THE REWARD OF VIRTUE
THE REWARD OF VIRTUE
This is a story about my guide, Josef Vezina. He’s a corking guide and a wonder at hunting, and all sorts of a good fellow besides, but he’s a French-Canadian habitant, and that means that he’s blind as a bat to some ideas perfectly evident to us. So he did a stunt last autumn one day, all out of kindness of heart, which came near getting me into a nasty hole, and would, if my friend Arthur Shackleton, my roommate at college last year, hadn’t been the best ever, and too square himself to think un-squareness of another fellow. It turned out only a joke on me after it was straightened out, but I was feeling rather shy for a while along at first.
I ought to give some idea of the sort Josef is. Well, to look at he’s a tall, lean, powerful chap of twenty-four, with slim hips and big shoulders, and black hair, and large light-blue eyes which are simply marvellous. They are wide open always, and snap back and forth over everything like lightning, and there isn’t a visible object for miles that they miss. Why, one day out on the lake in a canoe, fishing, Josef said, in his soft, respectful voice:
“M’sieur Bob!”
And I answered, “Oui—what is it, Josef?”
“If M’sieur will look—so—in the line of my paddle”—he held it out as lightly as a pencil—“V’là un oiseau-de-proie”—hawk—“on the tree across the lake.”
I looked till my eyeballs popped, and not a blessed bird could I see for minutes, and then, with much directing from Josef, I caught sight of a lump with a wriggle to it, on the top branch of a spruce like a thousand other spruces, half-way up a hillside.
It’s a treat to see him bend over a dim footprint in the moss, deep in the woods, and to watch those search-light eyes widen and brighten, and notice how he puts his rough fingers down as delicately as a lady. Then in a minute he’ll blink a quick glance and say quietly:
“Un orignal, M’sieur Bob—a moose. There is about an hour that he passed. It is a middle one, and he was not frightened. He but trotted.”