I could nearly have cried. Poor old Shacky! When he was ready and nerved up, and that glorious moose within gunshot, to have me step in and snap him off his upper lip when he was almost tasting him.
I was afraid to speak to Josef for a minute, I felt so much like killing him. I simply hustled those two guides, without another word about it, into the canoe, and we crossed to where the moose lay, and the business of skinning the brute and cutting him up, and all that, took three good hours of hard work. But I was laying it up for Josef, I can tell you. I’d have dismissed him if it hadn’t been that at lunch, when the men were off, Shacky took me in hand and reasoned with me, and made me see, what indeed I knew, that Josef had acted up to his lights. He couldn’t understand our point of view if I talked to him a year, so it was no use talking. He had found that hunting-place and he considered that he had a right to it for me, and that I should throw it away seemed to him pure childishness. By his code it was correct to circumvent me for my own good, and he had plain done it. Anyway I didn’t dismiss him, owing to Shacky, and also because I’m fond of him.
But I did give him an almighty serious lecture, which did no good at all. He was bursting with joy and quite ready to face small inconveniences, so he just shrugged his shoulders and blinked his light, big eyes when I preached at him, and I don’t believe he listened to much of it. Zoëtique was sore, too, but Josef let the storm rage around him and was content.
And all the way down the river and through the lakes, as we went home in triumph with those huge antlers garnishing the middle of the boat, I heard old Josef humming to himself as he paddled stern, back of me:
Chanceux est le chasseur
Et louable, qui est capable
Vaincre le Roi Orignal.
THE SABINE MAIDEN
THE SABINE MAIDEN
My young brother-in-law, Bob Morgan, is two yards long by an approximate three-quarters wide; his brother, my husband, is as long and wider; and the two frolic together, amid thunders of furniture, like kittens. Bob is that joyful-hearted thing, a sophomore at Yale, and the elder barbarian rises, playing with him, to the same glorious and irresponsible level. It is lucky that the appointments of our camp in Canada are of a sort suited to men of the stone age. Short of knocking down the stovepipe, a real tragedy is difficult, and after six years of connection with the Morgans no variation of giant gambols now surprises. So that the “God Pan” photograph, which might once have seemed against etiquette, did not startle me.