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Page 61
Many a night he passed the little window beyond which he knew that she
was sleeping. Often he looked to catch a glimpse of her pale face, and
he lived in the one happiness of knowing that Marie understood, and
that into her eyes there came for an instant a different light when
their glances met. No one else knew. The secret lay between them--and
patiently Lerue waited and watched. "Some day," he kept saying to
himself--"Some day"--and that was all. The one word carried a world of
meaning and of hope. When that day came he would take Marie straight to
the missioner over at Fort Churchill, and they would be married. It was
a dream--a dream that made the long days and the longer nights on the
trap line patiently endured. Now they were both slaves to the
environing Power. But--some day--
Lerue was thinking of this when McTaggart returned at the end of the
hour. The factor came straight up to where the half dozen of them were
seated about the big box stove, and with a grunt of satisfaction shook
the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders.
"Pierre Eustach has accepted the Government's offer and is going to
guide that map-making party up into the Barrens this winter," he
announced. "You know, Lerue--he has a hundred and fifty traps and
deadfalls set, and a big poison-bait country. A good line, eh? And I
have leased it of him for the season. It will give me the outdoor work
I need--three days on the trail, three days here. Eh, what do you say
to the bargain?"
"It is good," said Lerue.
"Yes, it is good," said Roget.
"A wide fox country," said Mons Roule.
"And easy to travel," murmured Valence in a voice that was almost like
a woman's.
CHAPTER 25
The trap line of Pierre Eustach ran thirty miles straight west of Lac
Bain. It was not as long a line as Pierrot's had been, but it was like
a main artery running through the heart of a rich fur country. It had
belonged to Pierre Eustach's father, and his grandfather, and his
great-grandfather, and beyond that it reached, Pierre averred, back to
the very pulse of the finest blood in France. The books at McTaggart's
Post went back only as far as the great-grandfather end of it, the
older evidence of ownership being at Churchill. It was the finest game
country between Reindeer Lake and the Barren Lands. It was in December
that Baree came to it.
Again he was traveling southward in a slow and wandering fashion,
seeking food in the deep snows. The Kistisew Kestin, or Great Storm,
had come earlier than usual this winter, and for a week after it
scarcely a hoof or claw was moving. Baree, unlike the other creatures,
did not bury himself in the snow and wait for the skies to clear and
crust to form. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two
years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and
wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute's, heavy and yet
muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed
husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of the Wuttooi, or
blood film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His
jaws were like Kazan's, perhaps even more powerful.
Through all that week of the Big Storm he traveled without food. There
were four days of snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and
after that three days of intense cold in which every living creature
kept to its warm dugout in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed
themselves in. One might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose
and not have guessed it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of
the storm but did not allow the snow to gather over him.
Every trapper from Hudson's Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew
that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking
food, and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the
biggest chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over
their trap lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on
the eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over
Pierre Eustach's line, which was now his own for the season. It took
him two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the
fallen "trap houses," and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was
back at Lac Bain.
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