For answer the hot tongue of the dog sought his hands as she raised her brown eyes to his. With arms around her shaggy shoulders her proud master muttered into the ears of the delighted husky love words that would have been strange indeed to any but Fleur, who found them sweet beyond measure.
"My Fleur, she grow to be de dog, de most sauvage!" he cried. "Some day she keel de wolf, eh?"
Owing to the weakened condition of the lynx, Fleur's were but surface scratches. So furious had been the husky's assault on the starved cat that she had left no opening to the knife-like claws of the powerful hind legs.
Continuing east, four days later Marcel camped in a valley on the flank of a great barren. In the morning, tying Fleur with a rawhide thong which she could have chewed through with ease but had been taught to respect, he followed the scrub along the edge of the barren searching for caribou signs. Often he stopped to gaze out across the white waste reaching away east to the horizon, seeking for blue-gray objects whose movements in scraping away the snow to the moss beneath, would alone mark them as caribou. In places the great winds had swept the plateau almost bare, beating down the snow to a depth of less than a foot. All day he skirted the barren but at last turned back to his camp sick at heart and spent with the long day on the crust, following his meagre breakfast. Deep in the shelter of the thick timber of the valley, he had dug away the snow for his fire and sleeping place, lashing above his bed of spruce boughs a strip of canvas which acted both as windbreak and heat reflector. When they had eaten their slim supper, he freshened the fire with birch logs, and sat down with Fleur's head between his knees. The "Starving Moon" of the Montagnais hung over Jean Marcel.
"Fleur, you know we got onlee two day meat left? W'en dat go, Jean Marcel go too—een few day, a week maybe; and Fleur, w'at she do?"
The husky's slant eyes shone with her dog love into the set face of her master. She whined, wrinkling her gray nose, then her jaw dropped, which was her manner of laughing, while her hot breath steamed in the freezing air. Vainly she waited for the smile that had never failed to light Marcel's face in the old days at such advances.
Dropping his mittens Jean held the massive head between his naked hands.
"Jean Marcel feel ver' bad to leave Fleur alone. Wid no game she starve too, w'en he go," he said.
Fleur's deep throat rumbled in ecstasy as the hands of the master rubbed her ears.
"Back on de Ghost, Fleur, ees some feesh and meat Joe and Antoine left; not much, but eet tak' us to Whale Riviere, maybe."