Marcel's mood infected the girl.
"You're—you're not reckoning to start in and—bury him?" she cried.
Marcel shook his head.
"There's only his bones left. The rest of him is chasing around in the bellies of a pack of timber wolves. No. It's his head and his antlers. The wolves have cleaned his head sheer to the bone, as I reckoned they would, and I've toted their leavings right here, and I guess we're going to set it up a monument. Say, Keeko," he went on, with real seriousness, "I couldn't quit this camp here without setting up a monument. Do you know why?"
Keeko sat herself on the old tree-trunk. She made no reply. She simply waited for whatever he had to say.
"It's to commemorate something," he went on quickly, gazing out over the canyon. "I've found something I've been looking for—years. And I just didn't know I was looking for it. Well, that old moose found it for me. So I'm going to set his skull up, with his proud antlers a-top of it, in the best and highest place I can set it, so his old dead eye sockets can just look out over the territory he reigned over till Fate reckoned it was time to set a human queen reigning in his stead. I don't guess he'll worry about things. He'll just feel proud that it wasn't a feller of his own sex ever beat him, and, if I know a thing, he'll feel sort of content and pleased watching over things for us."
The whim of the man, intended to be so light, was full of real feeling. Keeko was torn between tears and laughter. In the end she trusted herself only to a simple question.
"Where are you going to fix him up?" she demanded.
The spell was broken. Marcel promptly became the man of action. He pointed at the gnarled and broken head of a stunted tree growing at the very edge of the canyon, with its battered crest reaching out at a perilous angle over the abyss.
"At the head of that," he said, "so he can watch for your coming up out of the south, and—tell me about it."