CHAPTER IV
HOME AND JULIE BRETON
That night Marcel camped at the river's mouth and watched the gray waters of the great Bay drown the sinking sun. Somewhere, far down the bold East Coast the Great Whale emptied into the salt "Big Water" of the Crees. He remembered having heard the old men at the post say that the Big Salmon lay four "sleeps" of fair weather to the north—four days of hard paddling, as the Company canoes travel, if the sea was flat and the wind light. But if he were wind-bound, as was likely heading south in the spring, it might take weeks. He had a hundred pounds of cured fish and could wait out the wind, but the thought of Julie, who by this time must have learned from his partners of his mad journey, made Jean anxious to reach the post. He preferred to be welcomed living than mourned as dead. He wondered how deeply she would feel it—his death. Ah, if she only cared for him as he loved her! Well, she should love him in time, when he had become a voyageur of the Company, with a house at the post, he told himself, as he patted his shy puppy before turning into his blankets.
The second day out he was driven ashore under gray cliffs by a south-wester and spent the succeeding three days in overcoming the shyness of the hulking puppy, who, in the gentleness of the new master, found swift solace for the loss of her shaggy kinsmen of the Husky camp. Already she had learned that the human hand could caress as well as wield a stick, and for the first time in her short existence, was initiated into the mystery and delight of having her ears rubbed and back scratched by this master who did not kick her out of the way when she sprawled in his path. And because of her beauty, and in memory of Fleur Marcel, the mother he had loved, he named her Fleur.
When the sea flattened out after the blow, Marcel launched his canoe, and, with his dog in the bow, continued south. Not a wheeling gull, flock of whistling yellow-legs, or whiskered face of inquisitive seal, thrust from the water only as quickly to disappear, escaped the notice of the eager puppy. Passing low islands where teal and pin-tail rose in clouds at his approach, driving Fleur into a frenzy of excitement, at last he turned in behind a long island paralleling the coast.
For two days Jean travelled down the strait in the lee of this island and knew when he passed out into open water and saw in the distance the familiar coast of the Whale River mouth, that he had travelled through the mystic Manitounuk, the Esquimos' Strait of the Spirit. The following afternoon off Sable Point he entered the clear water of the Great Whale and once again, after ten months' absence, saw on the bold shore in the distance the roofs of Whale River.
There was a lump in the throat of Jean Marcel as he gazed at the distant fur-post. That little settlement, with its log trade-house and church of the Oblat Fathers, the last outpost of the Great Company on the bleak East Coast, which for two centuries had defied the grim north, stood for all he held most dear—was home. There, in the church burial ground enclosed by a slab fence, three spruce crosses marked the graves of his father, mother and brother. There in the Mission House, built by Cree converts, lived Julie Breton.
As the young flood swept him up-stream he wondered if already he had been counted as lost by his friends at the post—for it was July; whether the thoughts of Julie Breton sometimes wandered north to the lad who had disappeared into the Ungava hills on a mad quest; or if, with the others, she had given him up as starved or drowned—numbered him with that fated legion who had gone out into the wide north never to return.
Nearing the post, the canoe began to pass the floats of gill-nets set for whitefish and salmon. He could now see the tepees of the Whale River Crees, dotting the high shores, and below, along the beach, the squat skin lodges of the Huskies, with their fish scaffolds and umiaks. The spring trade was on.