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Just beyond the driftwood bridge there was a small clearing, and on the edge of it Baree paused to enjoy the last of the setting sun. As he stood motionless and listening, his tail drooping low, his ears alert, his sharp-pointed nose sniffing the new country to the north, there was not a pair of eyes in the forest that would not have taken him for a young wolf.
She was still asleep when he placed her on the balsams, and it was dark when he awakened her for supper. The fire was burning brightly. Tara had stretched himself out in a huge, dark bulk in the outer glow of it. Baree was close to the fire. The girl sat up, rubbed her eyes, and stared at David. "Sakewawin," she whispered then, looking about her in a moment's bewilderment.
The thunder sounded nearer; and a second flash of lightning seemed searching Baree out where he stood shivering under a canopy of great spruce. This was his second storm. The first had frightened him terribly, and he had crawled far back into the shelter of the windfall. The best he could find now was a hollow under a big root, and into this he slunk, crying softly.
In another year it would be good hunting ground, but now it was lifeless. Even the owls would have found nothing to eat out there. It was the blue sky and the sun and the softness of the earth under his feet that lured Baree. It was pleasant to travel in after his painful experiences in the forest.
Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without exactly knowing what death was.
Thoreau, who had overheard, shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. He hated Baree, the beast that would not yield to a club, and he muttered gruffly: "And to-night he will join the wolves, m'sieu, and prey like the very devil on my traps. There will be only one cure for that a fox-bait! poison!" And the last hour seemed to prove that what Thoreau had said was true.
For a moment her face was turned toward him, and he saw the white shine of her teeth, and her beautiful eyes seemed glowing straight at him. And then, suddenly, she dropped on her knees and peered under the rock. Their eyes met. For at least half a minute there was not a sound. Nepeese did not move, and her breath came so softly that Baree could not hear it.
On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam. Since his experience in the canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not fared particularly well. Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had lived almost entirely on crayfish.
And it was here, on a twist of the creek in which Wakayoo had caught fish for Baree, that Bush McTaggart made his camp for the night. Only twenty miles of the journey could be made by canoe, and as McTaggart was traveling the last stretch afoot, his camp was a simple affair a few cut balsams, a light blanket, a small fire.
Then, with a long breath of relief, she put down her four-legged burden and fastened the end of the babiche to one of the cut spruce limbs. Baree burrowed himself back into the wall of the wigwam, and with head alert and eyes wide open watched his companion attentively. Not a movement of the Willow escaped him. She was radiant and happy.
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