n sit on it in the furs! We have
plenty meat, and I sing like a voyageur while I build the fire. Drift,
so dry in summer you can light it with a coal from your pipe, lay on the
beach, but is now winter-soaked, and I make a fireplace of logs, and cut
pine branches to help it.

It is all thick woods on Round Island, so close it tear you to pieces if
you try to break through; only four-footed things can crawl there. When
the fire is blazing up I take my knife and cut a tunnel like a little
room, and pile plenty evergreen branches. This is to shelter Mamselle
Rosalin, for the night is so raw she shiver. Our tent is the sky,
darkness, and clouds. But I am happy. I unload the sledge. The bacon is
wet. On long sticks the slices sizzle and sing while I toast them, and
the dogs come close and blink by the fire, and lick their chops. Rosalin
laugh and I laugh, for it smell like a good kitchen; and we sit and eat
nothing but toasted meat--better than lye corn and tallow that you have
when you go out with the boats. Then I feed the dogs, and she walk with
me to the water edge, and we drink with our hands.

It is my house, when we sit on the fur by the fire. I am so light I want
my fiddle. I wish it last like a dream that Mamselle Rosalin and me keep
house together on Round Island. You not want to go to heaven when the
one you think about all the time stays close by you.

But pretty soon I want to go to heaven quick. I think I jump in the lake
if maman and the children had anybody but me. When I light my pipe she
smile. Then her great big eyes look off towards Mackinac, and I turn and
see the little far-away lights.

"They know we are on Round Island together," I say to cheer her, and she
move to the edge of the fur. Then she say "Good-night," and get up and
go to her tunnel-house in the bushes, and I jump up too, and spread the
fur there for her. And I not get back to the fire before she make a
door of all the branches I have cut, and is hid like a squirrel I feel
I dance for joy because she is in my camp for me to guard. But what is
that? It is a woman that cry out loud by herself! I understand now why
she sit down so hopeless when we first land. I have not know much about
women, but I understand how she feel. It is not her lady, or the dark,
or the ice break up, or the cold. It is not Ignace Pelott. It is the
name of being prison on Round Island with a man till the ice is out
of the straits. She is so shame she want to die. I