CHAPTER X
THE CAMP ON THE GHOST
Although the stinging winds with swirls of fine snow were already driving down the valleys, and nightly the ice filmed the eddies and the backwaters, yet the swift river remained open to the speeding canoe until, one frosty morning, Marcel waked in camp at the Conjuror's Falls to find that the ice had over-night closed in on the quiet reaches of the Ghost just above, shackling the river for seven months against canoe travel.
Caching his boat and supplies on spruce saplings, he circled each peeled trunk with a necklace of large inverted fish-hooks, to foil the raids of that arch thief and defiler of caches, the wolverine. That night he reached the camp of his partners.
Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, like Marcel, had lost their immediate families in the plague, and the year before, had been only too glad to join the Frenchman in a trapping partnership of mutual advantage. For while Marcel, son of the former Company head man, with a schooling at the Mission, and a skill and daring as canoeman and hunter, beyond their own, was looked upon as leader by the half-breeds, Antoine was a good hunter, while Joe Piquet's manual dexterity in fashioning snow-shoes, making moccasins and building bark canoes rendered him particularly useful. Marcel's feat of the previous spring in finding the headwaters of the Salmon and his appearance at Whale River with a pure bred Ungava husky, to the amazement of the Crees, had increased his influence with his partners; but his determination to go south after his dog when it was already high time for the three men to start for their trapping-grounds had left them in a sullen mood. Because they could use them, if he did not return from the south, they had packed his supplies over the portages of the Whale and up the Ghost to their camp, but had netted no extra whitefish for the dog they felt he would not bring home.
That night they sat long over the fire in the shack they had built the autumn previous, listening to Marcel's tale of the rescue of Fleur and of the great goose grounds of the south coast.
In the morning Jean waked with the problem of a supply of fish for Fleur and himself troubling him, for one of the precepts of André Marcel had been, "Save your fish for the tail of the winter, for no one knows where the caribou will be." Down at Conjuror's Falls, he had cached less than two months' rations for his dog, and they were facing seven months of the long snows. To be sure, she could live on meat, if meat was to be had, but a husky thrives on fish, and Marcel determined that she should have it.
Confident of finding game plentiful, his partners, with the usual lack of foresight of the Crees, had netted less than three months' supply of whitefish and lake-trout. This emergency store Marcel knew would be consumed by February, however plentiful the caribou proved to be, for the Crees seldom possess the thrift to save against the possible spring famine. So he determined to set his net at once.
Borrowing Joe's canoe, he packed it through the "bush" to a good fish lake where he set the net under the young ice, and baited lines; then taking Fleur, he started cruising out locations for his trap-lines in new country, far toward the blue hills of the Salmon watershed, where game signs had been thick the previous spring.