Piquet's remark brought the blood to Jean's face.
"De dog gets her share of feesh, do you hear dat, Joe?" rasped Marcel, his eyes blazing. "You and Antoine got no right to dat feesh; you refuse to help me and you laugh when I net dat feesh. De dog gets her share, Joe Piquet!" Marcel rose, facing the others with a glitter in his eyes that had its effect on Piquet.
"We have bad tam, dees spreeng, for sure," moaned Antoine. "I weesh we net more feesh."
"Well, I tell you what to do," said Jean. "Eef de feesh do not bite tru de ice or come to de net, we travel over to de Salmon, plentee beaver dere."
At the suggestion of moving into the unknown country to the north, with its dread valleys peopled with spirits, the superstitious half-breeds shook their heads. Rather starve on the Whale, they said, than in the haunted valleys where the voices of the Windigo filled the nights with fear.
With a disgusted shrug of his wide shoulders, Marcel dismissed the subject. "All right, starve on de Ghost, de Windigo get you on de Salmon."
With the disappearance of the caribou the partners began setting rabbit snares to save their meat and flour. Jean brought up the last of his fish from Conjuror's Falls but refused to touch his cache at the lake. With strict economy and a liberal diet of rabbit, they decided that their food could carry them into March. Jean wished to keep the flour untouched for emergency, but the half-breeds, characteristically optimistic, counted on a return of the caribou, and they always had rabbit to fall back upon.
During the last week in January while following his trap-lines, Jean made a discovery the gravity of which drove him in haste back to the camp on the Ghost.
"How many long snows since de plague, Joe?" he asked.
His comrades turned startled eyes on the speaker. Piquet slowly counted on his fingers the winters since the last plague all but exterminated the snow-shoe rabbits, then leaping to his feet, cried: "By Gar! eet ees not dees year. No, no! de ole man at de trade said de nex' long snow after dees will be de plague."