“Boosh! Non, mon garçon! It ees not well to travel in the snow. We must camp. Dat is all dere is for us to do. Maybe he not be bad. But look plenty bad now.”
“You mean to make camp, then?”
“Yes. Back by dose trees. Eet is good place. Zee wind is from zee nort’. Zee trees hold zee dreeft, bon. Eet might have come in much worse place.”
“Is the storm likely to last long?”
Joe Picquet gave one of his expressive shrugs.
“Maybe. Perhaps one day, maybe two, t’ree days. I do not know.”
Feeling rather low in spirits, the boys set about making a camp under Joe’s directions. It was the same kind as the one in which they had passed the night on a previous occasion. Great quantities of wood were chopped, and from the way Joe kept eying the sky, the boys could see that he was afraid the storm would be on them before they could get everything in readiness.
The old man himself worked like a beaver. It would have seemed impossible that a man of his age and apparently feeble frame could perform so much work. But Old Joe Picquet was capable of doing a day’s work with men of half his age, and the way he hustled about that camp showed it.
The dogs were fed, but instead of fighting as usual, they devoured their food in silence and then began looking about for places to burrow.
“Ah-ha! Mameluke, he know. He ver’ wise, all same one tree full of zee owl,” declared old Joe, noting this.