Jean shook hands with the factor.
"Bon-jour, M'sieu Cameron, and t'anks!"
"If you don't drop in here on your way back, give my regards to Gillies and his family, and be careful," said the factor as Marcel left him.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEETING IN THE MARSHES
Two days later, after rounding Point Comfort, Marcel was crossing the mud-flats of Gull Bay. At last the stalk was on, for somewhere in the vast marshes of the Hannah Bay coast, camped the men he had followed four hundred miles to meet face to face and fight for his dog. Somewhere ahead, through the gray mist, back in the juniper and alder scrub beyond the wide reaches of tide-flats and goose-grass, was Fleur, a prisoner.
That night in camp at East Point, while he cleaned the action and bore of his rifle, the clatter of the geese in the muskeg behind the far lines of spruce edging the marshes, filled him with wonder. Never on the bold East Coast had he heard such a din of geese gathering for the long flight. At dawn, for it was windy, lines of gray Canadas passing overhead bound out to the shoals, waked him with their clamor. The tide was low, and he carried his canoe across the mud-flats through flocks of plover, snipe and yellow-legs, feeding behind the ebb, while teal and black-duck swarmed along the beaches.
As he poled his canoe south through the shoals, he recalled the tales his father had told him of the marshes of Hannah Bay, the greatest breeding ground of the gray goose and black duck in all the wide north. Everywhere along the bars and sand-spits the gray Canadas were idling, always with an erect, keen-eyed sentinel on guard. Farther out, white islands of snowy geese flashed in the sun, as here and there a "wavy" rose on the water to flap his black-tipped wings. Just in from their Arctic breeding-grounds, they were lingering for a month's feast on toothsome south-coast goose-grass before seeking their winter home on the great Gulf two thousand miles away.