ed, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter
proud of his son, the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts
suffering to get the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as
the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips
his fingers at times with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a
lion fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of
the desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and, as
it lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its
handsomeness. Death is no insult. It is the law of the primitive
world--war, and love in war.

[Illustration]

II

They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own way:
the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic
feelings; the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious
atmosphere which belongs to the north, and to the north alone. At last
the boy lay back on his pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole of
the pelt. His eyes closed, and he seemed about to fall asleep, but
presently looked up and whispered: "I haven't said my prayers, have I?"

The father shook his head in a sort of rude confusion.

"I can pray out loud if I want to, can't I?"

"Of course, Dominique." The man shrank a little.

"I forget a good many times, but I know one all right, for I said it
when the bird was singing. It isn't one out of the book Father Corraine
sent mother by Pretty Pierre; it's one she taught me out of her own
head. P'r'aps I'd better say it."

"P'r'aps, if you want to." The voice was husky.

The boy began:

"O Bon Jesu, who died to save us from our sins, and to lead us to Thy
country, where there is no cold, nor hunger, nor thirst, and where no
one is afraid, listen to Thy child.... When the great winds and rains
come down from the hills, do not let the floods drown us, nor the woods
cover us, nor the snow-slide bury us, and do not let the prairie-fires
burn us. Keep wild beasts from killing us in our sleep, and give us good
hearts that we may not kill them in anger."

His finger twisted involuntarily into the bullet-hole in the pelt, and
he paused a moment.

"Keep us from getting lost, O Bon Jesu."

Again there was a pause, his eyes opened wide, and he said:

"Do you think mother's lost, father?"

A heavy broken breath came from the father, and he replied haltingly:
"Mebbe--mebbe so."

Dominique's eyes closed again. "I'll