"Ha! Ha! dat ees good joke, Jean Marcel!" exclaimed Piquet.
"Oui, dat ees good joke!" returned Marcel, rising and shaking a finger in the grinning faces of his partners. "But I say dis to you, Antoine Beaulieu an' Joe Piquet. We go to de barren and hunt deer to-morrow or I tak' my share of flour and mak' my own camp."
Marcel's threat sobered the half-breeds. They had no desire to break with the Frenchman, whose initiative and daring they respected.
"De deer are plentee, I count seexteen to-day," argued Antoine.
"Oui, to-day de deer are here, but, whiff!" Jean waved his hand, "an' dey are gone; for las' night I hear de white wolves, not t'ree or four, but manee, ver' manee, drive de deer in de hills. Dey starve in de nord and come here for meat. To-morrow we go!"
Piquet and Beaulieu readily admitted that the white wolves, if they appeared in numbers, would drive the caribou—called deer, in the north—out of the country, but they insisted that what Jean had heard was the echoing of the call and answer of three or four timber wolves gathering for a hunt. Never in his life had Joe Piquet, who was thirty, heard of arctic wolves appearing on the Great Whale headwaters. Thus they argued, but Jean was obdurate. On the following day the three men started back into the barrens with Fleur and the sled.