the other
Montagnais had descended the river in their canoes long before, so he
was alone. His provisions had given out and he saw no caribou. He began
to think he would surely starve to death. And then one evening, on the
point just above their present camp, he had seen a caribou and shot it,
but he had been too weak to take good aim and had only broken its
shoulder. It lay kicking among the boulders, pushing itself along by its
hind legs, and he had feared that it would escape. In his haste to reach
it he had slipped on a wet rock and fallen and broken his leg. In spite
of the pain he had crawled on, and then had taken place a wild, terrible
fight for life between the dying man and the dying beast.

He could not remember all that had occurred--he had been kicked, gored,
and bitten; but finally he had got a grip on its throat and slashed it
with his knife. Then, lying there on the ground beside it, he drank its
blood and cut off the raw flesh in strips for food. Finally one day he
had crawled to the river for water and had fainted.

The professor and his guides made for the Indian a hut of rocks and
bark, and threw a great pile of moss into the corner of it for him to
lie on. They carved a splint for his leg and bound it up, and cut a huge
heap of firewood for him, smoking caribou meat and hanging it up in the
hut. Somebody would come up river and find him, or if not, the three men
would pick him up on their return. For this was right and the law of the
woods. But never a word of particular interest to Prof. Bennie Hooker
did Nichicun speak until the night before their departure, although the
reason and manner of his speaking were natural enough. It happened as
follows: but first it should be said that the Nascopees are an ignorant
and barbarous tribe, dirty and treacherous, upon whom the Montagnais
look down with contempt and scorn. They do not even wear civilized
clothes, and their ways are not the ways of _les bons sauvages_. They
have no priests; they do not come to the coast; and the Montagnais will
not mingle with them. Thus it bespoke the hunger of Nichicun that he was
willing to go into their country.

As he sat round the fire with Marc and Edouard on that last night,
Nichicun spoke his mind of the Nascopees, and Marc translated freely for
Bennie's edification.

No, the injured Montagnais told them, the Nascopees were not nice; they
were dirty. They ate decayed food and they never went to mass. Moreover,
th