At first I used to say “Gosh! how can you tell all that, Josef?” and he would shrug his shoulders and look embarrassed.
“But it is easy—c’est facile—M’sieur. The print is not large or deeply sunken—calé—so the animal is of medium size. The marks are close together—he did not jump long jumps as one does to hurry, when effrayé. And the left hind foot and right fore foot come side by side—an animal trots so.”
“And the hour, Josef?”
For the life of him he can’t exactly explain that, but two or three times his guesses have been exactly verified. He murmurs something about whether the fern is withered which the moose crushed into his step, and whether a leaf or little twigs have fallen into it, but he lets a lot go unexplained. I reckon it’s judgment that’s come to be instinct by practice and thinking about it. For I believe he dreams hunting, he’s so crazy on the subject, and he’s sure a shark at it too.
He’s a shy fellow and won’t talk to most people, but he’s got used to me because we’ve gone off on trips. Being in the woods alone with a person, camping in one tent at night, and tramping in one another’s steps all day long; putting up with short rations and discomfort, and then having the fun and glory of killing a caribou, or getting a five-pound trout together—that game makes you feel as if you knew the other fellow pretty well. Especially if it rains—Holy Ike! We did have rain on one trip to drown a frog. Three days of it. We were off to find a lake up the right branch of the Castor Noir river, and we didn’t find it at all that “escousse”—as the guides say—and we got wetter every step and didn’t get dry at night so you’d notice it, and altogether it was a moist and melancholy excursion. But Josef was such a brick that I had a good time anyway—I’ve discovered that there are many varieties of good times and there’s one tied up in about every package, if you’ll look hard, and shake it out. So we used to have lots of fun building a whooping blaze at night near some little green-mossy arrangement of a brook, and making it go in spite of the rain—Josef’s a wizard at that. We’d get the tent up and chop for the all-night fire, and dry out our clothes and things—it’s wonderful how much you can. And then we’d have supper, and I never hope to taste anything as good as that fried bacon with corn-meal flapjacks. Maple sugar’s fine mixed right in too—we didn’t stop for courses. I’ve had meals at Sherry’s and they’re not in it with our bacon and flapjacks. Then Josef would fumble in his soggy pocket and bring out an old black pipe, and fumble in another pocket and bring out a marbled plug of tobacco, and slice off some with his ferocious hunting-knife, out of the caribou-skin case with fringe of the hide, which he wears always on his belt. Then, when he’d lit up, he’d start in to amuse me—I think he was deadly afraid I’d get bored before we found that lake. He’d tell me anything on an evening off in the woods like that by ourselves—especially, as I said, if it rained. He told me about his sweetheart who died, and about the hundred dollars he’d saved up in five years and then had to pay the doctor from Quebec when his father was awfully ill. He’s had a hard time in some ways, that Josef—yet he has his hunting, which is a great pleasure. I’d tell him about college and big cities, where he’s never been in his life, not even to Quebec, and he’d ask the simplest, most childlike questions about things, so that sometimes it made me feel sorry and a bit ashamed somehow to have had all the chances.
After we’d talked a while that way I’d get him to sing for me, for he’s got a corking voice and they are all musical, these habitants. Some of the airs were fascinating, and the words too, and afterward I got him to write down a few for me. The one I liked best began this way:
Les grands bêtes se promenent
Le long de leur forêt—
C’est aux bêtes une salle—
Le forêt, c’est leur salle;