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His old enemy Gillam was suspicious and ordered him away; but Radisson came again, and this time he brought with him the captain's son, young Ben, dressed as a wood-runner. This was enough to intimidate the old captain, for he knew that if his son was caught poaching on the Bay both father and son would be ruined.
Lord Selkirk wished to send a message of encouragement to his people in the colony. Laguimonière, the wonderful Canadian wood-runner, would carry it.
Did a man lose a toe on some frosty snow-shoe tramp, the Governing Committee solemnly voted him £4 smart money, or £1 for a periwig, or £10 a year pension for life. No matter to what desperate straits the Company was reduced, it never forgot a captain who had saved a cargo from raid, or the hero of a fight, or a wood-runner who had carried trade inland.
On October 29 he is sent prisoner to England on the home-bound ships of Bond and Lucas. His two companion spies are marooned for the winter on Charlton Island. As well try, however, to maroon a bird on the wing as a French wood-runner. The men fished and snared game so diligently that by September they had full store of provisions for escape.
But it was she who led me. Scrambling up the hillside like a chamois of the mountains, she flitted lightly through the greening to a small open where campers had built night fires. Her quick glance ran from tree to tree. Some wood-runner had blazed a trail by notching the bark. Pausing, she turned with the frank, fearless look of the wilderness woman.
The nonchalant gentleman who introduced the others was Jean Péré, dressed as a wood-runner, voyaging and hunting in this back-of-beyond for pleasure. A long way to come for pleasure, thought Sargeant all the leagues and leagues from French camps on Lake Superior. But England and France were at peace. The gentlemen bore passports.
Beside each sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver a swarthy fellow, on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his elbows flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto, 'marche! marche! the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds to thread his way westward through the wilds of the continent.
While the cook was preparing our supper and Ben disguising as a French wood-runner, we wandered at will, M. Radisson all the while uttering low laughs and words as of thoughts. It was "Caught neat as a mouse in a trap! Don't let him spill the canoe when we're running the traverse, Ramsay! May the fiends blast La Chesnaye if he opens his foolish mouth in Gillam's hearing!
The western terminal connecting with the wheat railroads is the Pas, an old, very old fur post of the French wood-runner days, on the Saskatchewan west of Lake Winnipeg. Here the railroad touches the Canada Northern and will doubtless later connect with the Canadian Pacific Railroad and Grand Trunk.
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