at minus sixty.