THE WARNING IN THE WIND
One afternoon toward the end of the year when the early dusk had turned Marcel back toward camp from his most northerly line of marten traps, he suddenly stopped in his tracks on the ridge from which he had seen the lake on the Salmon headwaters the spring previous. Pushing back the hood of his caribou capote to free his ears, he listened, motionless. Beside him, with black nostrils quivering, Fleur sniffed the stinging air.
Again the faint, far, wailing chorus which had checked him, reached Marcel's ears. The dog stiffened, her mane rising as she bared her white fangs.
"You heard it too, Fleur?" muttered the man, softly, resting a rabbit-skin mitten on the broad head of the nervous husky. Marcel gazed long at the floor of snow to the north through wind-whipped ridges.
"Ah-hah!" he exclaimed, "dey turn dees way." Clearer now the stiff breeze carried the call of the hunting wolves. Fleur burst into a frenzy of yelping. Seizing the dog, Marcel calmed her into silence. Then, after an interval, the cry of the pack slowly faded, and shortly, the man's straining ears caught no sound save the fretting of the wind through the spruce.
Wolves he had often heard, singly, and in groups of four and five, but the hunting howl which had been brought to him through the hills by the wind, he knew was not the clamor of a handful of timber-wolves, but the blood chorus of a pack. None but the white-wolves which, far to the north, hung on the flanks of the caribou herds could raise such a hunting cry and there was but one reason for their drifting south from the great Ungava barrens.
It was a sober face that Jean Marcel wore back to his camp. Large numbers of arctic wolves in the country meant the departure of the trapper's chief source of meat—the caribou. With the caribou gone, they had their limited supply of fish, and the rabbits, eked out by the flour, which would not carry them far, for the half-breeds, in spite of his warnings, had already consumed half of it. To be sure, the rabbits would pull them through to the "break-up" of the long snows in April; would keep them from actual starvation. Then he cursed his partners for failing to make themselves independent of meat by netting more fish in September.
"To-morrow," said Marcel, on his return next day to the main camp, "we start for de barren and hunt de deer hard while dey stay in dees countree." The partners spoke, at times, in French patois and Cree, at times in broken English.
"Wat you say, Jean? I got trap-line to travel to-morrow," objected Antoine Beaulieu.
"I say dis," returned Marcel, commanding the attention of the two men by the gravity of his face. "De deer will not be in dis countree een t'ree—four day."