Et le roi de la salle
C’est le Roi Orignal.
Chanceux est le chasseur
Et louable, qui est capable
Vaincre le Roi Orignal.
I had a bit of trouble making out the words because he spells his own style and splits up syllables any way that it sounds to him. I’d like to give some of it the way he wrote it, for it sure was queer, but I’d feel as if I were playing a mean trick on poor old Josef if I did that. When he brought the songs to me, written on a piece of brown paper that came around a can of pork and beans, he shrugged his shoulders in an embarrassed way and blinked those enormous light eyes half a dozen times fast, and said:
“Sais pas, if M’sieur is capable to read my writing. I do not write very well—me.” Then the shoulder stunt. “M’sieur will pardon, as I have had little of instruction. I was the eldest and could go to the school but two years. It was necessary that I should work and gain money. Therefore M’sieur will pardon the writing.” And you bet I pardoned it, and you see I can’t make a joke of it after that.
All this song and dance is just to explain how Josef and I got to be a good pair, so that he’d get up any hour of the night to hunt with me, and jump at the chance; and would always manage to get me the best pool on a river for fishing, and never let me realize that I was hogging things till after I’d done it. Sometimes the other guides were up in the air at him, but Josef didn’t mind. However, the one chance that was apparently the ambition of his life he’d never yet been able to give me, and that was to kill a moose. I’d been pretty slow at getting even a caribou, and missed one or two somehow—they’re darned easy things to overshoot, for all they’re so big. But that I’d finally accomplished, and I drew a good head with thirty points to the panaches—horns—so Josef’s mind was at rest so far. At the present moment the principal reason he was living—you’d think—was that I should get “un orignal,” and I didn’t have any objections myself either.
That’s the way things stood when Arthur Shackleton came up to camp. Shacky’s the best sport going, but a greenhorn in the woods—he’d tell you so himself promptly. I saw Josef sizing him up with those huge shy eyes, as Shacky stood on the dock and fired my 30-40 Winchester at a target before we started out on the trip I’m going to tell about. Josef had one foot in the canoe, loading pacquetons into it, busy as a beaver and silent as the grave, and almost too shy to glance at the bunch of “messieurs” who were popping the guns—all the same he didn’t miss a motion. He knew perfectly that Shacky had to be shown the action of the Winchester—how you saw the guard to load, and then saw it again to throw out the shell and put in a fresh cartridge. If it had been the Archangel Michael, Josef wouldn’t have taken much stock in a fellow who didn’t understand the Winchester action, and that afternoon poor old Shacky settled himself. We’d been travelling all day, paddling in canoes and tramping on portages, and we’d gone through two or three lakes and were now working up a little river full of rapids, but with long “eaux morts” between them. We were getting to the end of such a dead-water, and Shacky’s canoe was in front, with a guide in bow and stern, and him in the middle, with a rifle. We were behind, but neither of Shacky’s guides, Blanc or Zoëtique, saw the caribou till Josef gave a blood-curdling whisper that waked them up:
“C—caribou! C—caribou!”