heads; then he called to Jean
to come ashore.

Grounding his canoe, Marcel gripped the hand of the grinning Kovik while
the Huskies fell back eying them with mingled curiosity and fear.

"Husky say you bad spirit, Kovik say you son little chief, Whale River.
W'ere you come?"

It was clear, now, why the Esquimos had not wiped him out. They had
thought him a demon, for Esquimo tradition, as well as Cree, made the
upper Salmon the abode of evil spirits.

"I look for hunteen ground, on de head of riviere," explained Jean, for
the admission that he was in search of dogs would only defeat the
purpose of his journey.

"Good dat Kovik come," returned the Esquimo. "Some say shoot you; some
say you eat de bullet an' de Husky."

To this difference of opinion Marcel owed his life.

As Kovik finished his explanation, Jean laughed: "No, I camp wid no
Windigo up riviere; but I starve."

At this gentle hint, Marcel was invited to join in the supper of boiled
seal and goose which was waiting at the tepee. When Kovik had prevailed
upon some of the older Esquimos to forget their fears and shake hands
with the man who had appeared from the land of spirits, Jean stowed his
outfit on the cache of the Husky, freed his canoe of water and placing
it beside his packs, joined the family party. Shaking hands in turn with
Kovik's grinning wife and children, who remembered him at Whale River,
Marcel hungrily attacked the kettle, into which each dipped fingers and
cup indiscriminately. Finishing, he passed a plug of Company
nigger-head to his hosts and lit his own pipe.

"W'ere you' woman?" abruptly inquired the thick-set mother of many.

"No woman," replied Marcel, thinking of three spruce crosses in the
Mission cemetery at Whale River.

"No woman, you? No dog?" pressed the curious wife of Kovik.

"No famile." And Jean told of the deaths of parents and younger brother,
from the plague of the summer before. But he failed to mention the fact
that most of the dogs at the post had been wiped out at the same time.

"Ah! Ah!" groaned the Huskies at the Frenchman's tale of the scourge
which had swept the Hudson's Bay posts to the south.

"He good man--Marcel! He fr'en' of me!" lamented Kovik. Sucking his
pipe, he gravely nodded again and again. Surely, he intimated, the
Company had displeased the spirits of evil to have been so punished.
Then he asked: "W'ere you dog?"

"On Whale Riviere," returned Jean grimly, referring to their bones;