its hind feet and dance for bits of cake. His
Indian blood vearned towards the fawn; but Me-thuselah, the mighty
turtle, was more exciting. Methuselah lived a prisoner in one side of
the bait-tank, from which he was lifted by a rope around his tail. He
was so enormous that it required both Brown and Puttany to carry him
up the bank, and as he hung from the pole the sudden projection of his
snapping head was a danger. When he fastened his teeth into a stick, the
stick was hopelessly his as long as he chose to keep it. He was like
an elephant cased in mottled shell, and the serrated ridge on his tail
resembled a row of huge brown teeth. Methuselah was a many-wrinkled
turtle. When he contracted, imbedding head in shoulders and legs in
body, revealing all his claws and showing wicked little eyes near the
point of his nose, his helpless rage stirred all the Indian; he was the
most deliciously devilish thing that Gougou had ever seen.

Then there was the joy of wintergreen, which both men brought to the
child, and he learned to forage for it himself. The fleshy dark green
leaves and red berries clustered thickly in the woods. He and his
mother went in the boat when the day was to be given to bass or pickerel
fishing, and he learned great lessons of water-lore from the two men.
If they trusted a troll line to his baby hands, he was in a state of
beatitude. His object in life was to possess a bear cub, and many
a porcupine creeping along the beach he mistook for that desirable
property, until taught to distinguish quills from fur. Gougou heard, and
he believed, that all porcupines were old lumbermen, who never died, but
simply contracted to that shape. He furtively stoned them when he could,
reflecting that they were tough, and delighting to see the quills fly.

Francoise would sit in the camp like a picture of still life, glowing
and silent at her appointed labor. She sewed for all of them, looking
womanly and unhurried, with a pink-veined moccasin-flower in her hair;
while Brown, cooking and baking, rushed from tent to wood-pile, his
sleeves turned back from his white, muscular arms. He lived more
intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes
shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common man,
blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd spirit
seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly or
not at all.

Puttany and the child were often