When the first flight of snowy geese, southward bound, flashed in an undulating white cloud over Whale River, the canoe of Jean Marcel was loaded with supplies for a winter in the land of the Windigo. And in memory of Antoine Beaulieu, he was taking with him as comrade and partner the eighteen-year-old cousin of the dead man whose kinsmen had humbly made their amends for their stand against Marcel before the hearing. Young Michel Beaulieu, of stouter fiber than Antoine, had at length overcome his scruples against entering the land of dread, through his admiration for Marcel’s daring and his confidence in the man whose reputation since the hearing and the fight with the Lelacs had been now firmly established with the Whale River Crees. When Marcel had repeatedly assured the boy that he had neither seen the trail of Machi-Manito, the devil, nor once heard the wailing of a giant Windigo through all the long snows of the past winter in the Salmon country, Michel’s pride at the offer had finally conquered his fears.
So leaving the puppy he had given Julie as the nucleus for a mission dog team, and presenting Gillies with another, Marcel packed into the canoe already deep with supplies the three remaining children of Fleur, whom he had named in honor of his three stanch friends, Colin, Jules, and Angus, and gripping the hands of those who had assembled on the beach, eased the craft into the flood tide.
“Good-by and good luck, Jean!” called Gillies.
“De rabbit weel be few; net de beeg cache of feesh before de freeze-up!” urged the practical Jules.
“No fear, Jules. We ketch all de feesh in de lac,” laughed Jean, then his eyes sought Julie Breton’s sober face as he said in French:
“I will not come back for Christmas, Julie. The pups will not be old enough for the trail.”
And with the conviction that he was saying good-by to Julie Breton forever—that on his return in June she would be far in the south at East Main with Wallace, he pushed off. He heard Julie call after him.
“Bon voyage, Jean! God bless you!”
As the paddles of Jean and Michel drove the boat into the stream, the whining Fleur, beholding her world moving away from her, plunged into the river after them.
“Go back, Fleur!” ordered Jean sternly. “You travel de shore; de cano’ ees too full wid de pup.”
So the protesting Fleur turned back to follow the shore. The puppies, too young and clumsy yet to keep abreast, of the tide-driven canoe on the broken beach of the river, had to be freighted.
When the boat was well out in the flood, Marcel waved his cap with a last, “A’voir!”
Far upstream, a half hour later, rhythmic flashes growing swiftly fainter and fainter until they faded from sight, marked for many a long moon the last of Jean Marcel.
September came and waned and on the heels of September followed a week of mellow October days lulling the North into temporary forgetfulness of the menace of the bitter months to come.
Then the unleashed winds from the Arctic freighted with the first of the long snows beat down the coast and river valleys, locking the land with ice. But far in the Windigo-haunted hills of the forbidden land of the Crees a man and a boy, snug in snow-banked tepee, laughed as the winds whined through November nights and the snow made deep in the timber, for their cache was heaped high with frozen trout, white-fish, and caribou.
With the coming of the snow, the puppies, young as they were, soon learned that the life of a husky was not all mad pursuit of rabbit or wood mouse and stalking of ptarmigan; not all rioting through the bush, on the trail of some mysterious four-footed forest denizen; not alone the gulping of a supper of toothsome whitefish or trout followed by a long nap curled in a cozy hole in the snow, black noses thrust into bushy tails. Although their wolf blood made them at first less amenable than the average husky puppy to the discipline of collar and traces, their great mother through the force of her example as lead dog and the swift punishment she meted out to any culprit, contributed as much as Jean’s own efforts to the breaking of the puppies to harness.