d. They all go up river in
the autumn with their winter's supply of pork, flour, tea, powder, lead,
axes, files, rosin to mend their canoes, and castoreum--made out of
beaver glands, you know--to take away the smell of their hands from the
baited traps. They go up in families, six or seven canoes together, and
as each man reaches his own territory his canoe drops out of the
procession and he makes a camp for his wife and babies. Then he spends
the winter--six or seven months--in the woods following his line of
traps. By and by the ice goes out and he begins to want some society. He
hasn't seen a priest for ten months or so, and he's afraid of the
_loup-garou_, for all I know. So he comes down river, takes his Newport
season here at Moisie, and goes to mass and staves off the _loup-garou_.
They're all here now. Maybe you can get a couple to go up river and
maybe you can't."

Then observing Bennie's crestfallen expression, he added:

"But we'll see. Perhaps you can get Marc St. Ange and Edouard Moreau,
both good fellows. They've made their mass and they know the country
from here to Ungava. There's Marc now--_Venez ici_, Marc St. Ange." A
swarthy, lithe Montagnais was coming down the road, and Holliday
addressed him rapidly in habitan French: "This gentleman wishes to go up
river to the forks to see the big cache. Will you go with him?"

The Montagnais bowed to Professor Hooker and pondered the suggestion.
Then he gesticulated toward the north and seemed to Bennie to be telling
a long story.

Holliday laughed again. "Marc says he will go," he commented shortly.
"But he says also that if the Great Father of the Marionettes is angry
he will come back."

"What does he mean by that?" asked Bennie.

"Why, when the aurora borealis--Northern Lights--plays in the sky the
Indians always say that the 'marionettes are dancing.' About four weeks
ago we had some electrical disturbances up here and a kind of an
earthquake. It scared these Indians silly. There was a tremendous
display, almost like a volcano. It beat anything I ever saw, and I've
been here fifteen years. The Indians said the Father of the Marionettes
was angry because they didn't dance enough to suit him, and that he was
making them dance. Then some of them caught a glimpse of a shooting
star, or a comet, or something, and called it the Father of the
Marionettes. They had quite a time--held masses, and so on--and were
really cut up. But the thing is over now, exce