SPRING AND FLEUR
At intervals during the day Jean drank the strengthening broth, too
"bush-wise" to sicken himself by gorging. By late afternoon he was able
to drive the rejuvenated Fleur to the barren and bring back the meat on
the sled. The days following were busy ones. At first his weakness
forced him to husband his strength while the stew and roasted red meat
were thickening his blood, but as the food began to tell, he was able to
hunt farther and farther into the barrens where the main migration of
the caribou was passing. When he was strong enough, he took Fleur with a
load of meat back to his old winter camp, returning with traps. These he
set at the carcasses he had shot, for foxes, lynxes and wolverines were
drawn from the four winds to his kill. So while he hunted meat to carry
him through April, and home, at the same time he added materially to his
fur-pack.
Toward the end of March, before the first thaws softened his back trail
and made sled-travel heart-breaking for Fleur, Jean began relaying west
the meat he had shot. He had now, cached in the barrens, ample food to
supply Fleur and himself until the opening of the waterways when fish
would be a most welcome change. His sledding over, he returned to his
camp in the barrens to get his traps and take one last hunt, for the
lean weeks of the winter had made him over-cautious and he wished to
make the trip back with a loaded sled.
By the coming of April, Fleur, in whom an abundance of red caribou meat
had swiftly worked a metamorphosis, had increased in bone and weight. As
Jean watched her throw her heavy shoulders into her collar and trot
lightly off over the hard trail with a two hundred pound load his heart
leaped with love of the beautiful beast who worshipped him with every
red drop in her shaggy body. What a team she would give him some day! he
thought. There would be nothing like them south of Hudson's Straits. And
the Company would need them for the winter mail packet, with Jean Marcel
to drive them.
Lately he had noticed a new trait in his dog. Several times, deep in the
night when he waked to renew the fire, he had found that Fleur was not
sleeping near him but had wandered off into the "bush." As she needed no
food, he thought these night hunts of the husky peculiar. But at dawn,
he always found Fleur back in camp sleeping beside him.
It was Marcel's last night in the barren-ground camp. Leaving Fleur, he
had, as usual, hunted all day, returning with a sled load of meat which
he drew himself. As he approached the camp he crossed the trail of a
huge timber wolf and hurried to learn if his dog had been attacked, for
tied as she was, she would fight with a cruel handicap. But Fleur
greeted him as usual with yelps of delight. In the vicinity of the camp
there were no tracks to show that the wolf had approached the husky.
However, Marcel decided that he would not leave her again bound in camp
unable to chew through the rawhide thongs in time to protect herself
from sudden attacks of the wolves which roamed the country.
After supper man and dog sat by the fire, but Fleur was manifestly
restless. Time and again she left his side to take long sniffs of the
air. Not even the rubbing of her ears which usually brought grunts of
pleasure had the magic to hold her long.
The early moon hung on the white brow of a distant ridge, and Jean,
finishing his pipe, was about to renew his fire and roll into his
blankets, when a long, wailing howl floated across the valley.
Fleur bounded to her feet, her quivering nostrils sucking in the keen
air. Again the call of the timber wolf drifted out on the silent night.
Fleur, alive with excitement, trotted into the "bush." In a moment she
returned to the fire, whimpering. Then sitting down, she pointed her
nose at the stars and her deep throat swelled with the long-drawn howl
of the husky. Shortly, when the timber wolf replied, the lips of Fleur
did not lift from her white fangs in a snarl nor did her thick mane rise
as her ears pricked eagerly forward.
At dawn Jean waked with a sense of loneliness. Pushing together the
embers of his fire, he put on fresh wood, and not seeing Fleur, called
to her but she did not appear. She had a habit of prowling around the
neighboring "bush" at dawn, inspecting fresh tracks of mice, searching
for ptarmigan or for the snow-shoe rabbits that were not there. But when
Marcel's breakfast was cooked Fleur was still absent. Thinking that a
fresh game trail had led her some distance, he ate, then started to
break camp. Finally he put his index and middle fingers between his
teeth and blew the piercing whistle which had never failed to bring her
leaping home. Intently, he listened for her answer somewhere in the
valley of the stream or on the edge of the barren, but the yelp of his
dog did not come to his straining ears.
Curious as to the cause of her absence Jean smoked his pipe and waited.
He was anxious to start back with his traps and meat; but where was
Fleur? Becoming alarmed by the middle of the morning, he made a wide
circle of the camp hoping to pick up her trail. Two days previous there
had been a flurry of snow sufficient to enable him to follow her tracks
on the stiff crust. In the vicinity of the camp were traces of Fleur's
recent footprints but finally, at a distance, Marcel ran into a fresh
trail leading down into the brook-bottom. There he lost it, and after
hours of search returned to camp to wait for her return. But the day
wore away and the husky did not appear. Night came and visions of his
dog lying somewhere stiff in the snow slashed and torn by wolves,
tortured his thoughts. If only he could pick up her trail at daylight,
he thought, for she might still live, crippled, unable to come to him,
waiting for Jean Marcel who had never failed her.
As he sat brooding by his fire, he came to realize, now that he had lost
her, what a part of him the dog had become. His thoughts drifted back
over their life together, months of gruelling toil and--delight. Tears
traced their way down the wind-burned cheeks of Marcel as he recalled
her early puppy ways and antics, how she had loved to nibble with her
sharp milk teeth at his moccasins and sit in the bow of the canoe, on
their way down the coast, scolding at the seals and ducks; with what mad
delight she had welcomed his visits to the stockade at Whale River
circling him at full speed, until breathless and panting, she leaped
upon him, her hot tongue seeking his hands and face. Then on the long
trail home from the south coast marshes, how closely she would snuggle
to his back as they lay on the beaches, as if fearing to lose him while
she slept. And the winter on the Ghost, with its ghastly end--what a
rock his dog had been when his partners failed him! In the moment of his
peril, how savagely she had battled for Jean Marcel! Through the lean
weeks of starvation when hope had died, to the dawn when she had waked
him at the coming of the caribou, his thoughts led him. And now, when
spring and Whale River were near, it was all over. Their life together
with its promise of the future had been snapped short off. He should
never again look into the slant, brown eyes of Fleur. He had lost his
all; first Julie, and now, Fleur. There was nothing left.
At daybreak, without hope, he took up the search along the stream. Where
the wind had driven, the crust now stiff with alternate freezing and
thawing and swept clean of snow, would show little sign of the passing
of the dog, but in the sheltered areas where the crust was softer and
the young snow lay, he hoped to cross the tracks of Fleur. At length,
miles from the camp, he picked up the trail of the dog in some light
drift. Following the tracks across the brook-bottom and into the scrub
of the opposite slope, he suddenly stopped, wide-eyed with amazement at
the evidence written plainly in the light covering of the crust. Fleur's
tracks had been joined by, and ran side by side with, the trail of a
wolf.
"By Gar!" gasped the surprised Frenchman. "She do not fight wid de
wolf!"
As he travelled, he found no marks of battle in the snow, simply the
parallel trails of the two, dog and wolf, now trotting, now lengthening
out into the long, wolf lope.
"Fleur leave Jean Marcel for de wolf!" the trapper rubbed his eyes as
though suspicious of a trick of vision. His Fleur, whom he loved as his
life and who adored Jean Marcel, to desert him this way in the
night--and for a timber wolf.
It was strange indeed. Yet he had heard of such things. It was this way
that the Esquimos kept up the marvellous strain to which Fleur belonged.
He recalled the peculiar actions of the dog during the previous
days--the wolf tracks near the camp; her excitement of the night before
when the call had sounded over the valley. This wolf had been dogging
their trail for a week and Fleur had known it.
"Ah!" he murmured, nodding his head. "Eet ees de spreeng!"
Yes, the spring was slowly creeping north and the creatures of the
forest had already answered its call. It was April, and Fleur, too, had
succumbed to an urge stronger for the moment than the love of the
master. April, the Crees' "Moon of the Breaking of the Snow-Shoes,"
when, at last, the wind would begin to shift to the south and the nights
lose their edge, only to shift back again, with frost. Then the snow
would melt hard at noon, softening the trails, and later on, rain and
sleet would drive in from the great Bay turning the white floor of the
forest to slush, flooding the ice of the rivers which later would break
up and move out, overrunning the shell of pond and lake which late in
May would honeycomb and disappear.
Marcel followed the trails of wolf and dog until he lost them on the
wind-packed snow of the barren. There was nothing to do but wait. He
knew his dog had not forgotten him--would come home; but when? It was
high time for his return to the camp in the Salmon country, to his
precious cache of meat, which would attract lynxes and wolverines for
miles around. The bears would soon leave their "washes" and the uprights
of his cache were not proof against bear. But he would not go without
Fleur, and she was away, somewhere in the hills.
Three days he waited, continuing to hunt that he might take a full
sled-load back to his cache. But the weather was softening and any day
now might mean the start of the big "break-up." It was deep in the
third night that a great gray shape burst out of the forest and pounced
upon the muffled figure under the shed-tent by the fire. As the dog
pawed at the blanketed shape, Marcel, drugged with sleep and bewildered
by the attack, was groping for his knife, when a familiar whine and the
licks of a warm tongue proclaimed the return of Fleur, and the man threw
his arms around his dog.
"Fleur come back to Jean?" Breaking from him, in sheer delight, the dog
repeatedly circled the fire, then rearing on her hind legs put her
fore-paws on his chest.
"Fleur bad dog to run away wid de wolf!" Marcel seized her by the jowls
and shook the massive head, peering into the slant eyes in the dim
starlight. And Fleur, as though ashamed of her desertion of the master,
pushed her nose under his arm, the rumbling in her throat voicing her
joy to be with him again. Then Marcel gave her meat from the cache which
she bolted greedily.
It had not entered his mind once he had found her tracks that Fleur
would not return to him, but during her long absence the condition of
the snow had been a source of worry. Each day's delay meant the chance
of the bottom suddenly falling out of the trail before he could freight
his load of meat and traps back to his old camp far to the west. Once
the big thaw was on, all sledding would be over. So, hurriedly eating
his breakfast, he started under the stars, for at noon he would be held
up by the softening trail. Toward mid-afternoon, when it turned colder,
he would again travel.
Back at his old camp, Marcel found that the fish-hook necklace with
which he had circled each of the peeled spruce uprights of his cache had
baffled the wolverines and lynxes lured for miles by the odor of meat.
Resetting short trap-lines, he waited for the "break-up" with tranquil
mind, for his cache groaned with meat.