At daylight he went ashore, concealed his canoe behind some boulders, and trusting to Fleur's nose and ears to guard him from surprise, slept the sleep of exhaustion. Later, while his breakfast was cooking, Jean revelled in his reunion with his dog. In the weeks since he had last seen her she had fairly leaped in height and weight. Food had been plenty with the half-breeds and Fleur was not starved, but his blood boiled at the evidence she bore of the breeds' brutality. He now regretted that he had not ambushed the confederate of the man he had beaten, and branded him, also, as the puppy had been marked.
Though Fleur was but six months old, the heavy legs and already massive lines of her head gave promise of a maturity, unusual, even in the Ungava breed. Some day, mused Marcel, as Fleur looked her love of the master through her slant, brown eyes, her head on his knee, he would have a dog-team equal to the famous huskies of his grandfather, Pierre Marcel, who once took the Christmas mail from Albany to Fort Hope, four hundred and fifty miles, over a drifted trail, in twelve days.
"Yes, some day Fleur will give Jean Marcel a team," he said aloud, and rubbed the gray ears while Fleur's hairy throat rumbled in delight as though she were struggling to answer: "Some day, Jean Marcel; for Fleur will not forget how you came from the north and brought her home." And then the muscles of his lean face twisted with pain as he went on: "But who will there be to work for with Julie gone?"
That day, holding the nose of his canoe on Mount Sherrick, Jean crossed the mouth of Rupert Bay and headed up the coast. In three days he was at East Main, where he bought dried whitefish for Fleur, for huskies thrive on whitefish as on no other food, and salt to cure geese; then started the same night for Fort George. Two days out he was driven ashore by the first north-wester and held prisoner, while he added to his supply of geese, which he salted down.
After the storm he toiled on day after day, praying that the stinging northers bringing the "freeze-up" would hold off until he sighted Whale River. At night, seated beneath the sombre cliffs by his drift-wood fire with Fleur at his side, he often watched the wonder of the Northern Lights, marvelling at their mystery, as they pulsed and waned and flared again over the sullen Bay, then streamed up across the heavens, and diffusing, veiled the stars, which twinkled through with a mystic blue light. The "Spirits of the Dead at Play," the Esquimos called those dancing phantoms of the skies; and he thought of his own dead and wondered if their spirits were at peace.
And then, as he lay, a blanketed shape beside his sleeping puppy, came dreams to mock him—dreams of Julie Breton, always happy, and beside her, smiling into her face, the handsome Inspector of the East Coast posts. Night after night he dreamed of the girl who was slipping away from him—who had forgotten Jean Marcel in his mad race south for his dog.
On and on he fought his way north through the head-seas, defying cross-winds; landing to empty his canoe, and then on to the lee of the next island. While his boat would live he travelled, for September was drawing to a close and over him hung the menace of the first stinging northers which for days would anchor his frail craft to the beach. Hard on their heels would follow the nipping nights of the "freeze-up," which would shackle the waterways, locking the land in a grip of ice.
Past the beetling shoulders of the Black Whale, past the Earthquake Islands and Fort George he journeyed, for the brant and blue geese were on the coast and he needed no supplies; leaving Caribou Point astern, at last the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds loomed through the mist which blanketed the flat sea.
It was to this gray headland that he had raced the northers which would have held him wind-bound. And he had won.
Rounding the Cape, in five days he stood, a drawn-faced tattered figure with Fleur at his side, at the door of the Mission House.