de Jean
anxious to reach the post. He preferred to be welcomed living than
mourned as dead. He wondered how deeply she would feel it--his death.
Ah, if she only cared for him as he loved her! Well, she should love him
in time, when he had become a _voyageur_ of the Company, with a house at
the post, he told himself, as he patted his shy puppy before turning
into his blankets.

The second day out he was driven ashore under gray cliffs by a
south-wester and spent the succeeding three days in overcoming the
shyness of the hulking puppy, who, in the gentleness of the new master,
found swift solace for the loss of her shaggy kinsmen of the Husky camp.
Already she had learned that the human hand could caress as well as
wield a stick, and for the first time in her short existence, was
initiated into the mystery and delight of having her ears rubbed and
back scratched by this master who did not kick her out of the way when
she sprawled in his path. And because of her beauty, and in memory of
Fleur Marcel, the mother he had loved, he named her Fleur.

When the sea flattened out after the blow, Marcel launched his canoe,
and, with his dog in the bow, continued south. Not a wheeling gull,
flock of whistling yellow-legs, or whiskered face of inquisitive seal,
thrust from the water only as quickly to disappear, escaped the notice
of the eager puppy. Passing low islands where teal and pin-tail rose in
clouds at his approach, driving Fleur into a frenzy of excitement, at
last he turned in behind a long island paralleling the coast.

For two days Jean travelled down the strait in the lee of this island
and knew when he passed out into open water and saw in the distance the
familiar coast of the Whale River mouth, that he had travelled through
the mystic Manitounuk, the Esquimos' Strait of the Spirit. The following
afternoon off Sable Point he entered the clear water of the Great Whale
and once again, after ten months' absence, saw on the bold shore in the
distance the roofs of Whale River.

There was a lump in the throat of Jean Marcel as he gazed at the distant
fur-post. That little settlement, with its log trade-house and church of
the Oblat Fathers, the last outpost of the Great Company on the bleak
East Coast, which for two centuries had defied the grim north, stood for
all he held most dear--was home. There, in the church burial ground
enclosed by a slab fence, three spruce crosses marked the graves of his
father, mother and b