"Tiens!" muttered Marcel. "Stabbed tru de heart w'en he sleep. Joe Piquet, he t'ink to get our feesh and beaver and fur, den he tell dem at Whale Riviere we starve out. Poor Antoine!"
Sick with the discovery, Jean sat beside the dead man, his head in his hands. Bitterly now, he regretted that he had refused the hand of his old friend in parting; that he had not taken him with him when he left the Ghost. It was clear that before starting to stalk Marcel's camp, Piquet had deemed it safer to seal the lips of Beaulieu forever as to the fate of the man he planned to kill.
"Poor Antoine!" Marcel sadly repeated. Outside, Fleur, fretting at the presence of death, whined to be off.
In the cold sunrise, Jean lashed the body of his boyhood friend, which he had sewed in some canvas, on the food cache, that it might rest in peace undefiled by the forest creatures, until on his return in May he might give it decent burial. Beside it he placed the fur-packs, rifles and outfits of the two men.
"Adieu, Antoine!" he called, waving his hand at the shrouded shape on the cache, and turned north.
March, the Crees' "Moon of the Crust on the Snow," was old. Camped on a chain of lakes in the Salmon country Marcel had been following the few traps for which he had bait and at the same time hunting widely for food. Soon, the sun, mounting higher and higher each day at noon, would begin to soften the surface of the snow which the freezing nights would harden into crust. Then he could travel far and fast. With much searching he had found another beaver lodge, postponing for a space the days when man and dog would have not even half rations to stay their hunger. The Frenchman's drawn face and loose capote evidenced the weeks of under-nourishment; but, though Fleur's great bones and the ropes of muscle, banding her back and shoulders, thrust through her shaggy coat with undue prominence, still she had as yet suffered little from the famine. So long as Jean Marcel had had fish or meat, his growing puppy had received the greater share, for she had already attained in that winter on the Ghost a height and bulk of bone equal to that of her slate-gray mother now far on the north coast.
For days Jean had been praying for the coming of the crust. With it he planned to make a wide circle back into the high barrens in search of returning caribou. Once the crust had set hard, travelling with the sled into new country would be easy. Food he must accumulate to take them through the April thaws, or perish miserably, with no one to carry the news of their fate to Whale River. Since the heart-breaking days when the white wolves drove the caribou south and the rabbits disappeared, he had, in moments of depression, sat by the fire at night, wondering, when June again came to Whale River and one by one the canoes of the Crees appeared, if, by chance, a pair of dark eyes would ever turn to the broad surface of the river for the missing craft of Jean Marcel--whether in the joy of her love for another the heart of the girl would sadden for one whose bones whitened in far Ungava hills.