TRITOU swore mighty and fearful oaths. For the third time in as many
weeks, his traps had been robbed of their fur and the empty ones sprung.
The first time it had happened he reset them, and let it go at that; the
second time he reset them, and watched half the night, but saw nothing,
and the next morning the traps were all sprung again; now, the third
time, it was too much for any hard-working Indian to stand.
Tritou set and baited his line once more; then he started off at full
speed for the post, forty miles away. He was on foot, and it was night
when he reached the stockade; without a word to any one, he went into
his tepee, brought out food, blankets, and his beloved rifle; then he
picked out his dogs, eight of them, from the pack that wandered about
the post yard, harnessed them to his light sledge, and went off into the
darkness.
The other trappers wondered at this extraordinary behaviour on Tritou’s
part; he was usually communicative, and often quarrelsome, therefore
this silent streak in him astonished his fellow-Indians. “Tritou he fin’
beeg lot caribou to-day, Ah t’ink,” said old Maquette. “Mabbe,” the
others answered, and that was all that was said about it.
Tritou urged on his dogs; mile after mile passed under the sledge, and
still he hurried on. It was a quiet night, and at times a cloudy one.
There had been no snow for several days, and the crust was very hard—so
hard that the sledge often whirled sidewise on the turns, because the
bone runners could get no hold on the glare surface. The dogs needed no
whip; there were eight of them to the light sledge, and they made easy
work of it with only one hundred and forty pounds to draw, for Tritou
was not a heavy man. Four hours they travelled; then Tritou _raa-a-ed_
softly to them, and they swung off to the right, following a snow gorge
which led across a long barren. At the edge of the timber Tritou stopped
his team, and fastened the leader to a tree; with rifle cocked and eyes
and ears alert, he went into the sombre woods. His snow-shoes clicked a
little, though he did his best to prevent it by walking wide-legged and
lifting them high at every step; with a muttered curse, he knelt and
took them off. The crust was too slippery to stand in moccasins alone,
so he was forced to put them on again.
He went very slowly, listening intently at every little sound, and
peering now high, then low, through the tree trunks. An owl, disturbed
by this strange marauder, screeched over his head and flew away. Tritou
started at the sound. “Hibou! Dam’!” he whispered to himself. Suddenly
he stopped and looked at something that rested in a V cut in a big
spruce; it was the first trap on his line, and—sprung!
“Ah-h-h!” he softly hissed through his teeth; then he felt on the crust
at his feet, and found fresh scratches and little places where bits of
ice had cracked under some weight. Slowly he worked his way along the
line of traps, finding each one sprung as he came to it.
The spruce trees stood less thickly here, and a weird, dim gray light
shone on the snow between their trunks. Tritou listened again; far away
he heard the faint _click-click_ of snow-shoes. His hold on the rifle
tightened, and he looked again to be sure that it was cocked, and
advanced more carefully than ever; then he stopped again; not far in
front of him he heard the thud of a deadfall as it struck the threshold
of a trap, and then the clicking moved on; so did he, now bending almost
double. The woods grew more and more open as the edge of a barren was
approached, and the moonlight trickled on to the snow freely in places.
Tritou stopped and knelt on one knee, raising the rifle to his shoulder
as he did so. One hundred yards away, in an open spot, stood a tall
figure; it loomed up in the moonlight clear and sharp.
“Ha!” shouted Tritou as he fired.
The figure swayed, tottered, then gathered itself and disappeared in the
shadows.
“Blessé! Woun’, by gar!” said Tritou, with great satisfaction, as he
hastened to the place where the figure had stood; he hurried carefully,
with his rifle ready for another shot. Nothing stirred anywhere; Tritou
bent over in the open space. “Du sang!” he said, as he saw the dark
spots spreading over the crust here in blotches, and there, close to the
woods, in a thin streak. He thought for a moment, “Ah go back for ze
dog’; he no go far; Ah shoot for zat beeg hearrt Ah hear so mooch
h’about!” He chuckled, and turned back for the sledge.
Jules Verbaux had had bad luck with his traps; the Company’s Indians had
destroyed two lines of them entirely, so he started out on a foraging
expedition against their traps. “An eye for an eye,” thought Jules. He
selected Tritou’s line to plunder, because he had hated Tritou ever
since that day in the woods when he heard him say that he, Tritou, was
going to kill Verbaux for “dix dollaires et des fines blankeets.”
Once he reaped the harvest of fur from the line marked “T,” and he,
unseen, had watched Tritou as Tritou watched for him on the second and
third reapings. Yesterday morning he had laughed when Tritou struck out
for the post, and had followed him for five miles; but as Tritou kept
steadily on, he came back, ate his supper, and went down the line of
traps for the fourth time. He was going along slowly, springing the
deadfalls and taking the fur he found in them, when suddenly he thought
he heard something; he stopped and listened. A sharp, burning pain
seized him under the left arm, and the shock sent his wits flying for an
instant; then he heard snow-shoes coming, and gathering his great
strength, he sped into the forest. His side pained him cruelly, and his
breath came and went in gasps for a few minutes; he opened his heavy
jacket as he travelled and put his hand under the two shirts, and felt a
little warm hole near the armpit; he felt further, and found another
hole higher up on the front of his shoulder. “Dat notting, dat!” he
chuckled, with great relief, and moved his arm up and down. “Ah t’ink
Ah’m feenesh dat taime certainlee. Tak’ care, Tritou!” he said to
himself as he tore off two pieces of his shirt and stuffed them in the
little holes, effectually stopping the flow of blood. The old sign of
the pannikin came back to him. “Dey goin’ try, dey goin’ comme near,
mais dey not goin’ have success.” He repeated his own words of four
months ago.
Daylight was just coming as he reached the big open barren; he went
across it at wonderful speed, and on the edge of the next woods he took
off his snow-shoes and ran on and on; he did not slip on the crust,
because the moccasins he wore had caribou-hair soles. He passed through
the timber and crossed to another barren; in the middle of it he put on
the snow-shoes again and sped on fast.
Behind him, Tritou with his team came to the blood again, and followed
it, expecting every instant to see Verbaux dead or dying. When the
blood-trail ended, Tritou cursed horribly. “Ah go h’aftaire you,
Verbaux, de res’ h’of ma life, but Ah fin’ you!” and he called on le bon
Dieu to witness his vow. It was full light now, and he followed the
snow-shoe marks easily enough to the timber edge; there they stopped,
and not a sign of any kind could Tritou find. “Sacré-é! he no owl or
ange!” he muttered. “He do dees trick las’ taime; Ah goin’ fin’ h’out!”
He fastened the dogs, and began working in circles, each one larger and
larger as he covered the ground. It was slow work in the woods, but at
last he found the lost trail out on the next barren, where Jules had put
on the telltale snow-shoes. Tritou rushed back to the team, and lashing
them, tore on, following the open tracks. These worked farther and
farther to the southward, until Tritou was travelling at right angles to
his original course. Every time the tracks ended he would swing the dogs
in a big circle, and invariably find them again and hurry on.
Jules was crossing a high snow hill; from it he could see a long way; he
looked back, and saw Tritou in the act of circling. “Ah-ha, Tritou! you
fin’ ma leetle trick, hein? Bon! Jules goin’ show to you ’nodder vone!”
He unfastened his snow-shoes, and stepping carefully in the middle of
his tracks, worked backward over his own trail till he came to a
depression in the barren; he ran down this, and crouched low behind a
drift. In a little while Tritou came tearing down the tracks, and
stopped on the hill. He looked all round: Jules could see him perfectly,
standing there shading his eyes from the glare; then he began to circle
again, swinging out wide, and of course moving ahead all the time; he
disappeared beyond a rise, and Jules glided off on the back trail.
Tritou circled and circled in vain; he covered and recovered the whole
barren in front of him, big as it was, but he could not find the least
trace of Verbaux. He was furious, and beat the dogs unmercifully as he
twisted and turned and traced over the white country. Then he took a
tremendous circle, nearly ten miles in diameter, but returned to the
hill unsuccessful. He cursed le bon Dieu for not helping him; he spat on
his enemy’s tracks that came to the top of the hill and ended there.
“Chien! Diable! Pig! Beas’!” he screamed, shaking his fist in the air.
“Ah goin’ keel you somme taime, Verbaux! Dam’ you to l’enfer!”
He climbed on the sledge and headed the dogs back. “Ah go to la ligne,
an’ set de trap,” he said to himself. When he reached the lower end of
the line he fastened the team to a tree again, and worked up, rebaiting
and setting. “He no comme back non plus, an’ Ah’m please’!” he muttered
consolingly.
When half-way up the line, he heard a voice calling behind him, “Tritou!
Tritou! Ah leave de dog h’at Rivière Noire to-mor’! Rememb’ Jules
Verbaux. Au r’voir!” then a laugh, and all was still. Tritou rushed
back, falling down twice in his frantic speed, and came to the tree to
which he had tied the dogs; they were gone! Sledge, dogs, everything was
gone! Forty yards away his rifle stuck up, butt first, in the snow, and
the cartridges were scattered about on the crust at his feet. Far off he
heard a faint crackling, but it died away instantly, and all was quiet.
He cried and screamed with rage for a time; then, picking up the shells
and gun, he started on his forty-mile tramp to the post.
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