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Updated: May 13, 2025
He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.
"My heart, Ma'amselle," he said gallantly, as he pressed the fragile thing in her palm; and in another second he had stooped and kissed her, as he had kissed many another woman, lightly, delicately, in the face of the populace, joying to the depths of his careless nature in the dare of the thing. With a cry the girl sprang back, crushing the birchbark case with its red flower into shapeless ruin.
As gently as Mukoki had unrolled the precious birchbark map a few months before he smoothed out the paper. The edges of it broke and crumbled under his fingers, but the inner side of the roll was still quite white. Mukoki and Wabigoon, looking back, saw him suddenly turn toward them with a shrill cry on his lips, and the next instant he was racing in their direction, shouting wildly at every step.
Then he was swung, still bound, into the bottom of a canoe, saw De Courtenay tossed into another, felt the careless feet of Nakonkirhirinons as the paddlemen stepped in, and existence became a thing of gliding motion, the lapping of water on birchbark, and the passing of a long strip of cloud-flecked sky, pink and blue and gold with the new day.
He did not want Bateese to suspect this change in him, and he slouched lower against the dunnage-pack with his eyes still on the girl. He was finding it increasingly difficult to keep from looking at her. She had resumed her paddling, and Bateese was putting mighty efforts in his strokes now, so that the narrow, birchbark canoe shot like an arrow with the down-sweeping current of the river.
All through the summer there was a procession of birchbark canoes, filled with red men and white, coming down the river to the bay, laden with skins of wolf, fox, beaver, wolverine, squirrel, and skunk, the harvest of the winter's trapping.
One dived under a leaf, another between two roots, a third crawled into a curl of birchbark, a fourth into a hole, and so on, till all were hidden but one who could find no cover, so squatted on a broad yellow chip and lay very flat, and closed his eyes very tight, sure that now he was safe from being seen. They ceased their frightened peeping and all was still.
So Garry Everson and his little one-patrol troop took up their abode in Hero Cabin, and the little sandy-haired fellow with the cough raised and lowered the colors each day, as Tom had done, and ate more heartily down at mess, and made birchbark ornaments in the sunshine up at his beloved retreat, and was very proud of his leader; but he had little use for Tom Slade, because he believed Tom was a coward.
"Goodness, what was that?" asked Uncle Teddy, running forward in the direction of the noise, followed by the others. They soon saw. On the ground at the upper end of the ravine lay the great bull moose they had seen that afternoon when he had come, in the pride of his strength, to answer the call of the birchbark trumpet.
The thin-faced Chippewa with his alert movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree, with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racier birchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; each new tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, until at last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place.
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