THE DEAD MAN TELLS HIS TALE
When, late in May, the snow had left the open places reached by the sun
and the ice cleared the rivers, Marcel was ready to make his first trip
to the camp on the Ghost. Poor Antoine would have to lie content in a
shallow grave among the boulders of the river shore, for the frost was
still in the ground. Before the weather softened Jean had smoked the
remainder of his meat and now he faced a ten-mile portage with his
outfit. Before the trails went bad he could have freighted on the sled
sufficient food for his journey home but had preferred to face the
"break-up" in his own camp near a fish-lake and relay his meat over on
his back in May. The memories of the winter aroused by the camp on the
Ghost were too grim to attract him to the comfortable shack.
One morning at sunrise, after lashing a pack on Fleur's broad back, he
threw his tump-line over a bag of smoked meat and swinging it to his
shoulders, started over the trail. In the middle of the forenoon he
walked into the clearing on the Ghost and pushing off the head strap of
his line, dropped his load.
Glancing at the cache where he had left the body of Antoine Beaulieu
lashed in canvas with the fur-packs and rifles of the dead men, Marcel
muttered in surprise:
"By Gar! Dat ees strange t'ing!"
The scaffold was empty; the body of Antoine had been removed and not a
vestige remained of the fur-packs and outfits of Jean's partners.
Neither wolverines, lynxes nor bears, had they been able to overcome the
fish-hook barriers guarding the uprights, would have stripped the
platform in such fashion. Searching the soft earth, he found the faint
tracks of moccasins which the recent rain had not obliterated. But down
on the river shore the mud told the story. A canoe had landed there
within a week, for in spite of the rain the deep impress of the feet of
men carrying heavy loads still marked the beach. Since the ice went out
someone who knew that the three men were wintering there, had travelled
up the Ghost from the Whale, but why? They could not have been starving,
for fish could then be had on the Whale for the setting of a net.
Evidently they had buried Antoine and taken the fur-packs, rifles, and
outfits of the two men to Whale River. Marcel searched for a message, in
the phonetic writing employed throughout the north, burned into a blazed
tree, or on a scrap of birch-bark, left in the shack, but found
nothing. The cabin was as he had last seen it. They had thought him,
also, dead somewhere in the "bush" and had left no word, or----Then the
situation opened to him from the angle of view of the Cree visitors.
A camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a
dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him;
also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his
relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had
them in his possession. Of the third man, who was to winter with them,
no trace at the camp. Two dead and the third, possibly alive, if he had
not starved out. And that third man was Jean Marcel.
That was the grim tale which was travelling down the river ahead of him
to the spring trade. Who killed Antoine Beaulieu, and where is Piquet?
This was the question he would have to answer. This the factor and the
kinsmen of his partners would demand of the third man, if he survived to
reach the post. Yes, Whale River would anxiously await the return of
Jean Marcel that spring, but would Whale River believe his story? Of the
people of the post he had no doubt. Julie, Pere Breton, the factor,
Angus, Jules, he could count on. They knew him--were his friends. But
the Crees, and half-breds; would they believe that Joe Piquet had been
the evil genius of the tragedy on the Ghost, Joe Piquet, now dead and
helpless to speak in his own defense? Would they believe in the
innocence of the man who alone of the three partners had fought free of
the long famine? Marcel's knowledge of the Indians' mental make-up told
him that since the visit of the Crees to the camp his case was hopeless.
They would readily believe that he had killed his partners for the
remaining food, and, not anticipating the coming of a canoe in the
spring to the camp, had gone after caribou, planning to secrete the body
of Antoine, with its evidence of violence, on his return.
Of those who had peopled the canoes starting for the up-river summer
camps in July, many a face would now be absent when the Crees returned
for this year's trade. Famine surely had come to more than one camp of
the red hunters that winter; and doubtless, swift death in the night,
also, among some of those, who, when caught by the rabbit plague and the
absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet, went mad with hunger.
Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many
a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepee in the silent
places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January
winds.
To the red hunters, starvation and tragic death wore familiar faces. In
the wide north they were common enough. So, when in the spring, men
loosed from the maw of the pitiless snows returned without comrade, wife
or child, seeking succor at the fur-posts, with tales of death by
starvation or disease, the absence of witnesses or evidence compelled
the acceptance of their stories however suspicious the circumstances.
There being no proof of guilt, and because, moreover, their tales were
often true, there could be no punishment, except the covert condemnation
of their fellows or the secret vengeance of kinsman or friend in the
guise of a shot from the "bush" or knife thrust in the dark. He recalled
the cases he knew or which he had heard discussed over many a camp-fire,
of men on the East Coast, sole survivors of starvation camps, who would
go to their graves privately branded as murderers by their fellows.
Grim tales of his father returned to him; of the half-breed from
Nichicun who, it was commonly believed, had eaten his partner; of Crees
who had appeared in the spring at the posts without parents, or wives
and children, to tell conflicting stories of death through disease or
starvation; of the Frenchman at Mistassini--still a valued servant of
the Company--who was known from Fort Albany to Whale River and from
Rupert to the Peribonka, as the squaw-man who saved himself on the
Fading Waters by deserting his Montagnais girl wife. These and many
more, through lack of any proof of guilt, had escaped the long arm of
the government which, through the fur-posts, reached to the uttermost
valleys of the north.
And so it must have been with Jean Marcel, however suspicious his story,
had he buried Antoine somewhere in the snow, as he had Piquet, instead
of lashing the body on the cache with its telltale death wound. As it
was he already saw himself, though innocent, condemned in the court of
Cree opinion as the slayer of his friend.
As he came to a realization of how his case would look, even to the
whites at Whale River, he cursed the dead man Piquet for bringing all
this upon a guiltless man--for leaving him this black legacy of
suspicion.
Well, he swore to himself, they should believe his story at the post,
for it was the truth; and if any man, white or red, openly doubted his
innocence, he would have to answer to Jean Marcel. To be branded on the
East Coast as the assassin of his partners was a bitter draught for the
palate of the proud Frenchman. For generations the Marcels had borne an
honored name in the Company's service and now for the last of them to be
suspected of foul murder, was disgrace unthinkable.
So ran his thoughts as he hurried back over the trail to his camp. Of
one thing he felt sure. The situation brought about by the visit of the
Crees demanded his presence at the post as soon after their arrival as
his paddle could drive his canoe. From the appearance of the tracks on
the beach they already had a good start and it would take two days for
him to pack to the Ghost what meat and outfit he needed for the trip,
besides his furs. The rest he could cache.