The other trappers wondered at this extraordinary behaviour on Tritou’s part; he was usually communicative, and often quarrelsome, therefore this silent streak in him astonished his fellow-Indians. “Tritou he fin’ beeg lot caribou to-day, Ah t’ink,” said old Maquette. “Mabbe,” the others answered, and that was all that was said about it.
Tritou urged on his dogs; mile after mile passed under the sledge, and still he hurried on. It was a quiet night, and at times a cloudy one. There had been no snow for several days, and the crust was very hard—so hard that the sledge often whirled sidewise on the turns, because the bone runners could get no hold on the glare surface. The dogs needed no whip; there were eight of them to the light sledge, and they made easy work of it with only one hundred and forty pounds to draw, for Tritou was not a heavy man. Four hours they travelled; then Tritou raa-a-ed softly to them, and they swung off to the right, following a snow gorge which led across a long barren. At the edge of the timber Tritou stopped his team, and fastened the leader to a tree; with rifle cocked and eyes and ears alert, he went into the sombre woods. His snow-shoes clicked a little, though he did his best to prevent it by walking wide-legged and lifting them high at every step; with a muttered curse, he knelt and took them off. The crust was too slippery to stand in moccasins alone, so he was forced to put them on again.
He went very slowly, listening intently at every little sound, and peering now high, then low, through the tree trunks. An owl, disturbed by this strange marauder, screeched over his head and flew away. Tritou started at the sound. “Hibou! Dam’!” he whispered to himself. Suddenly he stopped and looked at something that rested in a V cut in a big spruce; it was the first trap on his line, and—sprung!
“Ah-h-h!” he softly hissed through his teeth; then he felt on the crust at his feet, and found fresh scratches and little places where bits of ice had cracked under some weight. Slowly he worked his way along the line of traps, finding each one sprung as he came to it.
The spruce trees stood less thickly here, and a weird, dim gray light shone on the snow between their trunks. Tritou listened again; far away he heard the faint click-click of snow-shoes. His hold on the rifle tightened, and he looked again to be sure that it was cocked, and advanced more carefully than ever; then he stopped again; not far in front of him he heard the thud of a deadfall as it struck the threshold of a trap, and then the clicking moved on; so did he, now bending almost double. The woods grew more and more open as the edge of a barren was approached, and the moonlight trickled on to the snow freely in places.
Tritou stopped and knelt on one knee, raising the rifle to his shoulder as he did so. One hundred yards away, in an open spot, stood a tall figure; it loomed up in the moonlight clear and sharp.
“Ha!” shouted Tritou as he fired.
The figure swayed, tottered, then gathered itself and disappeared in the shadows.
“Blessé! Woun’, by gar!” said Tritou, with great satisfaction, as he hastened to the place where the figure had stood; he hurried carefully, with his rifle ready for another shot. Nothing stirred anywhere; Tritou bent over in the open space. “Du sang!” he said, as he saw the dark spots spreading over the crust here in blotches, and there, close to the woods, in a thin streak. He thought for a moment, “Ah go back for ze dog’; he no go far; Ah shoot for zat beeg hearrt Ah hear so mooch h’about!” He chuckled, and turned back for the sledge.
Jules Verbaux had had bad luck with his traps; the Company’s Indians had destroyed two lines of them entirely, so he started out on a foraging expedition against their traps. “An eye for an eye,” thought Jules. He selected Tritou’s line to plunder, because he had hated Tritou ever since that day in the woods when he heard him say that he, Tritou, was going to kill Verbaux for “dix dollaires et des fines blankeets.”