OR three days the Fort Hope Christmas mail had fought its way through the blizzard that beat down from the Kapiskau barrens upon the frozen Albany. For three days old Pierre, breaking trail through the drifting snow to give footing to his panting dog-team, or swinging his goad of plaited caribou hide from behind the sled while his nephew, Esau, took the lead, had plunged head down into the gale. Stinging like the lash of myriad whips, the pitiless northwester had seamed the frost-blackened faces of the men with cracks, cutting the noses of the laboring huskies until they whined with pain. At times, when the fury of the snow-swirls which enveloped them in a blur of white had sucked their very breath, the men threw themselves gasping beside the ice-coated dogs whose red lips and tongues, to which clung the frozen froth of their hot mouths, alone marked them as living things. Still, hour after hour, they had hurled themselves headlong into the storm. And ever as they had conquered each hard-won mile of the frozen river, the parting words of the factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Albany lived again in the ears of the old half-breed words which had etched themselves into his memory as he left the post, asleep under the stars in the gray dusk of the December morning, to take the long Fort Hope trail.
Whenever, at daylight, the boy had urged that they remain in camp, deep in the shelter of the spruce, until the storm blew itself out, the sting of those last words of the factor had spurred him on as a rowel drives a spent steed. Always his reply had been a hoarse "Marche!" as he struck the lead-dog with an unwonted fierceness that Esau could not comprehend. But old Pierre had not deigned to voice the thoughts that consumed him, and the boy, Indian-like, did not question. So, forcing the huskies to the limit of their endurance and encouraging the lad, who already showed signs of the physical strain of the battle with wind and snow, the old Cree had pushed on and on.
"In canoe or on snow-shoes no better man has served the Company. But you're stiffening up and growing too old to take the winter mail to Fort Hope. It's the toughest trail in the north country, and next year a younger man will go, for the mail must get through on time."
These were the words that for four days had tortured the pride of the old Company servant, repeating and repeating themselves through every white mile of the shifting, drift-barred trail. He recalled, too, how the factor had rested his hand kindly on his shoulder and gripped his fingers at parting as if to lighten the blow—the blow that had been the death-knell of his manhood.
And so at last, he mused, the end had come—the end foretold of late years by recurring twinges of "mal raquette," and stiffened back on portage and river. He had hoped that he had concealed it from the younger men, but now even the factor knew. Fiercely the pride of the French blood of his father and the stoicism of the Cree had fought for mastery within him through the miles of white silence on the first day out. But in vain he battled with the demons that mocked. The sentence that he knew some day must come to all men had come now to him. So this was his last long trail. At length, age had struck him down as the timber-wolves in winter strike down an old caribou deserted by the herd. A few years of light river work and easy trips with the dogs, and then a seat at the fire with the squaws and old men, remained to him, Pierre Grassette, who, among the swift dog-runners of all the wide North, had met none, half-breed, red man, or white, who could take the trail from him in the days of his youth.
This which he had dreaded above all things; this ignominy which in the last few years he had prayed he might be spared; this rusting out at a post—would be his lot. He had longed to die on the trail, in harness. But his dearest wish was to be denied him, this death of a man, which had overtaken so many of his comrades.
Years before, one still in the flush of early manhood had drowned with the crew of a Company's boat in the great gorge of the Abitibi. Another, strong as a young moose, had been frozen with his dogs on the Nepigon trail; a third, stabbed in a brawl at Henley House; but he, the last of them, would rot with garrulous squaws and toothless old men at Fort Albany, a pensioner of the Company.