"En roulant ma boule roulante,
En roulant ma boule;
Derrière chez-nous y-a-t-un' ètang;
En roulant ma boule."
So the brigade went. And Oxford House crouched low in the distance.
CHAPTER X
THE CAUSE INVINCIBLE
Off Caribou Point Wahbiscaw, the bowsman of Dunvegan's canoe, cried out sharply in his native tongue. The craft turned aside from a jagged reef of rock that poked like a pike's nose almost to the surface. Then they sped on with increasing rapidity. The Cree knew every channel, every fang, every shoal, every bar in the shallows of Oxford Lake. And of every other lake and river in his district there was a map in his mind.
It is the unequalled gift of the true red man to remember country over which he has travelled but once. Not only does he recall the trails or the waterways but the things which go to make those trails or waterways. He can place the smooth current, the broken, the rapid, the eddy, the rocks, the bends of shore. Even the Indian youth quickly acquires such power of recollection. The retentive faculty is developed to an enormous degree by those who roam in the wilderness.
Ahead of the brigade loomed Wasita Island, a cliff of crag and spruce sunk to its knees in some volcanic crater which had opened under it aeons ago. Its headlands were scarred and seamed, old in time, marked with the brand of chaos that had once rocked the mighty northland as the tornado rocks the balsams.
Dunvegan, mechanically doing his work as steersman, scanned the shores for a glimpse of a canoe. At last he placed it on the island margin drawn up in a little cove called Spirit Bay. It was directly in the course of the brigade. His heart beats quickened.
"Faster," he commanded the paddlers, and steered closer to the island shore.