The man spoke in patois French, the woman in her native Cree language. For convenience we translate their conversation as near as may be into the English in which they were wont to converse with the Scotch settlers who, some time before, had been sent out by the Earl of Selkirk to colonise that remote part of the northern wilderness.
La Certe’s father was a French Canadian, his mother an Indian woman, but both having died while he was yet a boy he had been brought or left to grow up under the care of an English woman who had followed the fortunes of the La Certe family. His early companions had been half-breeds and Indians. Hence he could speak the English, French, and Indian languages with equal incorrectness and facility.
“You don’t like Cloudbrow,” remarked the man with an inquiring glance over the rim of his mug. “Why you not like him?”
“Hee! hee!” was Slowfoot’s lucid reply. Then, with an unwonted frown on her mild visage, she added with emphasis—
“No! I not like him.”
“I know that,” returned the husband, setting down his mug and resuming his pipe, “but why?”
To this the lady answered with a sound too brief to spell, and the gentleman, being accustomed to his wife’s little eccentricities, broke into a hilarious laugh, and assured her that Cloudbrow was not a bad fellow—a capital hunter and worthy of more regard than she was aware of.
“For,” said he, “Cloudbrow is willing to wait till spring for payment of the horse an’ cart I hired from him last year. You know that I could not pay him till I go to the plains an’ get another load of meat an’ leather. You will go with me, Slowfoot, an’ we will have grand times of it with buffalo-humps an’ marrow bones, an’ tea an’ tobacco. Ah! it makes my mouth water. Give me more tea. So. That will do. What a noise the wind makes! I hopes it won’t blow over the shed an’ kill the horse. But if it do I cannot help that. Cloudbrow could not ask me to pay for what the wind does.”
There came another gust of such violence, as he spoke, that even Slowfoot’s benignant expression changed to a momentary glance of anxiety, for the shingles on the roof rattled, and the rafters creaked as if the hut were groaning under the strain. It passed, however, and the pair went on smoking with placid contentment, for they had but recently had a “square” meal of pemmican and flour.
This compost when cooked in a frying-pan is exceedingly rich and satisfying—not to say heavy—food, but it does not incommode such as La Certe and his wife. It even made the latter feel amiably disposed to Cloudbrow.